By Ainslee Archibald PZ ’25

What if, instead of limiting yourself to Pitzer students via student-talk, you could buy and sell with students across the Claremont Colleges through a 5C-exclusive platform? That’s the goal of Dormplex, an online marketplace for college students launched by Noah Leopold PZ ’25 last semester.

Dormplex launched as a test website last November. Now, Leopold and his co-founders are working on an app and looking to grow their presence both at the Claremont Colleges and at other campuses.

Leopold believes that no centralized platform for student transactions currently exists to meet campus needs. He views Dormplex as the solution.

“Things like Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist are a little bit outdated,” Leopold said. “They’re more for our parents’ generation than they are for us.”

Unlike public platforms, Dormplex requires a college “.edu” email to access. Each campus will have its own marketplace, while the consortium is all in one system due to physical proximity. According to Leopold, Dormplex could bring safety and convenience that public platforms don’t offer.

“When you’re meeting with people on these platforms, you could be meeting with some random person miles away,” Leopold said. “So it’s both a little bit unsafe, potentially, and it’s not very proximate… A platform that allows you to see things for sale only on your campus makes it a lot easier to actually do those transactions.”

Leopold serves as co-CEO of Dormplex. He co-founded the startup with his friends from high school, co-CEO James Heath, who goes to Middlebury College, and CTO Aiden Habboub, who attends Kalamazoo College. The original idea for Dormplex came after Heath’s struggle to find a barber while at Middlebury.

“James [Heath] is Black, and he goes to school at Middlebury, which is in rural Vermont,” Leopold said. “It’s a lot of white kids and all of the barbers around are only used to cutting white people’s hair… It took him a really long time looking around and asking people to find another student on campus who ran a barber shop. We were thinking, if there’s a platform where everyone who’s selling things at their school can just post what they’re offering, it would have been a lot easier.”

Leopold said Dormplex has reached about 120 test users and has had a few transactions since their launch at the 5Cs last November. The majority of those users have been at Pitzer, but they were able to expand beyond to the other colleges through a partnership with the Mac Shack.

Cianan Gamble PZ ’23 ran a barber business on campus before graduating last fall. After talking with Leopold a year before Dormplex launched their website, Gamble was excited to list his business on the platform when it eventually went live.

“I was super happy to put my button up there,” Gamble said. “It was very easy to set up.”

However, Gamble explained things went less smoothly after he initially registered with the platform.

“It didn’t really take off,” Gamble said. “I didn’t really know anybody who used it to sell anything… I never got a haircut booked through it.”

Still, Gamble is optimistic about Dormplex. He recommends it for students who are running small businesses on campus.

“It’s so easy to set up; it’s kind of like, why wouldn’t you?” Gamble said. “I’m glad that my page was on there for a while.”

From the administrative side, Leopold recognized that the website’s launch hasn’t all been smooth sailing.

“We started with a website, which at first had a lot of bugs,” Leopold said. “We tested it at Claremont last semester, got some users, got a lot of feedback, and fixed all the things that weren’t working.”

As a result, the team decided to turn it into an app, building it to respond to user feedback. According to a statement from Leopold, the app is complete and the team is in the process of posting it to the Apple App Store, with an Android app in the works.

Leopold says he’s committed to Dormplex as a long term venture, and building the app is just one part of that roadmap.

“We have the next year really planned out,” Leopold said. “We don’t have as solid of an idea of what we’re going to do after that. But our hope is to really get Dormplex out there at a few schools this next semester. Then at the end of the semester, and over the summer, we’re hoping to raise a venture capital round, so we can really try to expand the following year.” 

Dormplex has already made progress on expanding to schools other than the Claremont Colleges, specifically at University of Michigan and the home campuses of the other co-founders.

In recent years, apps such as the social media app Fizz have tried a similar approach to gaining a foothold in the college lifestyle. Leopold has reflected on the success of this kind of approach, and is planning on doing something different with Dormplex.

“[Apps like Dormplex], to expand, have tried to use ambassadors, who they pay hourly wages, to market at the schools that they wish to expand to,” Leopold said. “We found that this didn’t really incentivize the students to work hard at promoting the platform, since their success is not at all tied to the success of the platform… These platforms typically perform really well at the school where the founders go. Then, they really struggle to expand beyond that, because they don’t have an incentive structure for these people that are working.”

Dormplex, in contrast to this approach, is going to be built on a franchising model, and will make money by taking a cut on the transactions on the platform. Leopold’s goal is to better align the incentives of the franchise partners with the success of the platform.

“We can partner with students at schools around the country, and eventually around the world, to market it at their own school,” Leopold said. “We’ll do a payment split with them, so they will keep 80% of the revenue from their school.”

The franchise partner’s 80% comes out of the 5% fee Dormplex will be taking out of every transaction on the platform. The other 95% will go to the seller. Leopold said the team is also looking at other revenue streams like paid promotions and partnerships with local businesses.

In order to make sure Dormplex is able to take their cut, names aren’t currently included on listings. This is intended to encourage people to sell through the platform rather than meeting up separately. However, the team is planning on changing this in the future.

“We’ll give sellers bonuses for every certain amount of items that they sell,” Leopold said. “That way, we don’t have to be so exclusive in order to actually get the revenue and get the transactions to happen on our platform.”

Leopold has one piece of advice for Pitzer students interested in creating a startup on campus: Don’t wait.

“Figure out what you can do today to get started, whether that’s making an Instagram to try to get your business off the ground or talking to a partner,” Leopold emphasized. “Just take action and do it.”