Got rejected by TechStars again, but we're getting better at it

badcheese.com

15 points·scumola··6 comments

Thanks for sharing! What surprised me was the comment by DreamIT Ventures who said "competing with eBay is crazy". Quite frankly, I haven't used eBay in quite some time... it's turned into more or less a storefront for drop-ship merchants and less like the glory days I remember.

I know the critical mass issues makes challenging eBay/Craigslist rather difficult, and probably turns off investors... But, I think there's room for a new, much improved bidding platform.

a combination of ebay and adsense – where you would put your auctions on other peoples’ websites as ads

I think this a great idea. Have you thought about trying to partner with other ad networks as a quick way to get access to content publishers? That could go a long way toward solving the chicken/egg problem of how to attract sellers to your marketplace.

http://www.auctionads.com

Yea, they're the first ones that we found when researching the idea. They're now quiet and own something like shoppingads.com and did a similar thing, but only with ebay items through their partner/affiliate system. We're doing our own system (no sniping in our system, btw), and the auctionads.com people seem to be very quiet nowadays. It's our guess that they were acquired and put to bed.

If you're interested in feedback, send me a note - we don't have auctions on Dawdle, but I'd be happy to share a lot of the auction research we have.

> "they told us that competing with ebay was crazy"

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