Life should be easy. Or at least as easy as possible. DormDorm is designed with ease of use as a primary goal because your time is valuable and you shouldn’t be fighting your systems.

Everything we’ve done is highly visual, from setting up your first rooms using a frighteningly easy wizard, right through to checking someone in and going over your reports. No more tab-tab-c–return-F1-y-return combinations to remember. No more eye straining spreadsheets (they’re there if you want them, but we find graphs and charts easier to use). No more wondering how to make the system work the way you want it to because it was designed for another purpose or designed by someone who doesn’t understand the needs of the end user – you.

We automate the most time consuming processes and make the rest so simple that a summer intern with zero experience could be introduced to the system and checking people in within 5 minutes.

You value your time and so do we, so if we can help save you some time, frustration or resources, don’t hesitate to contact me directly at justin@dormdorm.com or at (901) 466 6231

It’s no secret that universities have had their funding cut back and that meeting ever rising capacity and quality expectations are no small task. DormDorm helps universities to monetize un- or under-utilized summer capacity to put funds straight back to their bottom line – up to millions of dollars every year.

Many universities we’ve spoken with already have programs in place to rent out their rooms in the summer to conferences and individuals, and they already have software in place. But, what we’re also finding is that the software is re-purposed or custom in-house solutions that involve:

• Complex interfaces where only a few features are used but require a steep learning curve
• Custom solutions which require manual intervention to make and confirm a reservation
• No data flexibility to allow integration with other services
• Complicated set up procedures
• Reports and analytics which are incomplete, inappropriate or completely missing
• Block assignments which don’t allow full utilization of room space because of general and “just in case” hold types (conferences, groups, etc.)

We have designed DormDorm from the ground up specifically to address these issues. Our feature set includes exactly and only what a university needs, with an interface designed with inexperienced web-generation summer interns in mind. We can have a university up and running in an hour, instead of a month. We build visual reports so that administrators can get at-a-glance and in-depth views of what’s happening in the residence hall. And perhaps most importantly, we make precise room inventory available in multiple places online, increasing occupancy and decreasing the time, cost and errors often associated with needing staff inputting reservations.

And to top it all off, we have a zero risk pricing plan. We charge on a per-reservation basis, so if you’re not making money on on room, we don’t charge you a penny for it. Ever.

If your university, conference services dept, or residence staff would like more information on DormDorm’s reservation engine, don’t hesitate to contact me personally at justin@dormdorm.com

DormDorm was originally conceived to make it easy to find accommodations for budget travellers that is safe, comfortable, affordable and in a good location – i.e. a college dorm room. For $50-60 a night, I’ve stayed in some great dorm rooms which are private, clean, and right in the middle of the action. Sure they’re austere, but I’m only there to sleep.

As perfect as dorm rooms are, anyone who has tried to track them down recently knows that it is currently a time consuming, uncertain and often frustrating process. Not all schools offer public summer rooms, so you have to find the right ones. There are no automatic reservation systems, so you don’t know if they even have availability. There is no central service, so every city is a new challenge. They never seem to come up in search engine results, so you have to do a lot of digging. And then, if you do find the right place for you, you have to wait days to get a response…and for a last minute planner like myself, that’s almost a deal killer.

This is a problem that has been solved many times before for other industries, now we’re bringing it to the dorm space – and we wanted to give you a sneak peek at what that looks like. These were early drafts, and we’ve already come a long way from here:

DormDorm works just like existing booking engines, and we’re even working on getting listings right in regular searches on larger engines, but you’ll save $50-200 a night on your room compared to a hotel without sacrificing the comfort and privacy that often comes with 8 bed hostel rooms.

We’re excited, mostly because we’re building this to use it ourselves, but also because we know it will help hundreds of thousands of budget travellers every summer as well.

If you’re interested in hearing more when we launch, sign up for our announcement list. Spam free, we promise.

There has been a lot said about The Startup Bus and if it was just a gimmick or if it was something that had the opportunity to start a real company…or six.

I wont weigh in on the debate, my job is simply to see how far we can take what we seeded over the 3 days of the bus. But, for those who are following, I thought I’d make it a bit easier to follow all the press DormDorm is getting:

First off: The Wall Street Journal and VentureWire – http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2010/03/15/have-start-up-will-travel-start-up-bus-yields-two-winners-at-sxsw/?mod=rss_WSJBlog

PhysOrg wrote about how time constrained startups create innovation – http://www.physorg.com/news187851824.html

TheNextWeb gives some insight into the judging panel – http://thenextweb.com/au/2010/03/15/startup-bus-winners-announced/

True/Slant, who thought that “[DormDorm] is, actually, a good idea” talks about the gimmick vs. innovation of the Startup Bus -http://trueslant.com/eilenezimmerman/2010/03/15/startup-bus/#comment-210

KazzaDrask had some fun at the launch party – http://kazzadraskmedia.blogspot.com/2010/03/hot-on-press-startup-bus-pitches-6.html

Finally, our own Jonas wrote about his experience on the bus – http://thezukunft.com/2010/03/14/startup-bus-awesome/

The DormDorm team is extremely happy to announce that a panel of seasoned entrepreneurs, mentors and investors selected DormDorm as the best startup to come out of TheStartupBus. This honour was shared with DateBrowsr.com who revealed an innovative Business Intelligence opportunity for their software for multiple verticals during their pitch.

This has been a fantastic experience, and we look forward to taking it forward and bringing college dorm rooms to the main stream.

Thank you to everyone for your support during this crazy experiment in starting a company.

Justin – DormDorm team

Ozona, Tx: At 12:20 PST today DormDorm.com announced that it has raised 20K in funding through an innovative crowdsourced micro-credit round.

DormDorm.com is disrupting an industry by bringing up to 1.8 Million currently underutilized rooms to the $123 Billion US travel accommodation market. This round of funding will be used for massages after a long weekend of development.

Full details at: http://bit.ly/aHpwal

Justin – DormDorm.com team

The DormDorm team has frozen development of all new features and has moved into integration mode. We’re now 100% focused on getting the product bits all working together into a working demo.

Because of the nature of the constraints within the bus, and with a large team with such diverse coding languages and skills (we’re 8 people, none of whom share any common coding language), we have been working in relatively autonomous teams working on specific parts of the software connected by RESTful abstraction layers. This allows us to specifiy how each part will communicate – the server, the front end, the database, etc. – and as long as everyone works towards getting their respective parts accepting or sending the correct data, everything works.

That’s a big assumption to make and the proof will be in the pudding. They’re plugging it all together now and already we’re running into issues, but they’re minor and it’s looking pretty promising!

Austin is in about 8 hours. Lets see if we can hit it by then.

Justin – DormDorm.com team

Oh yeah 3 hours of sleep!

I don’t know how the people who slept inside did, but I slept like a baby on the bus last night. Rolled out a camping mat in the aisle and curled up in a sleeping bag I was nice and warm and dark. It was bliss.

Looking forward to knocking DormDorm out of the park over the next 10 hours today and ready to give our first pitches to mentors when we arrive in Austin at 6pm.

Rock on StartupBus!

Justin – from the DormDorm team

At around 11pm the DormDorm team crossed 3000 lines of code – approximately 2000 in Java and 1000 in python.

That’s from just 2 developers who are coding in cramped conditions on a bouncing bus with, essentially, no internet and no way to reliably test their code.

That doesn’t include 6 pages of API documentation, a stack of wireframes, mock ups, CSS and HTML.

I have a lot of respect for these guys.