For the busy Pitt student, there’s an app for that

A new digital application that’s being developed by a group of Pitt students could free up time for those on the run by “outsourcing” everyday tasks.

Flippo is a start-up company that allows students to pay other students to complete simple tasks for them, tasks including purchasing and delivering food, providing transportation and retrieving items left in campus buildings, among others.

Junior marketing major Alec Davis, Flippo’s CEO, said he, along with senior Branden Karnell and Pitt graduate Chirag Shah, began developing the program out of sheer practicality.

“On [Pitt’s] campus, there’s a lot of densely packed places,” Davis said. “[Flippo] helps facilitate the circulation of goods and services on campus.”

Davis said Flippo is similar to TaskRabbit, a website that’s blossoming in popularity because of its convenience and the opportunity it presents in earning extra money.

Like Flippo, TaskRabbit allows its users to assign daily tasks to other people for varying prices. As of now, the website has yet to gain a foothold in Pittsburgh. According to the TaskRabbit website, its services are available in nine cities throughout the U.S.

But, unlike TaskRabbit, Davis said, users of Flippo have the option of requesting services or performing tasks for other users.

“Ours is unique in that it’s also a two-sided marketplace where college students can use it to make money, and can also use it to request services,” Davis said.

Students using Flippo put in a request for a certain service, and another student who’s available can respond to the request. For example, if a student wanted a pizza from Papa Da Vinci’s brought to the Litchfield Towers lobby, that student could put in a request using Flippo and another student who’s willing to perform the task would respond.

The student who requested the service would pay the respondent an amount that correlates to the difficulty of the requested service. These payments would be made through a mobile payment system that’s operated by a system that’s similar to PayPal.

According to the blog on Flippo’s website, in October the product entered a “market validation stage”, through which students could put in requests using a Facebook group that the co-founders created or through Google Hotline. The Facebook group for Flippo Beta had 121 members.

Students could also request a service by text messaging a certain phone number designated by Flippo’s co-founders.

Flippo’s founders acknowledge that the development of a digital application is a time-consuming, yet rewarding, experience. Co-founder Karnell, a finance and general management major, said he spends between two and three hours a day working on Flippo. He said most of this time is spent promoting Flippo by posting fliers around campus and updating its Facebook page.

“We’re all keeping it on our minds all day,” Karnell said.

Karnell also said that he and the other co-founders have thoroughly enjoyed Flippo’s development process and that watching the project evolve has been rewarding.

Although Flippo has yet to launch, Davis said it has already attracted attention from Pitt’s student body. Last semester, he said, he and the other Flippo co-founders ran a test trial by using the Flippo formula on a Facebook page.

Brynn Yochim, a senior geology major, said she initially learned of Flippo after one of her Facebook friends “liked” the Flippo page. She said Flippo’s logo, a hippopotamus performing a front flip, caught her eye.

But, Yochim said, it’s Flippo’s purpose that made her a regular visitor to its Facebook page.

“It just sounded like a very convenient thing I needed to start learning about so I could start using it,” she said, adding that she used the service primarily for food.

While it’s true that Flippo is still in its infancy, Davis says the operation has gone rather smoothly thus far. He said costs have been low because its team of developers have agreed to accept equity, or stock in Flippo, as compensation for their work. Additionally, he said, since their advertising campaign has been dominated by social media, expenses have been kept in check.

More than 400 people have “liked” the Flippo Facebook page. Its wall contains a number of pictures of satisfied customers who took advantage of the website’s services during its trial phase.

An even stronger advertising campaign has resulted from Flippo test-run users simply talking about its services. Yochim said she has met multiple people who are interested in using the relatively new application.

“Every time someone hears me say the word Flippo, they ask what it is,” she said.