College Traffic, an online goods and services exchange for students developed by alumni Alex Seilliere(MSB ’12) and Andrew Boggs (COL ’12), will officially launch today after the idea began in an entrepreneurship class at Georgetown.

Seilliere conceived the concept for College Traffic in professor William Finnerty’s “Entrepreneurship Foundations” class during his junior year. He said the idea was based on conversations he had with classmates.

“[The class] was a game changer in my Georgetown education,” Seilliere said. “A lot of my friends told me they would use this website on a daily basis if it was created.”

The two said that their experiences as Georgetown students influenced their development of the site.

“I always ended up getting my books really late on Amazon,” Boggs said. “We wait for the last minute, we want to save money, we want do things as simply as possible. The stuff you’re looking for from year to year are similar.”

Seilliere brought Boggs into the project last March, and the two began to meet with developers, mentors and potential investors. Eventually, they decided to move the development base to Ukraine to cut costs.

“We started in D.C. and figured out it would be easier and cheaper to develop it in Ukraine,” Seillieresaid. “We worked on it for three weeks and managed to get a website going for way cheaper.”

The website aims to serve as a common platform used by students searching for goods and services.

Boggs emphasized that the website will be only be available to students and faculty, an exclusivity he hopes will differentiate College Traffic from other online marketplaces and create a safer environment.

The site will initially be available to students and faculty at Georgetown, The George Washington University, American University and Howard University. Boggs said, however, that he and Selliere plan to expand the website to ten to fifteen other cities by next fall.

“It’s all local. Georgetown, George Washington and American will all share the same network. You couldn’t tap into that from over in California, for example,” Boggs said. “[But] we’d like to see College Traffic across the country.”

A beta version of the site has been up and running for four months, during which Seilliere and Boggs have been testing with focus groups.

“We now work with in-house developers, and we are ready to go live,” Boggs said.

Although the website officially launches today, Seilliere and Boggs said that they will maintain the flexibility to add new features, including one that will allow students to find deals in the Georgetown area, which they plan to add in mid-April.

Seilliere anticipates that attracting users will be the startup’s biggest challenge.

“No one’s going to want to arrive in a site that’s [empty] like a desert,” Seilliere said.

“College students can be tough to convince,” Boggs added. “We’re trying to think out of the box in terms of marketing, keeping it new and relevant.”