

Review our site: Ditchit.com.au  - bhoung

Hi, this is our first side project working in a team of two.<p>Being new to web development, we built this site mainly to see if we could do it.<p>Feedback from the HN community would be much appreciated, especially tips on how to proceed and market the idea.<p>Aside from telling our friends on facebook we have yet to commence any form of marketing.<p>Our competitors in this space are: http://www.scoodi.com/ ,<p>http://www.freecycle.org/group/AU/, and http://www.ozrecycle.com/.<p>You can login with username: testuser and password: testuser.<p>Thanks in advance.
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brc
Ok, here goes:

On the design front - as this is a new site and probably a new concept for
some, I would spend at least half your home page real estate explaining with
some very simple graphics what the site does and how. Don't make the
assumption that people understand how it works. You have sort of a story in
the 'about' section but you need to reshuffle this. Look at 37signals product
landing pages for inspiration. The 'surprise me' links are a good idea, I'd
just have these on the front page and remove the regular stuff like old
monitors.

Your product listing should have clickable images/headers. People expect to
make a mouse click anywhere in the general vicinity of a thumbnail and get to
the detail of that image.

You've used the term 'ditched time' - but it's not clear what this means. Does
this mean the item was available up until this time, or does it mean it is
available from this time onwards? I'm assuming that for the person disposing
the goods, there is a set time limit for how long they are goign to hang onto
stuff before it goes in the tip or charity bin. So you should have an
'available from' and 'final ditch date' or something similar - a window of
time in order for the person who wants it to take action - even better would
be one day to entice the person collecting to commit to doing it. Short
timeframes encourage action. A 'time window' in terms of a clock or bar graph
would be a good reminder of this.

You might also want to put in some geo-location so people can enter their
postcode and find stuff near to them. It's not that complicated as the geo-
location for postcodes data is freely available and not very volatile. It's
not difficult to write a basic algorithm that calculates this for you.

Finally, and I'm not sure if you have this or not, but your main problem is
going to be stale inventory. You'll need to be aggressive in finding ways of
removing old inventory from the site, whether that be in a voting system or
aggressive removal of items after x days. If potential users continually find
that items they want are already gone they will give up on the site.

For promotion you should do some guerilla action on places where cash strapped
people are. I'm thinking university campuses. A good idea would be to get a
heap of old junk like pots, pans, couches, wardrobes - stuff which is useful
but not desired. Spray paint your logo with a simple template and dump it
where people will find it. Something like 'find free stuff with
ditchit.com.au'. With any luck you'll get in trouble with the authorities and
have a good story to hit the media with and generate your own PR. You could
also do this with a roadside dumping of stuff if you think you can locate a
good place for it. Think of the sorts of places people park their cars with
'for sale' signs in them.

Alternatively, pro-actively list someone's stuff on the site and then organise
users to come around and clean it out, then take the 'story' to a local
newspaper (the free type will do). They're desperate for content so you'll
have no trouble getting in. Use the 'residents helping residents' angle and
they'll eat it up. People who read free local newspapers are bang on your
target market for both disposers and collectors of unwanted stuff.

You might also allocate a few hundred bucks for garage sale purchases, and go
around and build up some inventory to move through a variety of planted user
accounts. Much cheaper promotion than anything else because you need the
network effect to kick off your site.

Good luck and congrats for getting to launch.

~~~
bhoung
That might just be the spray that we needed to gather another head of steam.
Thanks for the thoughtful suggestions. We're definitely at risk of losing
momentum and adding to the pile of unfinished projects on the internet.

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slindstr
Clickable: <http://www.ditchit.com.au>

Congratulations on getting something out there - for me that's always the
hardest part!

One thing I noticed is that if I remove the value to any of the $_GET
variables in your urls I get a mysql error. Not sure how you're handling the
data coming in to display listings, categories, etc. but be sure to guard
against SQL Injection (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sql_injection>).

Also, don't forget to add some meta tags (like description and keywords). I
always forget to do stuff like that so I bookmarked
<http://lite.launchlist.net/> to help myself remember.

~~~
bhoung
Thanks for the encouragement and tips. Agree that's difficult to get something
out there. We picked the project for its narrow scope, and even then it seems
like there is a never ending list of things to do.

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ra
Nice idea. I like the concept and never really thought much of freecycle as
it's really nothing more than a semi-managed yahoo group.

Your first big challenge will be to get enough people to use it to generate
critical mass.

Maybe you could promote your items as links on freecycle to generate some
traffic?

Also, most local forums have some sort of "buy it sell it" area. Given that
it's a free service I'm sure you could get some interest via whirlpool,
ozbargain, ocau and maybe even more specialised sites like aussiehomebrewer
etc.

Start building some links to your site.

Good luck.

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twelch
I like the idea. My penny pinching mother and father will LOVE the idea. I'm
just wondering how you can make any kind of serious money from uber-thrifty
people like my parents.

I'm going to spread the word about you guys anyway. Best of luck!

~~~
bhoung
Awesome, glad you liked it. Don't think the serious money will come with this
one. I view web startups as an exploratory creative process (curious to see
how network effects works with this one). Success will follow passion and
persistence. Thanks for the encouragement.

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2bHalfMad
Create your first product is hard, maintain it is much harder.

