What’s Asseta (YC S13), A Used Equipment Marketplace, Doing In Y Combinator?
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One thing that's not clear is how Asseta is better than DoveBid or Equipnet. All the best deals are found at auction, and running those is going to be really hard for these guys to get into. There aren't any prices listed, either... just "contact seller" buttons. There are tons of markets that just list items with web-to-lead forms (biox, biosurplus, alliance analytical, etc).
Everyone who buying from these markets for long enough ends up writing bots to crawl pricing and availability data. That would be a useful service. Because it's all based on auctions for a very thin market, it can be hard to get a sense of availability or fair pricing for a particular type of equipment. Aggregating all that and making it actionable would be useful. I'm not sure I get just another site with listings and no prices though.
Logistics is another huge problem. There have been several times where we've bought something for a huge discount only to end up spending more than the cost of the hardware on rigging and shipping it. Some companies even pick up trucks at transportation auctions, hire a driver, and use it to pick up their equipment from all over before selling the truck at auction again.
We spend huge amounts of money on capital equipment, along with much of the rest of the world, and these kinds of services would be a big deal to us. I'm excited to see how their business evolves.
Great deals can always be found at auctions but they only represent a small portion of all the available equipment. Most of these items are sitting in warehouses all over the world gathering dust. Their owners don't see the value and have more important things to worry about, manufacturing a product. The solution is a product that compliments their main business focus, manufacturing.
For buyers this means we're going to provide them a complete price for a transaction, equipment price, deinstallation, rigging, crating, installation, etc. I would love to speak more with you about our roadmap, please send me a PM.
Similarly, it's not that clear how DoveBid is better than plain old eBay. DoveBid does a lot of liquidation sales of equipment that eventually ends up on eBay. It would be better for buyers if one or the other middlemen were cut out.
1. DoveBid, Equipnet, eBay all take a consumer-centric approach by just providing basic information and a countdown timer. Very few companies can purchase anything in that type of system. Our customers are not individuals but organizations that have more complex requirements, i.e. approval chains, inspections, contract negotiations, etc.
2. Auctions work well for sellers who have many items for sale and a limited time-frame, typically facility closures. The vast majority of idle equipment does not fall into that category.
All of the major auctioneers pre-announce the auctions and have inspection windows. They're used to working with companies that have those kinds of requirements.
> The vast majority of idle equipment does not fall into that category.
Yep -- solve this and that's amazing. I know several large biotech with huge amounts of idle old-ish hardware that we'd love to buy from them, but right now it's hard to crack that. Convince them to sell, lease, loan, whatever all that stuff and we'd be all over it.
For consumer sales, auctions still seem pretty popular, but in those cases the buyer has to be crazy not to use a sniping service. So even the true auctions on eBay are more like sealed-bid affairs.
eBay is a shiny end-user-friendly auction interface; industrial used equipment markets are way more complicated than that, and DoveBid/Equipnet offer a lot more depth when you get into them.
The warehouse is huge. It's (somewhat ironically) in an old auto plant in a Cleveland near-ring suburb. They (as of a few years ago) list items both on their own website and on eBay/others. I recall being told that their business model is to make an offer to a company closing a plant for all equipment -- simple liquidation.
When I was there, some guys from Florida were looking at some sort of precision measuring device. They owned a small machining operation and said that this particular device would cost $125K new. HGR was selling it for less than $5K.
I was quite pleased with my $30 workbenches. One had been modified with large, lockable casters. On the way out, another customer noted that the castors alone would cost $100 new for a set. One could question the time efficiency of my purchase, but I wasn't working at the time so my opportunity costs were low.