Occupation: Student / Managing Director of Boso.com
Harjeet Taggar is co-founder and Managing Director of Boso.co.uk, the first online marketplace exclusively for students in the UK. He is a final year undergraduate at Merton College, Oxford reading Law. You can read Harj’s blog at blog.harjtaggar.com
Profile of BOSO
- Boso is the first online marketplace exclusively for students but operates differently to the e-bay model. Rather than charging any listing or commission fees the site is completely free to use.
- The site only allows students with a valid email to register and only then can they post items for sale or view contacts details for current sellers. The idea is for students to be able to meet each other face to face on campus to complete the transaction. Combining a traceable email address with this face to face element virtually eliminates the fraud risk.
- Boso now has a user base of just under 1,000 members and has received over 200,000 hits. The site continues to grow each day has recently been expanded to create a national site for all students.
Personal profile:
I began working on Boso at the start of this year after attending a Young Enterprise Graduate Program team building session. Kulveer had thought of the marketplace concept a while back and I thought it sounded like a potentially very interesting project. I took the initial lead and the idea of a student marketplace eventually became the reality that is Boso. It’s been a great experience and one of the highlights was definitely giving a speech to over a hundred students at Warwick about how to become involved in entrepreneurship.
During my time at Oxford I’ve been involved in a number of student societies such as Future Flyers, The Oxford Majlis Society, Merton JCR, The Halsbury Society and now Oxford Entrepreneurs. OE is definitely different to any other society I’ve been in involved with and getting national press coverage for the society has been a great challenge to get my teeth into. The society has now appeared several times in the national press, including the Sunday Telegraph, The Times and The Guardian.
Problems he’s had and how he’s overcome them:
The biggest problem I had was my own self-confidence. Having never done anything entrepreneurial before or having led a team of this size (there are currently eleven people working on Boso) I doubted whether I would actually be able to pull this off.
I think this is the biggest problem for most people looking to start their own venture and I overcame this by just asking myself what I had to lose. As a university student even if the idea didn’t work out it wouldn’t be the end of the world and I’d learn a whole range of skills and experiences that I wouldn’t have done otherwise.
Major successes:
- Launching the site and receiving over 600 registrations and 100,000 hits in just 8 weeks
- Being featured on the homepage of the Oxford University website
- Media coverage from the BBC, Times Online, The Guardian, Real World Magazine and The Run Down
- Support from not only Oxford University but also the Environmental Association for Universities and Colleges in the UK
What I love about (social) entrepreneurship:
To be honest the thing I love most about entrepreneurship is not having to fake an interest in something. At the end of the say, people don’t go into conventional career paths like banking or law because of their deep passion for either. It’s the money that is attractive but I love being able to work on something that I actually have a passion for and deciding how I want to do things. For me that’s unbeatable.
