Starting with five lamps, Tanner McCraney launches a serendipitous career path.
Tanner McCraney didn’t plan on becoming an entrepreneur – his original career plan was to earn a degree in chemistry and then attend medical school – but as he graduates from the University of Mississippi, he already is running an award-winning business.
Even his original plan to attend the university didn’t go quite as planned, but it all worked out well for McCraney, one of the brains behind RUMIE, an app that helps college students buy and sell clothes, furniture and books from one another. The app recently won the university’s 18th Gillespie Business Plan Competition.
Growing up in Jackson, McCraney always wanted to go to Ole Miss; his parents are both alumni. But he loved playing soccer and decided in high school that he wanted to try collegiate soccer.
“No other SEC schools besides Kentucky and South Carolina have a men’s soccer team,” he said. “I chose Rhodes College in Memphis because it was close enough to Ole Miss that I could visit whenever I wanted.”
When he moved into his freshman dorm room at Rhodes, his mother left him with five lamps. Deciding that this was too many lamps for one room, McCraney started trying to sell the extras for some cash.
He turned to his dorm’s GroupMe message thread to advertise, but the messages were quickly buried by all the other conversations from his peers. Next, he looked into the Memphis Facebook Marketplace, but most of the interest came from Memphis residents outside the Rhodes campus.
He told his friends, “I wish there was a better way to only sell to other students.”
After his freshman year at Rhodes, McCraney realized that he really wanted to be at Ole Miss.
“What ended up happening was I just realized that I was traveling to Oxford so much, I had lost interest in soccer, and thought then, ‘Why am I still here?'” he explained. “I transferred in the fall, and I’ve loved it ever since.”
After transferring to UM in 2019, McCraney reconnected with longtime friend Patrick Phillips.
Phillips also grew up in Jackson as an Ole Miss fan. He came to the university as a freshman accountancy major and was accepted as a student in the Haley Barbour Center for Manufacturing Excellence. Both Phillips and McCraney are also members of the Sigma Nu fraternity.
After enrolling at Ole Miss as a chemistry major, McCraney switched to entrepreneurship during his junior year.
Together, McCraney and Phillips came up with the idea to create an app for students to buy, sell and rent with other students on their campus. They named the app RUMIE, an acronym for Regulated University Marketplace Internet Exchange.
RUMIE is a community marketplace app for students in the area. Students create an account with their school email, ensuring that it connects them only to students at the same university. Students can sell or search for school materials, furniture or even leases with the Marketplace feature. The Connection feature helps advertise events on- or off-campus.
“Every student posting is an Ole Miss student,” McCraney said. “We wanted it to be completely free, with no subscriptions or hidden fees.”
McCraney and Phillips entered the concept into the 2021 Gillespie Business Plan Competition with a presentation of their app idea.
“We got good feedback,” McCraney said. “They were like, ‘We like the idea; we just need more from y’all.'”
After the Gillespie Competition, Phillips hired coders from India to create a base version of the app.
It’s truly been a journey. I feel like it was yesterday when we decided we were going to do this but it’s been over a year since we first started.
“We could either give up on the idea or just make it, so we put all of the money we had made over the summer behind getting it developed.” McCraney said.
He enlisted help from Blake Dubinski, an entrepreneur-in-residence at the university’s Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Dubinski is one of the brains behind GenTeal Clothing, a men’s athletic and collegiate wear brand.
Dubinski helped McCraney and Phillips polish the concept and get their business off the ground the way they envisioned.
“It’s truly been a journey,” Phillips said. “I feel like it was yesterday when we decided we were going to do this but it’s been over a year since we first started.
“There have been plenty of late nights and early mornings communicating with our developer in India and many days spent sweating giving out flyers on campus.”
The partners hired Samantha Pennock, also an Ole Miss student, to handle marketing and social media.
RUMIE is active on multiple campuses and has a growing number of users.
“As of right now we have over 1,200 users at Ole Miss, 40 at SMU, 30 at Harvard and 36 at MSU,” McCraney said.
The goal is to expand RUMIE to more campuses, and thanks to the Gillespie win, this is an achievable goal. The team won $10,000 for the competition’s top prize, plus $5,000 for the Steven E. Rowell Entrepreneur Award.
Along with their cash prizes, the partners won a full year of office space at Insight Park. McCraney and Phillips have decided that after graduation, they are going to pursue RUMIE full time.
“We’re using this year to see if RUMIE can be a job for us,” McCraney said. “We both want to start businesses; we don’t want to work for a corporation.”
If the early results on RUMIE are any indication, it would be hard to bet against them.
By Emmaline Wolfe, University Marketing & Communications
