Bitsy: Technical co-founders seek entrepreneur competition | Hacker News Reader

Bitsy: Technical co-founders seek entrepreneur competition

win.bitsy.io

30 pointsjmedwards18 comments

Nice idea, please update us with the results.

I am a little sceptical, I don't see enough traction to attract the type of person you are asking for. 1000+ users is not enough to get an entrepreneur with real experience. I would focus more on the skills your team has.........oh, just checked that, you mean to say you have a team of 10 geeks with no business guy, this is ridiculous.

At the end of the day you are not putting your team into the deal, you are just putting an idea that didn't take off and if the new guys can't make it work then the new company dies and the team goes onto the next project.

Invite a business guy into your team, a good business guy is good at business and will see through this type of offer in a flash.

"Inviting a business guy onto your team"... that's exactly what we're doing :) -- @CBM at Makeshift

I read it as inviting a business guy into your idea; "If we choose to work with you we'll create a new company (probably called Bitsy Ltd)"

I hope you guys do well, and since you landed on the first page of HN you may get that guy/girl. They will be quite young I imagine, but it doesn't mean they won't be good.

Best of luck.

thank you!

Hey HN - designer/dev who worked on Bitsy here; happy to answer any questions :)

Try to get some "fresh blood" instead of a super-extra experienced entrepreneur. You'll find out it's easier to work with and will probably be extra motivated to learn and get things done. And no, I am not talking about myself. Happy recruiting though.

I agree! I think "experienced" is open to interpretation.

Anyway, hence we're throwing it wide to someone who's got a passion and an itch they want to scratch. It's a bit of a stunt, obviously, but it's with good intentions. Thanks.

thanks!

Why did you build Bitsy in the first place? I've seen a number of beautifully designed apps in this space, so I wonder what pain point sparked the initial development?

Makeshift is a "startup of startups" - our intention is to build a series of digital products/services by experimenting with many ideas. So rather than going the traditional "let's do a startup" route, we're following the foundry model.

Paul Birch, my co-founder had been investing in some pretty well-known companies for a few years, and wanted to get back to the craft. I've been doing lots hacks, and wanted to do something around taking rapid experiments and turning them into businesses (if they worked). Nick Marsh, the other co-founder is from a design background, and was similar inspired about building a studio that builds digital products. He talks about the Eames Studio of the 21st century.

We looked at a number of hacks for our first product, and picked Bitsy because we thought it would be quick to hack (we were wrong!), had a good prospect of being revenue positive early, gave a leg up to the little guy (our core proposition as a company), and it was about enabling people that we know to sell digital products online easily.

I have a bunch of friends who could or should be selling online but don't know where to start. Being unable to price for the UK market, having to set up a paypal account, the legal issues involved, are all barriers for those people, and we wanted to make a very easy way for them to do that. With some elegance (Jon Gold is on the team), focusing on selling socially (via Twitter, Facebook and so on), and in a way that supplements the marketplaces. If you've done the hard work selling something, why give away a large percentage other than for payment processing?

From a US point of view, it probably looks like a solved problem, but in the UK it's really not. So that's where the initial motivation came from - help our friends, and people like them, make income from the digital things they make.

If you are searching for an experienced entrepreneur (not a good idea - see above post) you cannot expect to pay him a 2K pre-tax salary. As far as I know, an immigrant gets almost the same amount for low-level jobs. If you substract the living expenses, you will end up with almost nothing. Maybe you should try Eastern Europe countries for a salary like that, unfortunately racism is off the charts in UK lately so that's not an option. I have a business in the UK also and even though my employees from EE are really smart they are still rejected by the british community.

Is it possible to browse through stuff that people are selling on Bitsy?

Not at the moment — we wanted to build the best possible user experience for buying & selling items rather than creating a marketplace/destination site, but that could definitely be on the cards for the new CEO :)

that is an interesting way to find a co-founder.

out of curiosity: 1) why did you to price bitsy as free? 2) what are the future plans (features) for bitsy?

ps: bitsy blog is down.

On the "free" idea, our main principle is "give a leg up to the little guy", and we thought that one way of fulfilling that would be to enable people to have a place to sell their things that doesn't incur the heavy percentage that some of the marketplaces take. By using Paypal adaptive payments and Stripe Connect under the hood, we've managed to make it so that the processing doesn't even go through our bank account. So essentially Bitsy is a software service, rather than a payments processor. Much like other freemium models, there'd be opportunities to offer value elsewhere via pay-for services. That remains unproven.

Hey! We're hoping the new addition to our team will develop future plans and features for bitsy. And the blog is back up now! Cheers

To me it sounds more like they are crowdsourcing project ideas (plus founder) for their product agency.

Hey there! We're definitely not a product agency nor are we crowdsourcing project ideas - CBM @ Makeshift ;)

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