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That sounds like a great idea, but again, convincing businesses to join in and participate enough to reach that critical mass needed for a service to allow the

by lhorie 18y ago

That sounds like a great idea, but again, convincing businesses to join in and participate enough to reach that critical mass needed for a service to allow the reverse-auction-from-the-6-places-closest-to-me kind of deal can be difficult. I don't know how your experience talking to local business owners has been, but mine is that a surprisingly high number of local businesses are small shops who are not techie enough to even care to have a semi-decent brochure website. I suppose that idea would be a lot more feasible in a place like Tokyo, though. These days, they have those 2D barcode scanners on cellphones and all.

calambrac 18y ago
You bootstrap by ripping off yelp to get users. While you're building this traffic, you're investing in systems that let businesses advertise on your channel (handwavy here. Twitter clone? Something to hook inventory records into? I don't think the reverse auction comes until later). Then you find locations that get a lot of search traffic, figure out the businesses at that spot that would benefit most from it, and show them the numbers. Get just one to sign up (FooCorp), and then add a demo to your roadshow that shows the competitors exactly how many folks are being told that FooCorp is selling that widget, and ask them why they think they aren't selling as many of their own as they'd like. Wash, rinse, repeat. You don't have to get every mom-and-pop to sign up, just target who and where you think will pay.
- lhorie 18y ago
  >> handwavy here hehehe, I wish start-ups worked like that :) I did have a client in the past with a similar business model (much more low tech though), but when I really think about it, it basically boiled down to how good the sales reps were. While that model may work if you are an extrovert who loves chasing people around town all day, it doesn't quite fit with my particular resource allocation roadmap :/

by lhorie 18y ago

calambrac 18y ago

You bootstrap by ripping off yelp to get users. While you're building this traffic, you're investing in systems that let businesses advertise on your channel (handwavy here. Twitter clone? Something to hook inventory records into? I don't think the reverse auction comes until later). Then you find locations that get a lot of search traffic, figure out the businesses at that spot that would benefit most from it, and show them the numbers. Get just one to sign up (FooCorp), and then add a demo to your roadshow that shows the competitors exactly how many folks are being told that FooCorp is selling that widget, and ask them why they think they aren't selling as many of their own as they'd like. Wash, rinse, repeat. You don't have to get every mom-and-pop to sign up, just target who and where you think will pay.

lhorie 18y ago
>> handwavy here hehehe, I wish start-ups worked like that :) I did have a client in the past with a similar business model (much more low tech though), but when I really think about it, it basically boiled down to how good the sales reps were. While that model may work if you are an extrovert who loves chasing people around town all day, it doesn't quite fit with my particular resource allocation roadmap :/