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Sale away: Rumgr

It all started when Dylan Bathurst had to clean out the garage when moving out of his old place. “The usual thing to do is to have a garage sale, but I was too lazy to do that. I was thinking: How cool would it be just to take some photos of my stuff, post it and be done with it?” Out of this laziness, the idea for Rumgr was born. With his fellow founders Ray Morgan and Alex Coleman, he developed an app that does just that. The free iPhone app is a buy-and-sell app that’s like a mashup of eBay, Twitter and Tumblr. In short, you can quickly sell stuff, buy stuff and even follow sellers whose cool stuff you want to keep tabs on.

“We were doing it to have fun,” Bathurst says. But the fun drew some serious attention: Soon they had $500,000 in venture capital to go big. Since Rumgr’s launch in February, they’ve seen 18,000 downloads, and today have more than 5,000 avid users in Las Vegas. In future upgrades: an Android version, a ratings feature and an in-app payment system.

But Bathurst says he wants Rumgr to be more than a virtual garage sale. “We’re also trying to help build a sense of community and encourage people to meet their neighbors.” In one episode Bathurst blogged about on Rumgr.com, the owner of a sneaker boutique donated new kicks to the kids of Las Vegas Boys Town. Where’d they originally meet? On Rumgr. Now that’s customer satisfaction.

As a longtime journalist in Southern Nevada, native Las Vegan Andrew Kiraly has served as a reporter covering topics as diverse as health, sports, politics, the gaming industry and conservation. He joined Desert Companion in 2010, where he has helped steward the magazine to become a vibrant monthly publication that has won numerous honors for its journalism, photography and design, including several Maggie Awards.