Website's goal: Get students what they need, and quickly

And through nowineed.com, a new website that officially launches today, they can get what they want.

Founded by Ryan Shea ’12 and Joseph Perla ’11, the service aims to connect students with what they need, when they need it.

Shea and Perla, both members of the Princeton Entrepreneurship Club, were inspired to create the website two months ago at TigerLaunch, the club’s annual business plan competition. Shea was sent out to find a ribbon for one of the guest speakers at the event but failed to get his hands on one in time.

“I thought to myself, ‘I would be willing to pay $10–$15 for this ribbon right now. If only there was some way I could get it right away, having just my phone on me,’ ” Shea recalled.

Through the new service, students can text the phone number on the website with what they need, how much they are willing to pay for it and their location. To respond to requests, students text the same phone number with a five-digit need-specific code. At that point, the two students are connected by a free, anonymous and recorded phone call. Requests are placed in one section when they are first posted, then moved to another section when one hour has passed to draw attention to the most recent posts.

The great advantage of this service over similar services like Point, TigerTrade, Craigslist, or eBay is that a transaction can be sent in “less than 30 seconds,” Perla said.

A transaction on other sites can be “a hassle,” Shea added.

Another advantage of Now I Need is its potential to help students fulfill a wide range of needs. One student who had to go to rehearsal needed someone to hand in a problem set for him, another needed someone to take a shirt to the dry cleaners, and someone else needed some black felt-tip pens.

“The great thing about this site is that it’s not confined to buying and selling items, like on eBay,” Shea noted. “It’s not confined to services like plumbing or towing. It’s really [for] what you need and you can use it for almost anything.”

Needs are posted on the website immediately after a student sends a text, and the poster’s identity remains anonymous. Perla noted, however, that they “do keep track of all the phone numbers and calls that go through, so that everyone knows that it’s a safe, secure, monitored place.”

“We have filters to make sure that [the website remains] family friendly,” Perla said.

“We also want to make sure that everyone has their privacy when they ask for something,” he added.

Get the best of the ‘Prince’ delivered straight to your inbox. Subscribe now »

For now, the service is only available to the University community. Shea and Perla said they are looking to expand the service to other communities and cities in the future but are currently focusing on establishing the service on campus.

“We need to get established [here] first, because people won’t want to use the site unless there are people already using it,” Shea said.

Hoping that this service will “explode” on the Princeton campus, Shea said that he also wants Now I Need to draw the University community together.

“We want people ... to have their problems solved immediately, and ... to bring people together in the process,” Shea said. “People helping each other — that’s what this site is about.”