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“It seemed like such a no-brainer,” Hirsch says. Even Haszlakiewicz, the tech expert and devil’s advocate of the group, thought they could have it up in six months or so. They spent two years working out the kinks and in 2005 launched a fledgling version of swapsimple.com. After a year of user feedback and further refinements the site was expanded to include DVDs, video games, and all kinds of books. The peer-to-peer trading service offers free membership, integrated shipping, and, as of this month, a social network complete with user profiles and messaging capability. It has just 2,000 members so far and has logged only about 400 trades, but Haszlakiewicz says it’s reaching a tipping point. “We’re thinking pretty soon now it’s going to explode and we’re going to have a million users on there.”
The three returned empty-handed to their headquarters–the basement of a Ravenswood apartment–and their day jobs. Until recently, when Goldblatt took a position at Loyola University (running the lab at the Center for Urban Environmental Research and Policy), both he and Hirsch were waiting tables at Pete Miller’s Seafood & Prime Steak in Evanston, where they met and recruited SwapSimple’s newest unpaid employee, barkeep and marketing maven Lakshmi Rengarajan. Haszlakiewicz, a consultant for TransUnion, is SwapSimple’s system architect; Hirsch, tethered to his BlackBerry, provides its 24-7 customer service; Goldblatt handles the books; and Rengarajan, when she’s not tending bar, is responsible for getting the word out.
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