

Please review my startup - Online Classifieds - quellhorst
http://www.abtain.com/

======
dpcan
Welcome to the start-up everyone started-up in 2001 that failed for the same
reason: content.

Craig won the lottery on this one.

Here's something to think about though: Critical mass and exponential growth.

It's going to take you a few years to hit critical mass, which I "imagine" is
around 60,000 to 100,000 sellers.

It's at this point where if every person tells 3 people about your service,
and 1 of those 3 people use the site, you'll start getting enough traffic that
enough products will be sold that enough of your sellers will return to sell
again, maybe your buyers will too.

My first thought is to create a community for your sellers. Give them an
outlet to talk with each other. They'll help you improve your site. Engage in
that communication. Let them make it a home away from home, let them make
friends with each other.

It's these people that will give your site legs.

(I do have some past experience in this space...)

~~~
quellhorst
I actually did this before for a client in the auction market. Most of the
initial users were in the Texas / Louisiana area. After around 30,000 users we
had a nice critical mass.

The biggest problem came from the client not anticipating the support required
fro 30k users. Fraudulent transactions like fake Rolexs with western union
money transfers were too common. Another issue that came up was people paying
for postings yet using stolen credit cards. If you charged $5 to signup, but
then had a chargeback, you would get dinged for that $5 and a chargeback fee
of $25.

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qeorge
Things I like:

\- Design looks nice and clean. I'm impressed that you have a photo of
downtown Raleigh on my city's section, that's a nice touch.

\- Posting interface is simple, and I like that its free.

\- I like the McAfee secure logo. I know it doesn't mean anything, but the
everyday user in me likes seeing it (reinforces trust).

Things I think could be improved:

\- My profile says I'm in Reidsville (geolocated). I can't find a way to
change this (I'm actually in Raleigh, NC).

\- I can't find a way to post an ad from the dashboard.

\- More categories for services. For example, I'd like to list under graphic &
web design, which is available as a job but not a service. Computer is too
broad.

\- Once I choose a city, set a cookie so that when I click back to the
homepage it takes me to the Raleigh homepage, instead of the generic choose-a-
city page.

\- Let me add a link to my site! I'll make a profile for my business on just
about any well-made business directory provided that listing is free, and lets
me link to my website.

\- Following on this, let me add more metadata about my business (e.g., hours,
address, phone, specializations).

\- "Manage My Ads" is dropping onto 2 lines, orphaning "Ads".

\- The combination of the icon and the name _Ab_ tain make it seem like a
health site at first blush.

Overall, I really like it. If you can add in some of that metadata I will
definitely fill out my listing and try your site out.

~~~
quellhorst
After you make a profile, go to edit your profile and you can add a link to
your website. See how I have a link back on my profile.
<http://www.abtain.com/dan>

I'll check into updating the geocoding. Anyway you can tell me your ip
address? I'll check to see if any databases have your ip in correctly.

Will take your other comments under consideration in the next deployment.
Thanks.

~~~
qeorge
Thanks, I see it now. It was linked to my abtain profile, and I didn't realize
I could change that to whatever I wanted.

IP: 75.93.212.230. It shows up as Greensboro on most sites, which is just one
of the shortcomings of geolocation by IP. So really, I just need to be able to
change it.

------
antidaily
"No classified ads were found for" whatever I click on. Looks nice but that's
your hurdle.

~~~
quellhorst
Yeah, not only segmented by category but also by region. Curious, what area
are you from?

~~~
antidaily
Chicago.

------
ewams
How is this different than craigslist? It looks nicer, but you have the same
feel of how to find things. Why can't I search all of the USA? Or a region. Or
search a whole state? I hate clicking around to different cities to try and
find something.

Posting is easy. Making an account is easy. Managing postings is easy.
<http://www.abtain.com/posts/manage> has a field for price but I do not see a
place to enter that in the posting.

Good work.

~~~
quellhorst
I have sphinx search in the backend but turned it off because the number of
posts is limited.

Thanks for the feedback, I'll look into making browsing/searching across
regions better.

Do you think it would be useful if you are visiting a category in your local
city to see posts from other nearby cities (within 150 miles)?

~~~
ewams
Oh yes, most definitely. I was recently in the market for a new (to me) dirt
bike and it was a pain switching around to different local cities and
performing searches. And, because I was willing to drive for 2-3 hours to pick
it up, some people would say they lived near a larger city to get more hits
but when I called them up it turned out they lived like 50+ miles away from
said city.

------
wordsofwords
The prefix ab denotes 'away' or 'from'. Similar to the word abstain; abstain
from sex, abstain from voting, and seemingly opposite of obtain.

Just gives a weird feeling and vibe.

~~~
revorad
Interesting counterpoint - [http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2303-the-
unimportance-of-prod...](http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2303-the-unimportance-
of-product-names)

------
DennisP
Why would I use this instead of craigslist?

If you don't have an answer for this I don't think you have a business. If you
do, it needs to be more apparent on the site.

------
JangoSteve
Is this really "high traffic" already or is that the end goal?

Also, I couldn't find any actual listings. I saw in the recent activity that
"billybob created a post I want a 250f motocross bike about 5 hours ago", but
when I clicked on it, it only took me to his profile and had no link to his ad
listings, so I still couldn't find it.

It basically seems like a Craigslist, but without the content.

------
asimjalis
Also some of the categories are empty. I looked for IT and Software Jobs in
the San Francisco Bay Area, and it has nothing. It might be better to start
with a narrower focus and solve the chicken-and-egg problem first. If you have
posts, then you'll get readers, and then you'll get more posts.

~~~
John212
Following on from that..

On the homepage: * I would limit your popular cities to the top 4 or 5 as some
only have 1 or 2 items listed. * I'd limit the recent activities also, you
have some from two days ago.

------
mthompson
Get some integration to other sites to generate the posts, post people won't
post if there isnt much users.

Improve page preview. Had a sluggish feel to it also when high lighting the
subject and think the message but from right toleft it wouldnt select? wtf?:)

~~~
quellhorst
I think part of the sluggishness is the extra traffic from hacker news right
now, and forgetting that I only had one mongrel up to serve the load. Working
on getting unicorn going again to help handle more requests/second.

------
guiseppecalzone
Maybe you shouldn't try to do every city at once. Instead, focus on one city
and make it great. Expand from there.

Other than that, you need content. You could always try aggregating other
services and newspapers, to the extent their TOSs allow.

------
quellhorst
Thought you guys may find this interesting. stats from this post getting on
top of hacker news for a bit. <http://skitch.com/quellhorst/dby8q/dock>

------
singer
@quellhorst, what do you think about slightly fading the color of all category
links that have no posts? I certainly don't want to browse through categories
that I know have no posts.

~~~
quellhorst
Oh, I like that much more than showing a number next to the categories.

~~~
singer
It would be primarily helpful on the interior pages (e.g.
<http://chicago.abtain.com>).

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pstuart
How did you get the geolocation to work? It correctly noted I'm in the SF Bay
Area but my IP address normally shows for Richardson, TX (thanks alot, AT&T).

~~~
quellhorst
Using the free maxmind for the backend GeoIP database.

------
carbocation
Can you link us to one working classified ad? I'm clicking through random
Boston categories and I can't find any that have anything.

~~~
quellhorst
There are many postings in the Dallas area. <http://dallas.abtain.com/>

------
davidw
It has a very spammy look to it. I don't know exactly what it is that causes
this, but it looks "dubious".

~~~
quellhorst
Someone mentioned that it was because the blue links look like domain
squatting pages.

I only recently changed the links to be blue underlined after hearing a
presentation from bing about how a specific color of blue performed better.

------
efalcao
what do you mean by "high traffic classifieds?" Are you referring to some kind
of technological superiority over the alternatives? Does high traffic mean
anything to your users? Just wondering.

~~~
quellhorst
That is actually part of an A/B test with abingo to see if having that motto
does better with conversions. It did better with advertising.

------
grrrr
Lack of search would put me off using it.

