Hacker News Reader

Comment by ed | Hacker News Reader

Hey guys, I built this with the team at Fobo.net. It’s just a quick experiment I put together during the week.

The idea is to rent a truck and drive around the city picking up anything you want to sell. Furniture, appliances, etc. – anything of value that fits on a moving truck, as long as it isn't broken, in poor condition, or something you'd typically donate.

At pickup, we photograph your items, put them on the truck, ask for minimum selling prices, and notify SF folks of the deal. Highest bidder after 90 mins gets the item delivered. We have 100’s of interested buyers in SF so far.

Would love feedback. To cover the cost of delivery and movers I ask that you split the final price 50/50 on large items. Happy to wave the cost on more high-end items for now, just ask.

View on HN

Hi Ed, former moving professional here. I love the idea, but I think you have a lot of logistical obstacles to overcome. I thought I'd throw some questions at you to think about (and maybe you have already).

1. What will you do if something breaks? (As the saying goes, if a mover tells you he's never broken anything, he's either lying to you or it's his first day).

2. What will you do to protect yourself against mistaken/fraudulent damage claims? (i.e. Buyer/Seller claims you scratched the DR table, but you didn't).

3. How will you load your truck to maximize space efficiency? The more things you can store on the truck, the more things you can put up for auction. As a mover, the first thing I put into the truck is the last thing I take off [0]. But you can't do this as to the dynamic nature of your business. You always need access to everything on the truck...which is surprisingly harder than it seems.

4. What will you do with breakables (i.e. china, glasses, lamps etc)? Different animal than furniture.

5. If I'm selling a large ticket item, why would I use your service? For example, let's say I bought a couch for $2000 last year and now I want to sell it. I should be able to fetch $1000 for it. If I'm patient, I could probably get as much as $1700. You're taking half. $500-$850 is extremely expensive to list an item on the internet and move it across town.

That said, I wish you luck this weekend.

Edit: General Clean-Up

[0]: http://www.angieslist.com/files/packed-moving-truck.jpg

Your comment here explains the idea more than the website does. Why on earth don't you put more information on the actual website?

Not sure if the website has been changed since you made this comment, but at the moment the "How it works" section contains everything that was in that comment.

Yeah, looking at the website I had absolutely no idea what the service was offering.

This is the fashion. Startup websites aren't supposed to repel you with technical details on the home page. "Furniture, truck, phone, whitespace" is enough. What more do you need to know? Just click the button.

It's not technical details - It's that I literally didn't know what they were advertising. It wasn't until I read the comment that I understood the pickup would be from me, and that 50% for them(written under delivery for some bizarre reason) meant that they would be keeping 50% of the price. It wasn't clear enough.

I like this idea quite a bit. Both selling and buying furniture on CL is a nightmare. I moved to the city 3 years ago from across the country and was forced to sell furnishings for a 3 bedroom house. I don't expect you will have much trouble on the supply side because CL sucks:

1. CL interface is abysmal. No way to tell people stuff already sold or to automatically repost. 2. Dealing with humans was trouble. From time to time, someone would show up and offer a fraction of the asking price. 3. People can't move big stuff. 4. We were particularly time sensitive. We like sleeping on a bed, but we also don't want to be stuck with one. 5. People come by at random times, or don't show at all, or schedule a pickup a 10 days in advance. It would have been great to just load everything at once and be done with it.

I understand you don't want to rent a warehouse, but a 90 minute auction is too short.

On another note, this business model reminds me of modcloth. When they first started, I think they used to travel around and buy up vintage clothes to sell on ebay. Much later, demand outstripped supply so they started contracting out to small shops to make replicas.

CL = Craigslist, for those who don't know. http://sfbay.craigslist.org

> 1. CL interface is abysmal. No way to tell people stuff already sold or to automatically repost.

While I agree that the CL interface is bad, it's quite easy to delete your post after the item has sold. Reposting is also quite simple, though like you said, it's not automated.

I consider manual intervention to repost a good thing. Since so many people don't even delete their postings, I can only imagine how bad it would be if re-posting were automated.

> CL interface is abysmal.

I've not had a single problem using it.

>No way to tell people stuff already sold or to automatically repost.

You can delete a post to tell people it's already sold, and reposting at the end of the time period isn't really too hard.

>People can't move big stuff.

How big? I don't own any piece of furniture I couldn't move with a normal truck.

Love this idea! I signed up and am looking forward to seeing what kind of items are available in the coming weeks.

One little thing confused me about the dashboard: I can see that I have "free item alerts" on, but I can't find a way to see if I have alerts on for normal auction items.

In any case, great idea and I'm excited to use it.

Get this going in Manhattan. You'll make a killing there.

It is a cool idea but seems to have serious scalability concerns. One truck can only hold so many items, you'll need drivers with CDL endorsements, insurance, fuel, etc. for every truck you add.

He doesn't even know if it's profitable yet and you're already worrying about scalability?

Make a profit first. Once there's profit, a whole lot of problems become much easier to solve.

you don't need a CDL to drive a zipvan and they have a decent amount of space. They also include insurance and fuel although I haven't reread the TOS with this plan in mind, I think it might be acceptable.

OP if you want to get this going in manhattan get in touch.

+1 to NYC. I tend to avoid selling stuff on CL because I don't want to directly deal with the potentially creepy person that actually wants my stuff. I guess what I want is a minimal middleman that brings an extra degree of safety and convenience to the exchange.

Great idea. Do buyers ever get to see the items in person before committing to purchase?

How'd you find hundreds of buyers?

Building an email list for this type of service couldn't be that hard. It's not like the users have to actively go to his site to shop (thus have the chicken and egg problem), he just has to build a list of people willing to get an email to try a new service. SF is full of people who like trying new services I'd expect.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com