As Fall Quarter winds down and a six-week break looms, students aren’t quite ready to think about textbooks yet — but an Ohio University alumnus is working to stay one step ahead of them.
FourYears.com is a website that allows students to buy and sell textbooks, review classes and more. The site’s creator, OU alumnus Ryan Verner, is working with the university to better promote the site.
Student Senate passed a resolution at last week’s meeting to officially endorse the site. There will be a link to FourYears on senate’s website, and senate will request a link for Verner’s site on OU’s Current Students page as well.
Verner, who studied marketing and sport management and graduated in 2010, spoke with senate earlier this quarter about the possibility of combining his site with senate’s book exchange.
“The current (senate) exchange has been limping around the past two years and is old,” Student Senate President Kyle Triplett said. “Our main goal has been to provide a better change for what currently exists.”
FourYears.com officially launched in early September.
“The goal was to get the system up and tweak it all quarter and make a big marketing rush when students are thinking about scheduling,” he said.
In the past month, Verner has put the majority of his effort into marketing by taking advantage of resources provided around on OU’s campus.
He has discussed marketing the site with entrepreneurship students at OU.
“Several students are 100 percent into this, which has led to a lot of growth,” he said.
As an incentive, FourYears raffled off an iPad 2 last week — each book submitted for sale on the site in the past month equaled one entry for the person.
Two weeks ago, FourYears gave out free pizza at a table at Baker University Center for those who signed up to use the site, Verner said.
“It may cost money to buy the pizza, but when you a get a few hundred people signed up, it’s worth it,” he said.
There are 650 people currently registered, and Verner plans to have more than 1,000 people signed up by the end of the quarter. The site has currently averaged about 20 new users a day for the past 15 days, he said.
“This is clearly something that is not going to grow in one day, but the promotions have helped,” he said.
Verner is considering including a link to the PeopleSoft scheduling system on his site as another way to connect FourYears with the university.
Verner has met with several organizations and administrators this quarter for feedback on his site.
“PeopleSoft is a direction that sort of came up out of nowhere just because of some of these meetings,” he said.
Brice Bible, OU’s chief information officer, has met with Verner and said the Office of Information Technology would be willing to work with Verner with the collaboration of the registrar, Student Affairs and Legal Affairs offices.
“It could be a great value with the cost of textbooks really high. Anything that could be done to help students connect, share or sell textbooks, we support,” he said. “This looks like it would be a natural improvement over the current website.”
Verner said he believes the simplicity of the website makes it a great fit for students.
“It’s different way to find books while providing a list to easily connect with students rather than searching Facebook posts,” Verner said. “It’s a cool way to do something that we haven’t found at any other schools.”
Verner’s immediate goal is to have the website in full use by Spring Quarter, he said.
“Most goals I wanted to achieve happened,” Verner said. “I’m happy with how it has worked so far and am continuing towards my ultimate goal.”
Verner said he has achieved the majority of his primary goals this fall, including building relationships with OU officials and Student Senate.
“I didn’t want to be a competitor with the school, which opened up more doors,” he said.
If FourYears is successful at OU, Verner plans to contact other Ohio universities that currently use PeopleSoft.
“I’m building it with the idea in mind that it will be easily duplicated to provide the opportunity for students on a local basis,” he said.
