Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What do I do?

news.ycombinator.com

21–22 of 22 posts

Re: Ask HN: What do I do?

#21
Hey Stuckk, did you decide on what you wanted to do with your site?

The hardest part is to build enough momentum to have a viable marketplace otherwise you're stuck with a chicken and egg problem where no one posts because no one's buying and no one's buying because no one's posting.

I have a novel idea that I'm happy to share (and work on if you're interested) and that's a classifieds marketplace with REAL identities. I've sold and bought many things on Craigslist and Ebay over the years and I've come to value and appreciate people who don't give me the runaround or try to scam me. I think a lot of the good folks who I do meet when I buy or sell feel the same way about anonymous online classifieds. I personally always feel uncomfortable inviting complete strangers to my house to demo an item I'm selling w/o knowing a bit about who they are and if they're a known scam artist.

Some sites like Replyboard are trying to solve this with reputation and ratings for classifieds sellers but to a large degree they are hidden behind screen names and such. I would love to buy and sell locally to REAL people who are willing to back the stuff they sell with their name/identity. How would I do this? I would require two concurrent identity logins > Facebook & LinkedIn. I know this will limit the number of people who would participate but you would be surprised at how many "professionals" fit into this group.

Let me know what you think and best of luck with Classfy!

Re: Ask HN: What do I do?

#22
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are 100% correct on going against eBay. We don't want to do that even though it may look like it. Through some research and suggestion of others. We found out that there are lots of transactions taking place on the internet on no particular platform. They are done on forums, Facebook, twitter(as Status update)..ect. The reason why they don't sell on eBay is because eBay takes too much time and has too muc…

Great thinking all around! - aggregating listings from across other sources / syndicated auctions is a cool idea. You probably still want a category focus. In the 90s, at one point the other dozen auction sites shared/exchanged their listings into one combined, shared set of listings, and eBay still killed them. But if you can choose a category, you can beat eBay. - bit coin or other payment community, cool direction…

do you have any idea how airbnb scraped the craigslist listings (given that craigslist is so protective of its data)?
Post reply on HN