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YC startup Auctomatic looking to hire
- far33d 19y agobrilliant.
- far33d 19y agowell my point was that I believe this is a joke on valleywag's bashing of scribd for their overly optimistic job posting. hence this ironic understated job posting.
- Sam_Odio 19y agoSounds moderately interesting.
- vlad 19y agoHaha! I think auctomatic could be moderately great! It will depend on the execution.
- jason13 19y agoI don't get it..I do not see how auctomatic can defend their company from eBay just redoing some of it's UI.
- yubrew 19y agoi think the idea is that they will innovate and add features much faster than e-bay or other competitors will. from a user's perspective, i would much rather use the tools and software provided by a capable team that caters to my needs. that said, you don't really need a brilliant team, just one that does the job better than other current competitors. this is a great opportunity that aligns well with the strengths of the founders.
- rjb 19y agoeBay seems to do everything in their power to prevent usability. Auctomatic hopefully will capitalize on this.
- create_account 19y agoWhat happens if ebay decides they don't like what they're doing, and shuts them out or makes it hard to connect?
- rjb 19y agoOf course always a possibility (myspace/photobucket), but I was just supporting Auctomatic's decision seeing as at every turn eBay seems to make their tools harder and harder to use. There are a million reasons why Auctomatic shouldn't bother, but if they are a great team you'll never be able to convince them of that.
- dpapathanasiou 19y agoOr just copies them. I suppose their plan is to have ebay buy them out, and given that they've spent so little, a nice seven figure sum might work for all parties. Then again, how open is ebay to something like this? Other sites don't mind if you use their api to make enhancements, but is ebay one of them?
- rms 19y agoWhat if they got a large enough user base and opened their own auction site?
- jason13 19y agoI guess it would be to eBays benefit to let people use Auctomatic. And I guess it be easier for eBay to buy Auctomatic then to copy eBay.
- jason13 19y agoI guess it would be to eBays benefit to let people use Auctomatic. And I guess it be easier for eBay to buy Auctomatic then to copy eBay.
- 19y ago
- byrneseyeview 19y agoRead Paypal Wars if you want to know how that's done. They spent their entire existence about a week ahead of being crushed by eBay. The trick is to start with brilliant people, hire more brilliant people, and give them all stock options. Or something. They might have just had a longer outlook: if competing with eBay was a zero-sum game and eBay was worried about a bad quarter, Paypal could come out ahead by accepting bad quarters in exchange for good years. I think that's essentially what they did: eBay could (for example) lose 10% of their customers by completely locking out Paypal, or they could try to winnow that down to 5% or 1% or so by coming up with Paypal-like features.
- vlad 19y agoThey aren't competing against eBay.
- mynameishere 19y agoSeems like misplaced irony.
- kmt 19y agoHow do pronounce 'auctomatic'? [okshomatik]? [oktomatik]?
- eposts 19y agoWhats up with the colors on auctomatic homepage? Makes my head hurt... is it just me?
- Harj 19y agoA lesson in why you should check colors on different monitor screens. The green looked cool on our screens but not so much on others we tested on. Fixed now. Hopefully less headaching inducing.
- run4yourlives 19y agoI think they get points for being the only startup since 1988 to require a working knowledge of COBOL.
- eposts 19y agoI haven't used auctomatic, but how is it different from Andale? They have been making tools for ebay for years now...