Cool reverse auction idea | Hacker News Reader

Cool reverse auction idea

artsumo.com

18 pointsfapi197412 comments

One of the things that Groupon has taught me is that there are certain businesses and products that work well with certain types of offers.

I'm hesitant to call this a "reverse auction" because it's more like a discount fueled by sharing.

I think that this type of discount process would work well for those who make more by selling more, even if the price is reduced. Products and services with a "long tail" would benefit particularly well from this system.

As an example, this system would benefit a movie studio. A movie studio could offer discounts on tickets to see a movie, limited release extra content, etc. The biggest advantage of one movie studio over another is the ability for them to push their product as far and as hard as they can. The profit a film sees is a direct result of the number of people who see a movie, not necessarily how many people use a coupon or discount to see that movie.

In contrast to the Groupon model, this type of deal would work best for products that don't have a tangible limit on their production.

Also, it would be important to weigh the quality "sharing". A system like Klout, while certainly not perfect, is an example of an existing product that could use this type of deal to measure and weigh the influence of those who have shared.

Interesting point - there probably needs to be some alignment between the product and the model - something that wouldn't be limited by volume.

Yes - We're running a "dutch" auction fueled by sharing out on Twitter and Facebook. It worked really well last week. Trying it again. What do you guys think about the strategy?

Just wondering how you'll handle spam? What if someone goes to fiverr, gets a couple hundred spam tweets, then buys it for a couple bucks?

Really interesting idea though, reminds me of Pay with a tweet.

Glad you like it!

There are ways of handling spam via filtering out who we count's tweets. For example if somebody doesn't have a twitter profile pic, we can eliminate them.

Can you explain the process? i.e. What if I have a say ~500 friends and just drive the cost down to 0 (since you're sharing tweets and shares) then wait for the price to update, do I get it for free? How do you handle the case where starting price was too low? I know, lots of question, but that's because the idea seems really cool :)

Glad you like it. The price drops each time it's shared. So if you have 500 friends, you would need all 500 for she it out as well to drop the price by $500. If you drive the cost to 0, then you grab it for just the shipping costs. It's only available for a day though, you so need to snatch it up before it's gone.

I actually haven't seen anyone else online using reverse/dutch auctions before, and combining it with Twitter/FB likes seems a pretty cool idea too - double the effect for each bid.

Hah, I love the idea. Seems like a massively popular site using it would be ripe for abuse, but, I think it very clever.

Like anything these days, if you are attractive enough to abuse, you are attractive...

Yes, if you have created something that people want to game youve probably done something right.

By the way - I should probably disclose that I know the founder, Naysawn.

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