Ever was in class went through the whole syllabus and was like where else can I get these books?.. Especially where I’m not going to break my pocket or be held hostage ?…. lol . Well recently through word of mouth from my brother @T.Kjames. I was told of this wonderful website created by  Christiannah Oyedeji called Knapsac.com.
Dolly: Whats your name?
Christy: Christiannah Oyedeji … but my friends call me Christy
Dolly:Where are you from?..
Christy: Houston, TX (Htown babayyy)
Dolly:  so please tell us a little bit about Knapsac.com
Christy: Knapsac is a student to student rental marketplace. We allow folks to rent their used books, electronics, and other educational materials out to other students through the website. The owners set the rental prices and get that amount every time the book is rented. The best part is items can be rented out as often as the owner would like them to be.
Dolly:So how did you get started
Christy: It’s kind of long story but I’ll try to be as succinct as possible. After a freakishly long day in lab one day during midterms  my sophmore year,  I noticed I wasn’t able to log into Learnlink (Emory’s intranet) or Blackboard to get my assignments for the night. Figuring it was something wrong with my laptop, I decided to trek across campus to Woodruff Library only to find that my Emory Card wasn’t working either. Surprise surprise. But I had work to do, so I signed in as a guest, found a few friends from class to borrow the assignments from, and hit the books.

That was just the beginning of the fun times; the next morning, as I was preparing to head to class, I got an email from the housing department saying that I had 7 days to vacate my dorm room. No explanation as to what was going on at all. You can imagine how freaked out I was at this point, so rather than heading to class I ran to the registrars office to figure out what the heck was going on. It seemed that my financial aid package had changed from the previous year and the balance hadn’t been paid for my tuition. Without any sort of communication to at least make me the student aware of what was going on, I was dropped from each of my classes (which by the way I’d begged to be overloaded into at the beginning of the semester). I called my parents frantically and of course they didn’t have thousands of dollars just lying around the house to help out.

Awesome… I needed to find roughly $13,000 in less than a week or it looked like I wouldn’t be completing midterm exams or the semester. Not even getting a job at Magic City would get me the cash fast enough (plus my mom would have sent me to Nigeria to straighten me out). So I decided to open several credit cards and take out an emergency loan in order to cover tuition, room, board for the year. Also, to be able to pay the debt down I began working full time, forfeiting the rest of my college social life.

The spring semester of junior year I was adjusting to my new life pretty well, and as expected found myself searching for textbooks at the bookstore. After an hour of drifting through the isles and a wait in a line that wrapped around the entire building, I stared at my receipt. I had just spent $642 on books for 3 classes. Despite having so obviously been taken advantage of and being royally pissed, this was all coming out of my own pocket after all, I realized that most students across the country faced the same problem come the beginning of each semester. It didn’t seem like folks in admin were looking to help reduce the price gouging. So I set out to find my self and other college students a cost-effective alternative to purchasing textbooks and fast. Thus Knapsac.com was born.

Dolly:Why rental and not exchange I love the whole idea but , what if you could exchange as well…. do you think it would have the same effect?..
Christy: Funny you should ask. We started with textbook rentals and word of mouth a few years ago, but the more we grow the more features we’re adding to the site. Initially exchange wasn’t a focus because it required us to not only find two potential customers to create one transaction, but also each person would need to have an item the other needed. In order to do this successfully we needed some heavy traffic to the site that we just weren’t getting early on and more employees to help move things along. But now that Knapsac’s a bit bigger an exchange program is in the works. Folks who are interested will be able to purchase exchange credits (or pay some nominal membership fee … we’re still working out the specifics) and swap items. We hope to roll this out in time for the fall term.
Dolly: I see at this point you have the school Emory,Georgia Tech and State, in the future what other schools are you trying to work with?
Christy: We’d love to work with as many schools as possible, but all colleges have contracts with the companies who run their bookstores. So we actually work with the students at different schools rather than with the schools themselves. It’s all a matter of finding students at these schools who have items to list. Once the inventory is in place we can work with anyone. In fact we’re updating the site right now to reflect that Emory, GA Tech, and GSU aren’t the only schools we focus on.
But starting out these were the three schools where myself, the Knapsac team, and my friends who were helping out had the strongest connections. All of us were students at one of these three schools, so we had kind of insiders perspective on things that really helped us understand the customer’s needs, the best student hangouts, and gather more information about the academic schedules/book buying cycle. It was pretty nice being able to blend in and fly under the radar; nothing’s worse than being the creepy people marketing on campus who have no idea what’s going on.
Dolly:I noticed you have live chat offline I must say that idea itself is very innovative.Do you have an I.T. staff or is it students conversing with other students?..
Christy: The chat feature is our live support and we have a few folks on staff who are responsible for handling any questions that come through. I really like staying involved in one on one communication with customers, so I’m there helping out as well.
Dolly: Knapsac.com has so many perks and is very well put together are they re any other special links or attributes that will be added later to the site?…
Christy: I can’t give out all of the special features coming up but I can pass a long a few of my favorites.
- Stronger search: tool including search by class that will bring up a booklist. Ideally you’ll just search once to find what ya need for all of your classes instead of ping ponging back and forth between a syllabus, trying to find correct ISBNs, and different online bookstores.
- Book exchange: (talked a bit about that earlier)
- Local student discounts: I love, love, love  a good deal. The best part about being a student is that there’s always a ton places around campus that give 10-20% discounts off of everything from food to clothing to entertainment. But they’re not really advertised and unless you ask (or have a crazy friend like me who makes a point to find these things out) the deals just sit there… unused. And that really hurts my heart. So we’ve got a feature in the works that will pull in student discounts around a selected college. This will be just a fun little freebee for all of our customers to use.
- Partnering with college resource sites: the idea here will be to provide reviews of cool/useful sites that students can use to help boost grades, prepare for grad school, learn about enrichment programs, etc.
- Knapsac Street Team: our affiliate program that pays students in cash or store credits for helping us spread the word about the site, help out at our events, and build relationships with the “connectors” on campus.
Dolly: What do you hope to see happen to Knapsac in the future and will they re be other accessories later on if so what is coming ?..
Christy: Sure, we’ll most likely get some cool bags, t-shirts, and other little Knapsac branded things to add to the store. But in reference to long term goals, most folks that know me, know that I’m an overachiever and thrive off of the potential to make lasting change in the world. Everything I do relates back to that. My goal with Knapsac is to a) help lessen the financial burdens that students and their families face and b) flip the bookstore and rental industries on their heads. I envision Knapsac.com becoming the Amazon.com for college students. But I don’t want the company to become a billion dollar faceless entity. Don’t get me wrong, I won’t be upset if we become a billion dollar company, but Knapsac will always stay very in touch with our humanity and customers. We’ll do this by keeping our focus on giving back to the student community and above all else having fun along the way.
Dolly: is there any one you want to shout out or say thanx to?..
Christy:Shout Out to my biggest supporters :) Without y’all I definitely wouldn’t have made it this far!!
- Kenny Oyedeji (Advisor, Partner, IT)
- Anthony Oyedeji (Graphic Design)
- Brantley Beaird (Huge help with marketing on campuses)
- Ed Rieker (Advisor)
- TK James (De’ Medici Group)

Christiannah O. Oyedeji
President
Knapsac Textbook Rental
404.910.3456 (office)

Christy@knapsac.com