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Crapmania

crapmania.com

58 pointsmcantelon44 comments

I really have to admire Zed's use of all things lean here. It looks like a bare-bone site with no architecture to speak of, but there seems to be just enough content to create a compelling value proposition. This is an MVP if I've ever seen one. With just a couple hundred words of plain text, he can actually test whether there's a market or not. Very inspiring.

That being said, the name could be a deal breaker. In fact, it almost makes me think that the whole thing was put together tongue-in-cheek. It just screams "a place to buy a bunch of low quality junk."

Funny, because my first thought was "wow, awesome domain name. How was that not taken?"

Because, to me at least, it sounds like crap.

But some people will admit to loving crap. Lots of crap, the more, and the more crappy, the better. Some people will wax enthusiastic about the crap they love.

That's the idea, just put it up and see if anyone gets it.

I was thinking the name screamed, "The internet's dollar store!" But yeah, then I liked it.

A dollar store where serious sellers are meant to be identified by having paid a tax of >= $1 per item (for the image)? I hope you don't mean "dollar store" too literally.

yes, great MVP!

I think the name might just work great because of that tongue-in-cheek.

only to catch your eye. I can imagine it dying down quietly after the initial 'wow wow'

Charging by the image ($1?!) practically guarantees that all the listings will suck. Sellers will balk at the high price, creating paltry, image lean listings. Buyers won't waste time on listings that don't have large detailed images and lots of them. All that you'll end up with in that vacuum is spam.

Or: the people that really think they have something worth selling (i.e. not spam) will take pictures and pay to post a few of them. This could actually make it easier for buyers to spot posts from serious sellers. The number of pictures may indicate the seller's confidence in the product. Of course, there's still the potential for spammers willing to pay to post pictures, but at a dollar each I don't think the margins would be anywhere near, say, email spam which costs virtually nothing.

But if it's targeted at people who are causally selling their crap, not products, then you want lots of photos to be sure of the kind of crap you're buying. The seller might just want to unload it.

It does seem a little silly, though that could be said for most things that haven't been tried before. Couldn't you just combine a bunch of pictures into one huge image? Or if size is limited, you could just have an image that has a URL of an external picture gallery. I applaud thinking of a revenue model early on but I would think there's a better way..

No URLs. No HTML. Pretty much if you have to pay to put an image, you can't do any links or external content, and the email interaction is fairly controlled, then putting up spam will just be annoying.

Also, if they want to do one giant image then fine, it'll just load like crap.

This sounds all too much like Craigslist's free section. Where's the differentiation? Emailing stuff in is nice, but the market is really dominated by CL (plus CL is completely free for stuff like this), so honestly I'm not sure how this idea would work.

Exactly, it's like the free section plus two things:

1) A lot less bullshit to use it. Really good email interactions that's easy to use and keep your sale organized.

2) People who pay for images will immediately flag themselves as serious, so buyers will be able to filter easier.

Since they're paying for them they can put up as huge as they want, so better images is another minor selling point.

Otherwise, absolutely nothing original.

If only it was that simple to take a well beaten idea (selling stuff) and re-position it with a recently successful platform (posterous) and hope for its succeeding on the back of the platform.

I am actually amazed by so many people praising it, comparing it to MVP, and debating on the pricing model, but are failing to see if there are any real takers in the fundamental idea (selling stuff)??

Sorry, but I just do not see any innovation here that may warrant its decent traction.

Pfft, the only "innovative" thing on that page is the damn figlet BETA sticker. I'm not trying to be innovative, because frankly all you guys who keep using that word must not know what the hell it means.

I haven't seen one single bit of innovation at all from anyone doing tech businesses. The name of the game is to either:

1) Take an existing successful thing and add 2 features. 2) Take two things and put "meets" between them.

I just did both #1 and #2 is all. I took craigslist and added two simple features people want, and then said it's "posterous meets craigslist". Then I slapped some cash value on it, because that's the best way to actually, you know, make some cash.

Now, never mind the fact that I wrote the email framework (http://lamsonproject.org) that can make it happen. Just doing the above two things has got people millions in seed funding for the dumbest stupid ass ideas ever. At least my idea's got a proposed way to make money built in.

Finally, yes, this is MVP. I spent $15 on it total and about 10 minutes of my time. From that I got #3 on HN for most of a day, feedback from smart people, several volunteers to help, and all from a single hand written web page I crafted with vim while laughing at how ridiculous and awesome it was.

> I'm not trying to be innovative, because frankly all you guys

If that what it is, so be it. Personally I am not taker of this idea

My only request is that Zed offer a proper API. The number one reason I hate dealing with craiglist is that there is no easy way to get results in json format.

Probably will, since it seems people also want a bad ass iPhone, Android client.

For buyers, this isn't any different than using craigslist. Why would they go to this site? What's in it for them?

All the benefits of using this are targeted toward sellers.

True. But I've always believed when you're dealing with a C2C business, you have to choose one of the C's to attack first. On the other hand, sellers who pay to sell something that doesn't sell probably don't make great repeat customers.

Perhaps--like posterous again--the service could push the listing to all the existing classified sites. That would probably muddle his proposed business model though.

Thoughts:

It will make or break depending on how well people can find the stuff being sold so they can buy it.

$1 sounds expensive -- maybe for the beginning have it be $1 if the stuff actually sells, in order to build up a user base.

Why charge per picture?

Pictures = More likely to get sale, Less likely to disappoint the customer.

I like the idea of making the initial listing of the item easy (although I'm still not sure on the benefits over just making an extremely simple, sell this form with 3 boxes (title, description, price).

What is wrong with taking a small charge for the successful sale? The advantage of this is that everyone wins. The seller will only pay an amount (relatively small) when they have completed a sale and made money (and thus don't mind paying the small fees).

What's your target audience? Everyone who has internet? Seriously? You must be bonkers.

You can't seriously be suggesting that I'd opt to choose your site instead of a local one, merely because there's just a crapload of crap from everywhere of the world which pretty much clutters the whole plainfield for every player in the market of crapmania.

Why would I upload a 1$ picture when there's no users to speak of? I mean, the site itself has no indication of how much people is using it. So if I'm a potential seller who wants to sell his crap, why would I opt a site that shows in no way how much users it has (if it's not public knowledge that the site has a lot of users).

Target audience: Myself. I have some guitars and pedals to sell so I'll write it and use it to sell them. After that I'll try other people who need to sell guitar gear. Why? Because people who sell guitar gear want bigger pictures.

If by "local" you mean craigslist and ebay, you gotta seriously different view of local. I plan on hawking my guitar crap by pointing my twitter followers at the page I make. That'll work for now.

Finally, I plan to have it make a page. Then I'll link to that page off my twitter. Then people who want to buy will email me. And then, I'll sell stuff with it.

I'm thinking, hey, maybe other people would like a way to make a page of pictures of crap they want to sell to point their friends at so their friends of their friends of their friends might buy it.

At least, that's the start.

"maybe other people would like a way to make a page of pictures of crap they want to sell to point their friends at"

What would make them want to pay for it when they can already easily create a picture album in flickr (or any other free picture hosting website for that matter) and point their friends into it?

I mean that would be completely free for them. I still don't see the point why anyone in their right mind would want to pay 1$ for uploading a picture & creating a web page which has those mentioned pictures - Where's the value for the user compared to other sites ???

It's not the year 1998 anymore, you know...

Good idea, bad execution.

1) Why even charge for posting pictures of stuff people want to sell? Put yourself as an user. Browsing through craigslist or ebay, I almost 100% filter out listings without an image. That's not the bare minimum, that's required. I know you use the bill me later approach for pics, but why even push users to fill your site with listings with poor conversion rates?

2) Browse listings, not even sure how to do that. # Type in what you're looking for. << Type where? # Look at what's being sold. << Where's the listing? )

I think this is a really good idea. How about a smaller charge, say, $0.50 an image, or tiered, at $1.00 for the first image, $0.75 for the next, $0.50 for each after?

Perhaps a discount on the next sale if a previous sale was successful?

I know my idea isn't perfect. However I think Zed should think of something along those lines. One dollar flat per image might discourage bulk sales or products that need visual defining.

"You then get an email address that buyers use to talk with you. None of that email tag like with craigslist."

Having trouble understanding this point. The CL anonymizer forwards to my normal email account. How does that add a step for either party? Or I should say, how does providing a different email address remove steps?

I was thinking that it would basically help you keep track of who you've been talking to and what you've been offered. Probably a simple web interface with each convo that's easier to track.

I gotcha. FWIW, simply changing the email subject based on the respondent (or some other id) would let threaded email clients work their magic.

It is annoying how multiple CL convos intermingle, all because they share the same subject line.

I'd say people will only spend $1 if they know there are buyers coming to buy. How will you guarantee that?

Phase 1) Take pictures of random guitar gear I want to sell.

Phase 2) Put the gear on crapmania.com.

Phase 3) ....

Phase 4) Profit!

I like the just-email-it approach to posting listings. Somewhat tangentially, looks like there's some demand for email auctions: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1332831

Actually, I'm 90% certain that this is almost a "joke". I can smell the irony off of this post.

The idea actually seems good, but the billing $1 for a picture seems very out of character for Zed.

Personally, I like the idea.

Does this email-centric interface mean lamson 1.0 is around the corner? :)

I think there's like 2 bugs I still have to fix, so yeah maybe I'll just fix them and release.

I'm wondering about the situation of a seller making a single physical image file comprised of (i.e. collage of) several actual individual images. Maybe charge by the pixel?

Reminds me of the Freecycle idea, but with payment. I wonder if Freecycle would actually try to respond with a similar board if this idea became popular.

You should think about location. I'd like to search per country or even city. Are there any standards for geotagging in email? Doubt it.

Awesome, I was wishing there was something like this for a while, but didn't know what format would be good. This looks perfect.

Wow. What a bold initiative. In an age of of Flash websites and very slick designs, Zed Shaw comes up with a website that is more minimal than minimal. Something that could have been a home project almost 15 years ago.

So he threw it to the wall... I wonder if it'll stick. We'll see. I'm guessing it will.

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