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Ask HN: My project is getting traffic but the product fails. What do I do?

• patio11 15y ago
  Two sided marketplaces are hard. Is there any way you can fake the existence of one side of the marketplace? For example, there has to currently exist some way of buying used textbooks in Australia. It presumably is crazily inefficient, but it exists. Either a) roll up your sleeves and do it or b) pay some VA in the Philippines to do it for you. Customer A: "I want a textbook for COFA0217 textbook." Site: "We've got it for $30." Customer: "Yay!" Site: "We'll send you an email when we ship it." Site in email to freelancer or yourself: "Acquire a copy of COFA0217 textbook for less than $30 and ship to $CUSTOMER." Freelancer, 4 hours later: "Did it!" Site: "Congratulations! We shipped your order. Tell your friends how much money they could make by listing their textbooks on our site!" If you can't find a copy, you mail them personally, say that the book they wanted was out of stock, and refund their purchase (and/or you authorize but do not charge until shipment, which is similar to e.g. Amazon, but your credit card merchant account may or may not be happy with that). I think Eric Ries called this the Wizard of Oz model: you can duplicate any arbitrarily complex system with near-zero engineering costs if you're willing to conceal a man behind a curtain. When you don't have traction, it's great, since it's just part-time work for yourself. Once you have traction, the "problem" of scaling solves itself.
  • meric 15y ago
    There's two issues with that: 1. My website only exchanges buyers and sellers' contact details, I don't know when a sale is made. The idea is that since buyer and seller are in the same university, they'll just transact face-to-face. 2. I don't actually know the name of the textbooks for e.g COFA0217 unless the user enters it into the form. e.g. http://textbookcentral.com.au/26/university-of-new-south-wales/buy/69897/acct1501/?query= http://textbookcentral.com.au/26/university-of-new-south-wal... If they do enter it into the form and I become the other side of the transaction, it'll be very expensive. Textbooks here cost $100 each. I'll have to make at least a $20 loss for each transaction. What I need is more students looking for textbooks online, and I guess doing this will help. But matching a request/offer costs $20 in loss for the book (If you're buying a used textbook you're looking for at least a 20% discount), plus labor required to get the textbook. Is a freelancer really going to be able to find a used textbook worth $80, send it to me, for the price $80? Also, I still have to send the book to the buyer/seller. This might sound suspicious; if I did the course why do I have to send it and not just meet at university? There will also be some students who receive the book by mail and not pay me, and I'll have to take the loss for that. (i.e I can do this for my university only.) So the only way out is to change my website so I can use the tactic you described. That would be like changing it to the model of textbook.com, where they have an existing inventory and make dough from the margin between buyers and sellers. I don't want to handle such a big business yet. (Higher stakes, requires lots of time) I want to run a website that helps people but requires minimal maintenance.
    • noahc 15y ago
      You should listen to patio11. He's basically saying 'fake it until you make it' and this is the key to success. You need to fake the transaction until you're big enough that you no longer need to fake the transaction. Reddit did this to get started and so have millions of other projects. You need to build the system so that they pay you before they take possession of the book. Also build or scrape an already existing book search website. Basically, take the cheapest one there and buy it and then try to sell it for cheaper than Amazon. Even put that so they can see it. Amazon, with shipping, is $98.54 but we are $94.94. Try to break even on each of these, and then scale it up. As for why you can't meet them? You already graduated, you're selling it for your dead cousin, you found a bunch of your brothers old text books, you transfered universities, you got a job, etc.
• petervandijck 15y ago
  Interesting. It seems like, if you had more traffic, it would work better. You have the typical chicken/egg problem of a marketplace: just not enough matching. The same problem dating sites have. One possible approach: limit your site, to only 1 university, or only 1 topic (law or something). That might increase that match rate.
  • noahc 15y ago
    The other problem is that one university might call it PS101 and the other one PS1001 and they might use the same book, but he would never know.
    • sixtofour 15y ago
      Allow listing by text book, as an alternative to course number.
  • meric 15y ago
    Good point; I shouldn't done some maths before I started. I thought by hiding how many users this website has, new users won't be daunted by the lack of other users. But no. Limiting my site will only serve to decrease traffic, I think this might be counter productive. I'll think of ways I can increase traffic further cheaply.
• superted 15y ago
  A side-note: From where I am, this thread on Hacker News is currently the top result for "COFA0217 textbook" on Google.
  • meric 15y ago
    Sorry, it can't compete with hacker news. :(