
Tinytrunk - Hyperlocal Flea Market - flocial
http://tinytrunk.com/
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munificent
Oh, God, it's like Pinterest but you can spend money on it. Please, no one
tell my wife about this.

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raghus
This looks very nice which leads me to a somewhat tangential question: how is
it that the photography on these sites is so gorgeous?

This is just supposed to be stuff from one's closet. I fancy myself as handy
with a DSLR and even I wonder if I'd be taking such classy DOF-y Bokeh-y pics
of watches and shoes to post on (an admittedly much niftier version of)
Craigslist?

Just imagine what a poorer impression this site would make if the pics
actually were like what you'd find on Craigslist? Is the front page curated
like heck or what?

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fookyong
Love the healthy skepticism!

I think I just got lucky with the first batch of users. The homepage is not
curated. Everything is just in chronological order of upload.

You raise a good point though, crappier pictures would definitely lower the
first impression and if/when I achieve mass with this project then curation of
some sort will have to factor into the homepage products.

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raghus
Thanks for replying. I am not so much skeptical as I am jealous :-)

Anyway, I wish you all luck in hitting critical mass soon - I've requested an
invite myself (email is in my HN profile) and if you can speed up my request
to join, I'll be happy to post some stuff I've got and send you feedback on
the process.

Good luck!

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dot
I really like something about this.

I wouldn't call it a hyperlocal flea market, that makes me think of craigslist
for my block, when I think what you're trying to do is more of an etsy meets
gumroad.

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coderdude
This is nice, I like it. It's very simple and has a clean design. I'm not sure
how they're going to make money with it since the sellers use their own PayPal
accounts. Though, how else could you do it without putting your ass on the
line? All you'd need is a string of bad sellers to send PayPal running for the
hills.

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fookyong
Thanks for the compliment :)

The original problem was simply "I want to hook up a photo and my paypal
account easily, so I can share the link with friends and sell my (physical)
stuff".

As you've touched on, I really don't want to get into payment processing
myself (messy), even though it would be a simple path to revenue generation. I
also don't want to charge people outright for using the service. I think this
is way more casual than regular e-commerce, I'm not going to take a %
transactional fee and/or a monthly fee just so a girl can sell a pair of shoes
she doesn't wear.

I figure that with enough mass there will be other opportunities to generate
revenue by upselling services to help people extract more value. For example
more visibility - if there's something you need to sell urgently, pay $1 and
it appears on the top for a given locality / tag.

I'm not really concentrating on building mass yet though. It's still very much
in the MVP stage - right now all I want to prove is that I can help people
sell their stuff. Need to get that right first.

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bobds
"right now all I want to prove is that I can help people sell their stuff"

Thanks for the inspiration. I need to do this.

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chlee
A small feedback.

If I was a seller, I would be extremely uncomfortable with Tinytrunk showing
my full-name in all of the items that I am trying to sell. I can foresee some
privacy issues with this problem. For example, People can easily find
information about me via google or some deep search engine.

Instead, you can perhaps go with the Yelp route -- show the the user's first
name and initial of his or her last name, e.g. Bill G. instead of Bill Gates.

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fookyong
that's good feedback!

The original reason for this was accountability - I don't want to build a
marketplace where any random username can just put up a photo of a product and
collect money into a paypal account. That seems like it's asking for trouble.

But I also see what you are saying. First name + initial is a decent
compromise.

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chlee
I glad this feedback is useful.

To show how potentially creepy this is, I googled your users. I was able to
find the user's linkedin and twitter in the 1st page of the search results.

Anyways, good luck. I love the idea, and your design is fantastic. Best of
luck going forward.

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coderdude
I don't know why you think that's creepy. They put that information out there
to begin with and for a reason (to be read by humans). Some things online
require an identity. Things that involve money also involve real-life
consequences and responsibilities to different parties.

It would be an overwhelmingly bad idea to start letting sellers hide behind
usernames if those sellers are responsible for accepting money _and_ shipping
products. (This would be somewhat solved by Tinytrunk handling payments, but
that goes against one of his stated goals of not charging processing fees.)

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chlee
Don't take me wrong. I am not arguing that the Tinytrunk should allow
arbitrary pseudonyms.

I fully understand the point that Fookyoung made. That he want to make sure
real, accountable users are selling things on Tinytrunk.

Obviously, Fookyoung is trying to balance between preventing seller fraud and
Tinytrunk's user experience. However, I think the balance is tipped towards
preventing seller fraud at the expense of user experience.

However, there potentially harmful and/or unintended consequences that can
result from publicly disclosing the user's full name on the internet, e.g.
privacy related issues. For example, a malicious user can easily obtain
sensitive and private information about a certain seller ala 4chan style
either directly or indirectly. Also, we've seen how users reactive negatively
to potential privacy issues nowadays [cite various user discontent towards
facebook, google plus, and various social networks here].

Also, this is not a binary issue, e.g. either disclose the user's full-name or
use nothing but pseudonyms. There are other alternatives and compromises, like
the yelp method that I described above (which task rabbit also uses).

We can argue further on the issue of real names vs pseudonyms on preventing
seller fraud. Like someone above me pointed out, ebay is a great example of a
buying/selling market that thrived despite its users hiding behind pseudonyms.
Etsy is also another example. Let's not forget various online forums that have
thriving for-sale and for-trade sub-forums w/ its sellers and buyers using
pseudonyms, e.g. AnandTech and Hard[OC].

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coderdude
You make some great points. My original assertion about hiding behind
usernames has been thoroughly blown out of the water, given the success of
eBay and Etsy. I had always assumed that they handled the payments themselves,
but clearly they've found ways to protect buys and sellers without sacrificing
privacy.

I prefer when everyone knows who everyone else is, personally, but I
understand that many people don't want to broadcast their personal
information.

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tyok
Is there any reason you didn't implement any search or filtering feature?

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fookyong
yup! it's an MVP (a few days of work?) and there's only like 50 products in
the database right now :)

If I get to over 100 products I'll put in filtering controls.

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andreasklinger
Yongfook you rock. Wish you all the best with this one :)

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fookyong
cheers!

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garazy
How long is the waiting list? I signed up Feb 2nd. Other than that nice work.

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fookyong
garazy > do you have things to sell?

I'm kind of concentrating on one region for now (Singapore) so I've been
letting those people in first from the waiting list, but if you have things to
sell I'll let you in :)

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iantay
Hi Yongfook, I'm on the waiting list and I have some things i want to sell.
Could I have an invite? I'm from Singapore.

