Not cut out to be a farmer? Then perhaps becoming a tech entrepreneur is right for you.
Okay, it’s not exactly that simple, but it is one small (or not) part of the story of how one co-founder of local startup Rumgr found his way to his current occupation. Dylan Bathurst, one-third of the trio who make up the company which enables users to quickly and easily sell items via their mobile devices, grew up on a farm in Kansas. He raised and sold cattle to pay his tuition to Fort Hays State University, and relocated to Las Vegas to take a job with Zappos.
“I was just not cut out to do farming. It was just not something I wanted to do,” says Bathurst. A youthful interest in computers, particularly hardware, led him to study networking in college and to develop his interest in web development despite a dearth of classes on the subject.
Once at Zappos, Bathurst met his fellow Rumgr co-founders Ray Morgan and Alex Coleman. Like Bathurst, neither of the two took a “traditional” route to tech entrepreneurship.
Morgan grew up in Las Vegas and graduated from Green Valley High School. He followed that with a brief stint at College of Southern Nevada, but dropped out. At Zappos, he worked in front-end website development and then on the mobile team where he helped create the Zappos app for iPhone and iPad. Despite his lack of a degree, Morgan’s career hasn’t suffered. He has worked continously developing his tech expertise throughout his life. “I’m primarily self-taught, but so many people have helped me along the way,” he says. But he also recalls with a laugh, “My parents were totally annoyed by it. They were like, ‘Get a real job. Stop playing on the computer.’”
The third member of the team, Alex Coleman, is a California native who studied at Cal State Long Beach. “I didn’t really know what I wanted to do at first, but ultimately I found the path that I wanted to take. That was in Studio Art.” Studio Art–not programming, networking, web development. He received a degree in Studio Art and focused on Graphic Design. Colemean relocated to Las Vegas just a little over a year ago to work at Zappos.
These seemingly non-traditional paths aren’t really that unusual. A story in the latest issue of Desert Companion cites the liberal arts backgrounds of several local business leaders including gaming industry heavyweights Jim Murren and Glenn Schaeffer. No MBAs there. There is no straight-line direct path in any field, and there isn’t one in technology. Tech superstar (or superhero) Steve Jobs dropped out of Reed College. Mark Zuckerberg famously dropped out of Harvard, as did Bill Gates. We all know this.
Lazy? Not Exactly
The origin of the idea behind Rumgr is suitably inauspicious for an app that can easily one day replace the old-fasYhhioned garage sale. Bathurst was getting ready to move and “me being lazy. . . I didn’t want to move it. I wanted to sell it. But I’m not the kind of person who wants to get up early Saturday morning have a garage sale,” says Bathurst. “I thought, ‘I’m a smart person. I’ll start taking pictures with my iPhone and start posting all of my stuff to Twitter. I’ve got a few hundred Twitter followers, maybe someone there will buy it from me.’”
The simplicity of that process versus already established online sale platforms like craigslist and eBay intrigued Bathurst, sparked his imagination. “I was playing around with it. Tinkering with the code a little bit on my phone, like at the jellies, but I never really came up with anything solid,” he says. Then a friend suggested pitching the idea at the first Las Vegas Startup Weekend.
Startup Weekend was the start of the conversation between Rumgr’s trio of cofounders. “I didn’t have any master plan for it going into startup weekend,” says Bathurst. “I just had the one idea ‘let’s build a marketplace for your phone.’ Together as a team, we came up with what is now Rumgr, and built it from the ground up in that weekend.” The team also won $5,000 during the weekend, which covered the nascent company’s initial costs.
That was June. What followed was an ongoing commitment to developing Rumgr into a viable entity. Bathurst, Morgan, and Coleman began meeting after work and working into the wee hours of the morning on the app. They knew that it needed to be reworked, so Morgan rewrote the iOS. They made it scalable, a solid platform to build on, released Rumgr to the app store, and started “hustling local media to get the word out around Vegas,” explains Bathurst. Getting the word out worked. They group started to see more and more items listed for sale on the site, items being sold, and discussed. Rumgr was for real.
Since then, items ranging from knick-knacks and Storm Trooper masks to industrial ice machines and fire hydrants have sold on Rumgr. And Morgan and Bathurst have left Zappos to work full-time on their startup. “It was shocking to see people we didn’t know were selling things using this app. It really helped people buy and sell used stuff. It opened our eyes. ‘Let’s go for this. Let’s put in the effort,’” says Morgan.
The company is now looking to raise capital, but money isn’t the only catalyst for entrepreneurial action. Leaving a company that you admire (or moved here to work for) isn’t an easy decision. Passion is a key element in having the courage to follow that entrepreneurial path. “We initially thought that once we raised some money, we would quit our jobs. But we decided not to wait. We thought, ‘money or no money, let’s rock and roll,’” Bathurst explains.
Rumgr is continuing to refine its product, taking into account user feedback, working on bug fixes, and streamlining processes. They’re also planning to expand their team through hiring, considering creative ways to generate revenue using the app, and looking to expand into other markets. And despite their relatively short journey from the generation of an idea to this point, they are facing the future with a hope and a broad outlook at possibilities for Rumgr—and a reasonable amount of humility and trepidation.
“It’s kind of a scary market to get into because of the other players. Right now, the mobile buying/selling market doesn’t exist. Right now we have craigslist, eBay. That’s the space we’re getting into. We’re going to be taking on the most well known part of craigslist. When you think of craigslist, that’s what you think of, buying and selling stuff. That market, that industry, is definitely going to be changing. We want to be at the front of that, I guess. That’s going to be a big job, but we want to see what happens. No one’s really captured that,” says Morgan.
Get the app at Rumgr.com.
