Jesus Najera was tired of seeing Facebook groups spammed with ads, so he decided to clean it up.
The 20-year-old UF finance graduate student is a co-founder of Market Loco, an online market that allows college students to buy and sell products and services.
MarketLoco.com, which is specialized by university, breaks the market down into categories of students’ interests: tickets, furniture, subleases and miscellaneous. The website’s free mobile app went live Friday.
UF, Florida State University, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, University of Michigan, University of California at Los Angeles and University of Texas at Austin have branches on the website. A Florida Gulf Coast University page is in the works.
Najera said he saw how inefficient Facebook was as a college marketplace and wanted to streamline the process of buying and selling among students.
“Now you have a Facebook page with a vast amount of ridiculous posts from ‘looking for a sublease’ to ‘selling my left pinky,’” he said.
Najera said Facebook appeals only to the seller-side, while Market Loco fuels the buyer-side by making shopping more simple and efficient.
Najera described himself as the business and marketing side of the website. His two partners, University of Michigan students David Fontenot and Raj Vir, handle the technical side.
To drive more traffic to the site, Najera created an ad featuring an unofficially signed message from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to stop spamming official Facebook groups for student exchanges and to use Market Loco to buy and sell things on campus.
While Zuckerberg didn’t officially endorse his website, Najera believes that Zuckerberg is against group spamming.
The ad caught Abe Carryl’s eye while he browsed the UF Class of 2014 Facebook page two weeks ago.
The 21-year-old UF information systems and operations management senior said he prefers Market Loco to Craigslist because of its proximity and how easy it is to use. He used the website to sell basketball tickets and plans to sell his old guitar.
“I’ve seen a lot of different markets like this, but none of them are very easy to use,” Carryl said.
Contact Colleen Wright at cwright@alligator.org.
Jesus Najera, 20, co-founded a Market Loco, an online marketplace for college students.
