Zach Milburn , a junior in business administration, noticed students buying textbooks for prices over $100 and then selling them back for less than half the price. That’s why he decided to spend his free time this summer developing a site that allows students to sell books–and more–among each other.
One problem: Milburn’s idea for a N.C . State centered website along the lines of Craigslist already existed. Chris Roth, a former N.C . State student in business, created the first edition of Wolf Exchange last year.
“I launched the site in May of 2010,” Roth said. “It was my freshman year, and I was looking at connecting people with the housing market. It took off.”
Roth became occupied with other projects, and the first edition of Wolf Exchange went dormant after its initial boom. However, Zach Milburn and his brother, Geoff Milburn , found the site later when thinking of a similar idea.
“We really like the idea and the name,” Zach Milburn said. “We just wanted to revamp it. At that point, it was just for housing.”
Milburn approached Roth in September and offered to buy the rights to the site, but the brothers decided to join forces with Roth to rebrand Wolf Exchange.
“We’ve added more options, like ways for people to sell and buy books, post events, buy tickets,” Milburn said. “It’s like a Craiglist at State.”
Milburn and Roth said Wolf Exchange offers a cleaner and better-designed site for its users.
“The cluttered and busy layout of Craigslist—it’s ugly—I guess adds to their charm,” Milburn said. “But a lot of people are deterred from it.”
Wolf Exchange may encourage students to do business on campus, and according to Milburn and Roth, this would be a safer alternative to other online classifieds.
“People won’t be sketched out by doing business on the site,” Milburn said. “I hope that it would bring people on to campus to sell their books, in an established safe environment. We also just want to build community between students.”
The development team doesn’t make any money off the site. According to Roth, the project is an altruistic way for him to gain experience.
“I really wanted to start something to serve the community—something that NCSU needed,” Roth said. “We would love to make money, but our focus is to provide service to our visitors. We want to get a critical mass…the more people that use it, the more value the site has. Then we can worry about the money part.”
According to Milburn , Wolf Exchange is his creative outlet to develop a product, which he calls good practice.
“I’m in an entrepreneurship concentration, so this is what I love doing,” Milburn said. “Chris and Geoff have the same outlooks, so we hope to expand with more visitors.”
Without Milburn’s expressed interest in Wolf Exchange, the site may have never rebounded after 2010. According to Roth, he almost allowed too much dust to accumulate on the almost forgotten project.
“I’m glad it’s not going to die now that new people are helping out,” Roth said. “There is some energy and hope. I don’t have the time to market it, I’m more involved in programming, so Zach and Geoff have revamped that really well. All we need is some more traffic.”