Today I am writing about a new experience - SavySwap. SavySwap is a secure online experience to get what you want simply by trading. It works in three simple steps:

1. Add items you are interested in swapping for items that spark your interests.

2. They match you with real people…who want your stuff

3. Don’t like their offer? No problem. Barter for the deal that you want.

Verification is done using social media, ratings and official government id eliminating the false identity factor when it comes to trading online.

The reason why I’m writing about this on the blog is because I think it’s a great way to trade unwanted or double gifts you receive as wedding presents. There are people who get double of triple lot of the same gifts i.e. you receive three blenders (I’ve seen it happen before!). Instead of giving them away to charity or to a friend, you can swap them for a deal. I spoke to Chris about how this idea started and why people should use SavySwap.

How did the idea of SavySwap arise?

From the top, the idea for SavySwap popped into my head three years ago when I was living in Denver, Co and moving to Washington DC for college. I had a bed and a couch I needed to sale and you can’t really put that on eBay and Amazon so I went to Craigslist and it turned out to be a disaster. No one wanted to come to my house because apparently I lived in the hood of Denver and the people who did want to come to my house knew I lived there so I didn’t want them to come to my house.

I ended up giving my bed away to charity, which I don’t oppose but I would have liked to receive something in return that I needed. The idea would sit in my mind for over a year as I attended Howard University as a journalism major. I had the chance to interview tons of tech companies and founders as well as cover some awesome events such as the Webbies as I was a technology editor for an online magazine in DC. Hearing and telling their stories caused me to want to do more with technology then just write about it but I didn’t have any skills. So I began teaching myself to code spending about 12 hours a day going to class once a week (because it was easy and stupid at this point) and going to work for 8 hours a day and then doing it all over again.

After building a few websites for companies and doing marketing for them I realised hey someone will pay me to do this service time to branch out and do my own thing. Now I just needed an idea, I spent weeks researching, reading, and couldn’t think of anything but the swapping idea kept coming back to my mind. I had no experience in the tech startup scene so I wanted to find someone who did, so I joined a young entrepreneur meet up group and that’s when I first laid eyes on him. My future business marriage partner, Calvin Knight. He’s a sales and marketing expert and had experience creating his own college based startup, which was initially my idea, a college share company for only students. I asked him to talk with me for about 30 mins to give me feedback on my idea and it turned into a 3 hour convo and the broader vision of SavySwap was born.

I was going into my senior year of college and told my parents hey I’m dropping out of school and moving to Cali to start SavySwap, bye! Met some awesome people over the past two years and experienced ups and downs, raised a 5 figure investment from a private investor after he saw a video I put on my YouTube channel. It’s been quite a wild ride and we are finally launching in beta in Jan 2014!!!! We recently completed our rebranding and rolled out our newly launched landing page.

Why should people use SavySwap?

Why people should use it? That’s easy…when using Craigslist there is a lack of trust there because you have no idea of who you are communicating with. eBay is great for selling certain items but powersellers dominate the market and over 50% of items don’t receive a view or bid (I know from experience, I’m not a powerseller but have a pretty high rating) and you can’t sell large things such as desk etc. Amazon is great for finding awesome prices but it is business to consumer and not consumer to consumer. There are bartering and trading exchange sites out there but they look like they were designed by Moses and used by Jesus!!!

Lastly money is losing its value especially here in the US and we’re shifting into a sharing economy, think AirBnb, RideShare, ZipCar, the list goes on. People are realizing why not get something of value in return for something they either aren’t using or don’t need to use all the time. The last piece ppl should use SavySwap is because we are creating communities both online and offline around people’s trading interests. Being online is great but there is nothing like communicating with people face to face based off of a common interests.Request an invite today on: www.savyswap.com