

Ask YC: Feedback for our new startup - tyohn

The site is bidboxr.com<p>We're getting ready to launch and since I've enjoyed so many of the articles posted here I thought it would be great to get some feedback from the YC community.<p>Bidboxr.com is a unique blend of online advertising and online auctions. Instead of simply providing a site where sellers list items and bidders bid on those items, we've created an interactive ad banner that bring auctions to the bidders.<p>One of our major goals when we created bidboxr.com was to provide online entrepreneurs/startups with a profitable source of revenue.  Think of it like Google's adwords/adsense model, but we're using interactive auctions instead of static ads. The auctions are relevant to the content of the page, so it's designed to draw users who are interested in that particular content. Imagine reading a blog post about a digital camera and looking at an ad on the side of the page showing an image of the exact same camera on sale and closing in 10 minutes for $50 with a big 'BID NOW' button beneath it.  If you're interested in running an ad on your site simply sign up, add a few lines of code and when someone bids from your site you earn money.<p>I've started to do a few "pre-launch" marketing tests to see which method would bring in the most users - so we've already started to see some sellers listing items. If you have anything you'd like to list or know anyone who might want to list some items - I'll remove all listing fees from anyone that list anything over the next few days.<p>Thanx!
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andrewljohnson
Founders really need to stop using misspellings for the name of their
companies.

Number 1, people are going to have a harder times finding your site. This is
somewhat mitigated by Google's technology around suggesting seatch terms, but
not totally.

Number 2, you will have to spend five minutes explaining your name to every
potential investor, customer, and even your friends, just so they know what
your proper name is. That doesn't leave any time for what you should be
delivering - your elevator pitch.

Number 3, it suggests you aren't very creative. Saying that all the good
domain names are taken just isn't true. I've bought a number of good domain
names in the past couple of years, none of which have been misspellings.

Use real words people.

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mrtron
Unfortunately there are very few real words or even real word combinations
that are not registered.

Clever misspellings have been a solution to that problem.

What do you propose as an alternate solution?

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jorgem
>> Unfortunately there are very few real words or even real word combinations
that are not registered.

Problem solved... I'll plug my own site for finding good, available domain
names: <http://Hotnamelist.com>

Or, go out and BUY a good one: <http://sedo.com> or <http://Afternic.com>

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moe
Sorry but problem _not_ solved.

It's nice that your site lists CowardlyAct.com, MountyBounty.com and
SecuritySituation.com as available - but that's completely useless to me who's
looking for a name that somehow makes sense in conjunction with my business
model.

Furthermore a good name is supposed to be _short_ and distinctive. Most names
listed on your and similar services meet neither criteria. They consist of
more or less randomly combined dictionary words which leads to generic 10+
letter domains like, well, SecuritySituation.

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jmackinn
Who told you that names are _supposed to be short and distinctive_? Security
Situation is a pretty damn good name if you're starting a security company.
Impressing the web 2.0 fanboys with misspellings makes your company look
illiterate to everyone else. If you're simply going after those fanboys (or
girls) as you target audience then that is fine but considering how many
people are web 2.0ers and how many regular people there are, when starting a
company I'm probably going to go after the far bigger market.

~~~
moe
_Who told you that names are supposed to be short and distinctive?_

My common sense and probably every marketing book in existance. Think about
the internet brand names that you can recall from the top of your head. How
many of them are longer than 8 letters?

 _Security Situation is a pretty damn good name if you're starting a security
company._

Most certainly not. It's generic and unsuggestive. That kind of name may work
for an information page ("Security situation in your neighbourhood") but not
for most businesses.

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jacquesm
So, if I get it right you've crossed 'adwords/adsense' with 'ebay' ?
Interesting!

I'm quite curious how high the effective CPM is of your usage of screen real
estate vs other advertising networks. Since the items are 'relevant' it could
be quite high, but initially you might be left with more inventory than you
can sell.

Shipping seems to be USA only, you may want to limit your 'ads' to the region
that the seller is willing to ship to.

~~~
tyohn
We are just getting ready to launch so I'm not sure what the "effective CPM"
will be vs other ad networks but I hope it will be high:) That's a good point
about shipping. thanx

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jacquesm
you're welcome. Another idea, not sure if it is feasible: Get your users to
place an ad tag on their own pages with their own items that they have for
sale. That would build you a ton of backlinks in no time at all. And possibly
they'll leave the tag up even when they have no items for sale.

~~~
scumola
That's actually a great idea. We're working on a way to have users request a
certain category of ads on their ads that they post on their site, but having
them post their own products is a great idea.

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pbrown
One thing I noticed that I think is really cool is that the first bid starts
the auction clock. Not sure if the other "big boys" do that, because I don't
use them, but great idea nonetheless.

Something else I noticed though is that in the satisfaction guarantee, you
mention that you, Bidboxr, will refund the purchase price if it's not what
they expected. I see that lasting about two weeks before you run out of money.
If you really want to set yourselves apart with a satisfaction guarantee, you
may want to look at some sort of escrow service instead.

Just my two cents.

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tyohn
If you read the satisfaction guarantee you'll see it says "If you see the
Satisfaction Guarantee link on an item". We control which items have the
satisfaction guarantee - so we will reserve the satisfaction guarantee for
sellers that have earned a good reputation with us.

~~~
tptacek
That's clever. eBay never tried this? (I've never bought anything there).

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scumola
Yea, I'm a co-founder for the site. It's an "auction ads" site that is self-
contained (doesn't use ebay auctions or other auction data). We've got
multiple sizes for ads (like adsense) and we're using a highly-cached
architecture to serve up the auction ads (typical for ad-serving sites). We
use linux servers, memcache for avoiding DB calls, apache, php, mysql, ... The
normal stuff. :) We also crawl websites on demand for finding context-
sensitive auctions to serve-up similar to adwords. Most of the crawling and
text analysis stuff is done in perl.

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eatenbyagrue
This is a great idea, and has the potential to take off very quickly. One
thing you might want to do is seed your site with a bunch of merchandise. Find
an interested party with some cheap stuff to unload (like woot.com) and offer
to help them move inventory.

You need to get scale first, and you need lots of sources before you'll get
lots of products. At then end of the day you are selling affiliate revenue to
website owners, so I would focus your message on that, and attempt to stuff
the product pipeline with some choice partnerships, until you get enough
affiliate sites to drive product.

~~~
tyohn
I'm glad you like it. Thank you for the idea! We already have a few site using
our banners but its going to be a challenge getting products, affiliates and
bidders :)

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vaksel
your math is wrong:

"We charge the seller a final sale fee of $3.12 which makes $1.56 available to
the "active advertiser pool". If 5 people bid on the item from your site and 3
people bid from a different site. You earn 62.5% of the $3.12."

So there is only 1.56 available, but I earn $1.95?

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vaksel
actually it doesn't seem like anyone proofread the actual site, since there
are a ton of other errors all over the place

"By signing up for a fee account"

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tyohn
I'm sure there are more errors. I've been working on finding them - but you
are right I am the writer, coder and proof reader - and I'm not great at
writing - won't mention my dyslexia :)

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bemmu
Why wouldn't I just feature eBay auctions on my apps and get paid that way? I
don't remember if it was directly from eBay, or from some other startup, but
there was a way to copy & paste an iframe to your page that would target
auctions based on keywords that you give, and you could get a percentage of
sales.

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pedalpete
great idea, but I didn't get it the second I got to the site. Why say
"Auctions Just Got a Lot More Exciting!"? Why not say "An entire auction in an
ad box"! or something like that?

2nd, if you want people to put the boxes on their page, i'd suggest investing
in design. Of both your site and the boxes. You have to get peoples trust, and
the poor design could sink you.

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tyohn
Thanks for the input. Great idea about "An entire auction in an ad box" - I
like it. And the banners are being re-designed by professionals they should be
done very soon :)

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okeumeni
So many broken images from your badcheese.dyndns.org it's hard for me to move
around.

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vaksel
it doesn't seem like you guys know that eBay has an affiliate program that
pretty much does what you are doing

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tyohn
You're right I didn't know eBay had interactive ad banners that you can place
bids from... Could you point me to the link - thanks.

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vaksel
not interactive, but bidding is only a click away.

The interactive part isn't really a plus. How does a person know that the
interactive banner is yours, and not some scammer phishing for information?

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tyohn
That's a valid point but I don't agree that the interactive part isn't a plus.
I agree and realize that some people will be afraid to use our banners because
of phishing - but some won't... I hope :)

