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From Business Idea to Successful Startup in Three Months How Zaarly quickly brought its concept to market, complete with celebrity investment and lots of buzz.

By Jennifer Wang

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Bo Fishback, CEO of Zaarly
Bo Fishback, CEO of Zaarly

You can build a company pretty fast these days, but Zaarly took even the startup world by surprise.

Within six hours of the 54-hour Los Angeles Startup Weekend competition in February, Bo Fishback, former VP of entrepreneurship at the Kauffman Foundation, along with early-stage startup veterans Ian Hunter and Eric Koester, had cooked up an idea for the world's first cash marketplace--something that could potentially change the future of commerce.

They called it Zaarly, a mobile platform that allows hyperlocal, person-to-person transactions at scale, in real time. "What you want, when you want it," the site's tagline boasts. Say you want to switch for better seats during a concert, or get someone to bring you beer after liquor stores have closed. Just name a price, post your request with time and location filters and see if there are any takers. With enough people onboard, the theory goes, someone should bite.

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