Local Marketplace App Yardsale (YC S11) Launches Nationwide | Hacker News Reader

Local Marketplace App Yardsale (YC S11) Launches Nationwide

techcrunch.com

84 pointsryanmickle34 comments

Ok, I am fine with the need of something better than ebay and craiglist but would someone explain me why does it have to be a mobile app? why? i think that this services need to reach the larger audice they can. Making it an app does not do that..it is limiting IMHO. Why I, android and PC owner, should be excluded? i understand you will (maybe?) make it available in future for other platform even porting it to android cuts out all those people who want to do things on the PC, which is the biggest part of the userbase I think.

Because they need to do one thing and do it well. They don't have a 10000 person team to venture into "larger audiences", they do one specific thing or they die.

People don't wake up one day and think "oh hey, I'm in the market for a craigslist alternative, let's look for one". They need to be told that Yardsale exists, and it needs to find a place in their minds. The best way it can do that is to do one thing well.

As for why it's mobile specifically, look for why people do anything on their mobile phones.

Ok, as I said i am fine with alternative, and I understand that they are not a huge company and they wanted to make a good thing, but why a native app? This app will probably run only on the most recent iOS versions, so this also cuts a part of "old" iOS users. Instead a website, maybe optimized for mobile(there are tons of way to do this, nowadays it's not hard) would have been avaible to everyone. Therefore the can expand easier, mostly because everyone WANTS an alternative.

From the article i get that this way they try to encourage people to take photos. This is good. But it's not worth all the market you are cutting out, especially you are cutting out people who wants to buy, they have no reason to be forced to browse from the app. An alternative would be make the website available to everyone and suggest(not force) people to use the app just to make the advert. Maybe even by applying a little "tax" to those who use the website. This way i think you would have the same effect but a larger audience.

I think I have to agree with that. Doing one thing well is good and all, but for an app like this it might've been prudent to do the web site well first, and pending the success of that move onto devices.

Warning - Rant:

This strikes me as typical of two things that seem to be trending -

1). Build platform-specific (be that HTML5, Windows, or iOS or whatever) that cuts out otherwise interested users.

2). Make sure it's "social". That word right there is starting to turn me away from apps. I have enough "social".

I heavily agree with your rant.

Many apps are just brushing old ideas with new social, mobile or html5 coatings. Ignoring the fact that the idea is still the same.

First thought: "My girlfriend is going to love this!"

Next thought: "Don't have an iPhone. Oh well..."

the thing with marketplaces, is that the ui itself doesn't matter...what matters is having buyers.

sellers will post where the buyers are, and it doesn't matter if UI is crap. So craigslist wins on that by a huge margin. Add the fact that it's free, means that they have a pretty entrenched position.

To me, eBay and Craigslist have an insurmountable first mover advantage. They are already established in our culture as the place for auctions/classifieds, you can't undermine that with some flashy UI or a few extra features. And since you need people to sell/buy, you don't have the same viral effect that allowed Facebook to take out Myspace.

The only way I see going at them, is thru incredible service. Rent a huge warehouse. Hire a few drivers.

Charge a fee for someone to come to my house to collect all my spare stuff, take good professional photos. Then list them for sale. Charge a % for all items that sell. Let buyers pick up the stuff at the warehouse instead of having to deal with shady sellers. Offer to ship to buyers. Offer credit card processing etc. Send a check to the seller.

Sure it's a bit more effort than slapping together a website. You'll need to go state by state, renting warehouses and hiring a lot of people to do the legwork and will need to spend the money on marketing. So your profit margins will be closer to a real business than a website(franchising might work for something like this). But if you want to crack the Craigslist nut...you need to put in the extra effort...otherwise you are just one of the hundreds of people who think they are the ones to beat Craigslits

Yardsale beats CL and eBay by the mobile route. eBay's app is ok, and craigslist doesn't have an official one.

The integrated sale experience is one that still hasn't gotten the "dropbox" experience, and perhaps Yardsale can deliver.

You are right and wrong.

In the beginning the UI doesn't matter. But with time it begins to matter as more and more items become available.

Its nearly impossible on the Apple Store to get any sense off what is good or bad there.

The reviews are not really that useful.

All design systems have a limit to how much they scale. Apple should have been re-designing theirs a long time ago.

http://www.crosswa.lk is at least an attempt to fix some of it.

Hopefully Apple's acquisition of Chomp will improve discovery as well.

eBay and Craigslist are being legitimately disrupted every day by many different startups http://www.quora.com/Craigslist/Why-hasnt-another-product-di...

Their first mover advantage is by no means insurmountable. And if you think all Yardsale has is a "flashy UI", you're glossing over a lot of important features that make them a serious alternative to CL.

I created something similar ..check out http://www.peeqshare.com

Got excited about this, grabbed it for iPhone.

Launched it, got error that it can't connect to server. Will probably be deleted now. You got the one chance to get my attention, and it got blown.

Edit: I tried reconnecting 4-5 times, still failed.

Edit2: Reading the TechCrunch article, they want to take 10% from the seller at some point in the future? For a craigslist style thing? How does this make sense?

Really sorry about this. We're on it now!

Edit: to answer your question on fees, we're still considering how we roll them out. Appreciate the feedback. We felt strongly that we wanted to build a service worth paying for. We also didn't want to bait and switch users, so we do mention fees when you post, but the entire experience is free. When you try it, I hope you'll agree that it's a lot better than the one for which you pay 40% at a consignment store.

When you frame it against a consignment store it makes sense. When you frame it against craigslist, it doesn't.

Sure buyers flake, but ultimately I haven't had much issue with that selling lots of items on craigslist. The beauty is that good deals are to be had because there is no middle man. I know that doesn't work well when trying to run a business there.

This was submitted on another thread, but this one seems to be getting more traction, so I'm reposting my comment here to add to this discussion:

"The app is set up so you can easily cross-post your item on Craigslist, too."

I find that statement extremely interesting. The problem with apps like this is they're only as good the volume of people that use them. YardSale sounds to me like a more beautiful, mobile centered Craigslist. But YardSale is only as good as the number of people who have it installed an use it.

I'm in the process of moving and we're getting rid of a bunch of random furniture. Where did we post it?

Craigslist of course. Because when you need to find something, you go to Craigslist.

I don't envy YardSale. Craigslist has a not-so-pretty interface and it's not exactly the most intuitive.

But when it comes to selling/buying things, Craigslist simply works. Really well.

Big things have small beginnings.

I know these guys and they're doing a very good job of tackling a tough problem - creating a market in an area where CL has critical mass.

They are doing it by both expanding the market by making it super simple to snap a few photos on your phone (something you can't do on CL) and by creating such an awesome experience that eventually people will switch over.

As we've learned with Yahoo, Microsoft and MySpace a market leader that doesn't innovate is eventually going to get toppled.

Not sure I'd be comfortable hiring someone who claims to be able to "understand undocumented libraries and code bases in a day".

http://www.garagesellr.com/merchants/1 (very early stages); it is essentially craigslist but allows anyone to accept credit cards using stripe (I charge 1$ per transaction, and stripe charges their usual fees). Every time you list, you will have the option to tweet/FB it; You can only login with FB or twitter to buy, sellers login with stripe/fb/twitter. You "make an offer" and the seller decides whether they want to accept or not, based on your FB friends etc, to eliminate scamming. Every seller has their own "merchant account" through stripe.

I started building this, then stopped due to a lot of negative feed back, anyone think this is worth pursuing? Anyone have any feedback?

I support any startup wanting to go after fees-heavy eBay.

If the article is correct, Yardsale will actually have higher fees than eBay.

eBay fees are variable. You can pay 25% for a $50 item or as low as 4% for a $1500 item. You can't compare the two easily.

Check out Rumgr.com

Can someone link to a Craigslist post created by Yardsale? I'm curious to see one.

I posted an item yesterday to try out the service, but noticed that it was including a link to a zoomed in map hovering right over my house in the post (the same map is included in the "yardsale" version of the post). I'm a little cautious about posting my location/address on a site like CL (though I use the site frequently).

I promptly deleted the post and notified the ryan of my concerns; he promptly replied to my email and mentioned that he "fuzzed" my location details so that my perceived location was not so pinpointed. I haven't reposted anything to verify, though.

Here's a gist of the auto-gened CL post:

The title is essentially an ellipsis'ed version of your yardsale post (it cuts off at some character count, not sure the exact number). It uses the price you set as the CL price. Here's the post body:

"Hey everyone, I've got a [your yardsale post auto-inserted here]

Interested? Get in touch <shortened link to yardsale post>here</link>

<another yardsale link>View All Images</link> / <link to map>show map</link>

Posted with <link to Yardsale homepage>Yardsale</link> (free!). lovingly made in San Francisco.

Thanks for looking!

- [your first name auto-inserted here]"

Seems kind of lame that an apparent competitor already owns yardsale.com.

You'd think that even if you couldn't get the domain you wanted, you'd try not to drive people to a competitor.

question for the founders I'm really curious about because you probably get asked it a lot (and it probably has a great answer): why would I use this over CL?

Congrats Ed and Ryan! Great idea and great team!

How is SimplyListed (also with YC) doing? Seems like they tried tackling similar problem earlier.

I look forward to yet another HN thread about why a startup won't work.

Congratulations, Ryan and Ed!

So...it's competing with Craigslist by building an OS-limited mobile app that posts items to Craigslist. And they want 10% of any sales.

Craiglist is accessible from any device, and it is free.

They really need to put more thought into their business model.

Thanks for the feedback, we actually never set out to compete with Craigslist. We built Yardsale as a way to list and sell for all the items that don't get posted on Craigslist or eBay, because it's too painful. So really, at least in my own personal experience, the choice is to get nothing for an item, or to list and sell it to a neighbor and make money that I wouldn't have otherwise.

But you are competing with Craigslist. Not to mention the App store has no shortage of classified apps.

Posting to classified sites really isn't that difficult. For some people, sure, but enough to justify a company? The proof is in the marketplace with the lack of traction for Eggdrop, Antengo, and the numerous other apps that claim to make posting items for sale easier.

I would stick to the community aspect. I don't know if there is anything there, but at least it is different then what already exists in the market.

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