What is Unifloh.de?

Unifloh.de is an online marketplace that allows students to easily buy and sell used books. In contrast to regular online marketplaces for used books at Unifloh.de the seller does not ship the book to the buyer by mail but seller and buyer meet on campus to do the trade. The advantages are faster deliverey, more personal transactions and higher security and transparency.

The story of Unifloh.de

The idea to Unifloh.de was born in 2008 from pure necessity. Every semester we had to buy quite a number of expensive textbooks. Hence we were looking for cheaper ways to get those textbooks. We were looking for offers on black boards at our university but apparently we could not find any. Therefore we decided to create our own online marketplace for used books so that we were able to buy and sell our books. We created a first preliminary version of the Unifloh.de website and promoted it with funny self-made posters and flyers at our university. Suddenly people startet using Unifloh.de to offer their books and because we got a lot of postitive feedback we decided to think big. Why not making Unifloh.de available to every student?

But there was already the first crisis. Because the initial startup phase was just a test to try the offer and more of a quick idea than a fully-fledged business plan we did no comprehensive competitor analysis. Inevitably it turned out that there was already competition in that market and we were not the first ones with such an idea. We had the choice to drop everything or to go and accept the challenge. We decided for the latter because we were optimistic that we can beat our competition if we create a more clever concept.

Having decided that the second crisis was not far. How do we get students to use Unifloh.de? We had neither money nor a business plan to convince investors to invest in Unifloh.de. And in addition we had no clue whether our idea was really working in large scale. So in order to test-drive the concept without spending too much money we teamed up with local student unions to promote our idea. Thankfully the student unions welcomed us warmly as they valued our idea and realised that there was a large benefit for their students. We experienced great support even though it was sometimes tough to convince everyone of the advantages of Unifloh.de.

But soon we realised that we can not go on that way for ever. We were working more and more for Unifloh.de in our freetime while missing out on salary from other jobs. At some point we had to earn something to finance our own lifes. That was then the third crisis. In order to earn at least a little bit of money we integrated affiliate programs and adsense ads in the website. But now student unions thought we were a truly commercial website with the only goal of ripping off poor students. Hence it got more difficult to get support from student unions. As a result of that we tried to partner with other student related website to integrate our website technology into their websites. We would benefit from their traffic and they would benefit from our technology. The idea was to share advertisting revenues. But other than expected this idea never really took off. People just did not click on the marketplace links or did not regeister through the partner websites. The most traffic was still generated by the main Unifloh.de website.

By the end of 2009 we knew a couple of things: We knew we had a website concept that was of true value for students. Besides that from the lots of positive feedback we got we knew that this website was hiding large potential. But we also knew that we had no money to turn Unifloh.de into a sustainable business. In order to solve the last problem we decided to work fulltime for Unifloh.de to give proof that our concept is grounded and realistic and to find a strategic partner with whom we can run Unifloh.de on a large scale. In January we started to turn my kitchen into an office. From that time on we printed flyers and went to give them away on campuses every day to proof that we can convince students to use Unifloh.de easily. And with giving away flyers students started to use Unifloh.de more and more. At the same time we started to talk to potential strategic investors until today.

By having accepted that challenge from the beginning and having always paid attention to create a clever and comprehensive concept we are now at a point were everything is prepared to let the website fly. Today we have quite a number of options and things look good for the future.

Unifloh.de Clip