By NICK BUDD
Hays Post
Dylan Bathurst, a Fort Hays State graduate and founder/CEO of Rumgr, recently sold his company to eBay. When eBay approached Bathurst to buy the company, he almost thought it was too good to be true.
“When they initially reached out to me, I almost deleted the email thinking it was spam,” Bathurst said. “After rereading it, I looked up the sender and found out that it was legit.”
Rumgr is an app that allows users to sell used goods in their community through their mobile devices. The app allows allows the user to create a profile, so they know who they are selling to or buying from. Bathurst came up with the idea while living with a friend in Las Vegas.
“I was moving out of his spare bedroom and had a bunch of ‘stuff’ in his garage. I was too lazy to have a garage sale and the Craigslist mobile app was terrible, and I’ve always been creeped out by meeting strangers on Craigslist,” Bathurst said. “I started taking photos and posting them to Twitter and Facebook so my friends could buy my stuff. They didn’t buy a lot of it, but I still felt the concept felt fun, so I started thinking about how to turn that into an app.”
Bathurst worked at Zappos before coming up with the idea of Rumgr. After coming up with the idea, Bathurst and some of his co-workers pitched the idea at a Las Vegas startup weekend, and after revisions based on user feedback, eventually received $500,000 to fund the project.
“I knew it was risky, and I was on a pretty nice career path a Zappos at the time, but that didn’t really deter me from wanting to do a startup,” Bathurst said. “I don’t like to be comfortable, so as soon as I started to feel comfortable at Zappos, I knew I needed a change.”
Bathurst, who relocated from Las Vegas to Silicon Valley after the sale, is currently working on his new app, Close5, which was built on top of the Rumgr code.
Bathurst, a Chapman native who graduated from Fort Hays State University in 2010 with a degree in information networking and telecommunications, also was instrumental in the foundation of Hays Startup Weekend, designed to foster entrepreneurs and new business ideas.