April 27, 2021

Dongyeon Lee showcased his brand new Sellege app – an exclusive college marketplace – in an email to Boston College students with a simple line: “You asked for it, so I did it for everyone!”

Sellege is the first college marketplace platform in British Columbia where users can interact exclusively with other undergraduate and graduate students at their college or university, according to Lee, co-founder of the app and CSOM ’22.

Lee came up with the idea for Sellege last summer after encountering privacy and organizational issues while trying to purchase furniture for his bedroom in British Columbia on other platforms including eBay, Facebook Marketplace and BC-class Facebook pages, he said.

“I looked through and realized it was really hard to find what you needed,” Lee said. “It’s just a jumble of information with manuals, sublets and announcements all mixed up in one page with no organization.”

Sellege seeks to fill these gaps by allowing students to filter the lists according to their needs. Some of the categories that sellers can choose from include furniture, manuals, clothing, and sublets. Users can also sort the available ads by price, user rating, or preferences, Lee said.

When creating a Sellege account, users are asked to enter an official university email address, which verifies that they are a student and immediately places them on their school’s community page.

“I realized it would be great for the students if there was some sort of organized place where you know the people selling are from your school so you feel safe when you meet them,” said Lee.

Although Sellege is completely anonymous, users can share their name and information with others through the messaging feature when coordinating the logistics of a sale, Lee said.
“The reason I made it anonymous is that these course pages can be a little bit critical sometimes, where you just don’t feel comfortable, you know, telling the whole world you’re selling something.” , Lee said.

When designing Sellege, Lee said, inclusiveness was his top priority.

“One of the reasons I really felt compelled to do this is because I want to make school communities very inclusive and non-judgmental,” Lee said.

In addition to the main market, Sellege also offers a college page, which functions as a bulletin board where students can post announcements, ask questions, and meet other students.

“It can be as simple as’ What are the good restaurants on campus? “Or ask other students for recommendations from professors,” Lee said.

Lee said he co-founded the app with his friends Dustin Lee and Sophie Park, who work on coding and graphic design respectively. Sellege had a successful launch at the two schools of its co-founders – the University of Michigan and the University of Southern California – among others, Lee said.

Although the team has mainly focused on marketing the app to its own schools so far, Lee said he hopes to ramp up marketing efforts in other areas soon, as the app is already available to students at over 2,000 colleges and universities.

Just over two weeks after its launch, students from British Columbia took to Sellege to share lists of everything from off-campus parking spots to chemistry textbooks to a guitar.

Sellege was also recently appointed for Best New Mobile App by the Best Mobile App Awards, which judges apps based on their usefulness, uniqueness in the market, user interface, design and overall quality, according to its website .

Lee said that while the launch process took a lot of time and hard work, he and his co-founders were excited about Sellege’s future.

“I think the startup benefit is just that groundwork that you have to do at the start,” Lee said. “I have to be resilient and it’s tough sometimes, but, you know, I really believe that resilience will pay off in the end.”

This story was originally published by The Heights, the student-run news publication at Boston College.