Students launch online marketplace business
Four students started Doordale, an online marketplace for students to buy and sell as a project for the Kehoe Family Initiative for Entrepreneurial Excellence. Courtesy | Karolina Grabowska
Four students have launched Doordale, a business that helps students to buy and sell their items in an online marketplace.
“It’s basically a Facebook Marketplace for the Hillsdale community,” said junior Alex Cho, a founder of Doordale.
Cho said Doordale helps solve several problems in Hillsdale.
“We’re helping people get rid of old stuff when they graduate,” Cho said. “It also helps people make a little bit of cash. We serve as the intermediary between buyer and seller, making it easier for people to buy things they need or sell things they want to get rid of.”
Cho and sophomores Abriana Badalamenti, Eva Bessette, and Andriy Pasichnyk started the business as a project for the Kehoe Family Initiative for Entrepreneurial Excellence, a fellowship program for students interested in entrepreneurship.
“Along with the practical experience, they are also taught how to identify their customer base, research their target market, create a business organization chart, craft a sales pitch, and evaluate business performance,” states the KFIEE website.
To sell items through Doordale, sellers fill out a Google form located in the Instagram bio of @doordale25, negotiate a price, wait for a buyer, and have their item delivered to the buyer through Doordale’s service.
Pasichnyk said Doordale helps students make use of materials that would otherwise be thrown away or donated, such as mini fridges, textbooks, and furniture.
“There is a huge market for reselling books,” Pasichnyk said. “If students want to make money on their old books, they would have to go through eBay or other platforms and encounter numerous obstacles. Doordale eliminates the obstacle of time, cost, and effort.”
Each of the founders of Doordale are working to start their own small businesses as part of the Kehoe Fellowship but founded Doordale to gain knowledge and experience.
Cho said the skills he’s learned through the fellowship have been not only applicable to Doordale, but also to Choba Boba, the business he runs with his sister, senior Kayla Cho.
“The fellowship helps us with our individual businesses, but they also give us different assignments,” Cho said. “The fellowship students met before classes started, and we were assigned into groups. We had to create a group project business, and Doordale was what my group came up with.”
Pasichnyk said the Kehoe fellowship has helped him learn valuable skills such as systems development and team management.
“The goal of this project was to try to start and run our own business while working with other people,” Pasichnyk said. “The most important part is coordinating with everyone else on the team – a core part of division of labor.”
