Please review my startup - Online Classifieds | Hacker News Reader

Please review my startup - Online Classifieds

abtain.com

11 pointsquellhorst39 comments

Welcome to the start-up everyone started-up in 2001 that failed for the same reason: content.

Craig won the lottery on this one.

Here's something to think about though: Critical mass and exponential growth.

It's going to take you a few years to hit critical mass, which I "imagine" is around 60,000 to 100,000 sellers.

It's at this point where if every person tells 3 people about your service, and 1 of those 3 people use the site, you'll start getting enough traffic that enough products will be sold that enough of your sellers will return to sell again, maybe your buyers will too.

My first thought is to create a community for your sellers. Give them an outlet to talk with each other. They'll help you improve your site. Engage in that communication. Let them make it a home away from home, let them make friends with each other.

It's these people that will give your site legs.

(I do have some past experience in this space...)

I actually did this before for a client in the auction market. Most of the initial users were in the Texas / Louisiana area. After around 30,000 users we had a nice critical mass.

The biggest problem came from the client not anticipating the support required fro 30k users. Fraudulent transactions like fake Rolexs with western union money transfers were too common. Another issue that came up was people paying for postings yet using stolen credit cards. If you charged $5 to signup, but then had a chargeback, you would get dinged for that $5 and a chargeback fee of $25.

Things I like:

- Design looks nice and clean. I'm impressed that you have a photo of downtown Raleigh on my city's section, that's a nice touch.

- Posting interface is simple, and I like that its free.

- I like the McAfee secure logo. I know it doesn't mean anything, but the everyday user in me likes seeing it (reinforces trust).

Things I think could be improved:

- My profile says I'm in Reidsville (geolocated). I can't find a way to change this (I'm actually in Raleigh, NC).

- I can't find a way to post an ad from the dashboard.

- More categories for services. For example, I'd like to list under graphic & web design, which is available as a job but not a service. Computer is too broad.

- Once I choose a city, set a cookie so that when I click back to the homepage it takes me to the Raleigh homepage, instead of the generic choose-a-city page.

- Let me add a link to my site! I'll make a profile for my business on just about any well-made business directory provided that listing is free, and lets me link to my website.

- Following on this, let me add more metadata about my business (e.g., hours, address, phone, specializations).

- "Manage My Ads" is dropping onto 2 lines, orphaning "Ads".

- The combination of the icon and the name Abtain make it seem like a health site at first blush.

Overall, I really like it. If you can add in some of that metadata I will definitely fill out my listing and try your site out.

After you make a profile, go to edit your profile and you can add a link to your website. See how I have a link back on my profile. http://www.abtain.com/dan

I'll check into updating the geocoding. Anyway you can tell me your ip address? I'll check to see if any databases have your ip in correctly.

Will take your other comments under consideration in the next deployment. Thanks.

Thanks, I see it now. It was linked to my abtain profile, and I didn't realize I could change that to whatever I wanted.

IP: 75.93.212.230. It shows up as Greensboro on most sites, which is just one of the shortcomings of geolocation by IP. So really, I just need to be able to change it.

"No classified ads were found for" whatever I click on. Looks nice but that's your hurdle.

Yeah, not only segmented by category but also by region. Curious, what area are you from?

Chicago.

Had a client that had the exact same problem. We built them basically an "eBay for rentals" platform. They had a solid business plan and plenty of smarts on how to build it out. However, when it came down to marketing and filling up the site, their guy on the team with that job failed miserably. As a result, they were a non-starter and tanked horribly. Just goes to show: cashflow is king. Concentrate on that first, otherwise you've got to get really luck (like Twitter) and get investments without having solid plans in that area.

How is this different than craigslist? It looks nicer, but you have the same feel of how to find things. Why can't I search all of the USA? Or a region. Or search a whole state? I hate clicking around to different cities to try and find something.

Posting is easy. Making an account is easy. Managing postings is easy. http://www.abtain.com/posts/manage has a field for price but I do not see a place to enter that in the posting.

Good work.

I have sphinx search in the backend but turned it off because the number of posts is limited.

Thanks for the feedback, I'll look into making browsing/searching across regions better.

Do you think it would be useful if you are visiting a category in your local city to see posts from other nearby cities (within 150 miles)?

How about arbitrary distance, which the user defines?

Oh yes, most definitely. I was recently in the market for a new (to me) dirt bike and it was a pain switching around to different local cities and performing searches. And, because I was willing to drive for 2-3 hours to pick it up, some people would say they lived near a larger city to get more hits but when I called them up it turned out they lived like 50+ miles away from said city.

The prefix ab denotes 'away' or 'from'. Similar to the word abstain; abstain from sex, abstain from voting, and seemingly opposite of obtain.

Just gives a weird feeling and vibe.

Oh interesting. Maybe opposite of obtain would be to sell/give away something?

Interesting counterpoint - http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2303-the-unimportance-of-prod...

great name for a late night tv exercise machine though :)

You know you want sexy abs like these. Call Now! and get the ABTAIN-A-MASTER 3000 PRO for only six easy payments of $99 (plus $129 s+h)

Why would I use this instead of craigslist?

If you don't have an answer for this I don't think you have a business. If you do, it needs to be more apparent on the site.

Is this really "high traffic" already or is that the end goal?

Also, I couldn't find any actual listings. I saw in the recent activity that "billybob created a post I want a 250f motocross bike about 5 hours ago", but when I clicked on it, it only took me to his profile and had no link to his ad listings, so I still couldn't find it.

It basically seems like a Craigslist, but without the content.

Also some of the categories are empty. I looked for IT and Software Jobs in the San Francisco Bay Area, and it has nothing. It might be better to start with a narrower focus and solve the chicken-and-egg problem first. If you have posts, then you'll get readers, and then you'll get more posts.

I heard that elsewhere too. Considering going after a niche, like only one specific category/section thats currently on the site.

Will take some research to know which one.

Following on from that..

On the homepage: * I would limit your popular cities to the top 4 or 5 as some only have 1 or 2 items listed. * I'd limit the recent activities also, you have some from two days ago.

Get some integration to other sites to generate the posts, post people won't post if there isnt much users.

Improve page preview. Had a sluggish feel to it also when high lighting the subject and think the message but from right toleft it wouldnt select? wtf?:)

I think part of the sluggishness is the extra traffic from hacker news right now, and forgetting that I only had one mongrel up to serve the load. Working on getting unicorn going again to help handle more requests/second.

Maybe you shouldn't try to do every city at once. Instead, focus on one city and make it great. Expand from there.

Other than that, you need content. You could always try aggregating other services and newspapers, to the extent their TOSs allow.

Thought you guys may find this interesting. stats from this post getting on top of hacker news for a bit. http://skitch.com/quellhorst/dby8q/dock

@quellhorst, what do you think about slightly fading the color of all category links that have no posts? I certainly don't want to browse through categories that I know have no posts.

Oh, I like that much more than showing a number next to the categories.

It would be primarily helpful on the interior pages (e.g. http://chicago.abtain.com).

How did you get the geolocation to work? It correctly noted I'm in the SF Bay Area but my IP address normally shows for Richardson, TX (thanks alot, AT&T).

Using the free maxmind for the backend GeoIP database.

Can you link us to one working classified ad? I'm clicking through random Boston categories and I can't find any that have anything.

There are many postings in the Dallas area. http://dallas.abtain.com/

It has a very spammy look to it. I don't know exactly what it is that causes this, but it looks "dubious".

Someone mentioned that it was because the blue links look like domain squatting pages.

I only recently changed the links to be blue underlined after hearing a presentation from bing about how a specific color of blue performed better.

Same feeling here

what do you mean by "high traffic classifieds?" Are you referring to some kind of technological superiority over the alternatives? Does high traffic mean anything to your users? Just wondering.

That is actually part of an A/B test with abingo to see if having that motto does better with conversions. It did better with advertising.

Lack of search would put me off using it.

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