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 •
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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.
