The Product
You want to browse eBay every night, or five times a day, looking for specific items (or unspecific items) but each time you visit the eBay site, eBay insists on showing you everything you've already seen. It's burdensome to try to stay on top of large searches or a category with thousands of listings.
AuctionHero remembers what you've seen, so you only see stuff you haven't. It also orders what it shows you, so you see the auctions that are ending soon or the buyable listings that were just posted sooner. This sorting is dynamic and occurs in real time, so new listings are magically placed in front of you ASAP as you browse your results.
AuctionHero can also collate disparate searches into a single result set that benefits from the above features, and it can apply a single search to multiple eBay sites worldwide simultaneously. eBay's search result size limitations (10,000 items) do not apply to AuctionHero; you can browse a search that yields 10 million results just as quickly and easily as one that yields 10,000.
Finally, the results are heavily cached and prefetched in the browser so that all images are preloaded and paging is instant. All the item listing's images are presented in the results so you don't miss any details, and you can click on them to load the largest available zoom.
Who is it for?
eBay buyers who "know it when they see it", want to browse more items in less time, want to see more listing images more easily, or want to better organize their searches and collate results.
Certain forms of search enhancement, such as blacklisting 100 sellers or uploading 2,000 UPC codes to search for, are trivial with AuctionHero but unwieldy or impossible on the eBay site.
Who is it not for?
AuctionHero is not designed for simple ad hoc searches; use eBay for that. Similarly, if you aren't going to revisit your search over time, it makes less sense to use AuctionHero.
The Market
eBay has over 165 million users worldwide (of which at least 140 million are buyers) and around 1 billion items for sale. In 2015, eBay sold items totaling $82 billion.
How many buyers want a better search tool? I assume not very many, or more tools would already exist.
Product Analysis
AuctionHero is free to users; I make money via eBay (and other) affiliate programs. Because what it does is so unique and so valuable to its users, it is very sticky and encourages frequent return visits. There's a built-in incentive to return to AuctionHero and benefit from previous progress browsing through your large search results. Once you drink the Kool-Aid, you're unlikely to want to use the eBay site directly.
I know of a couple vaguely competitive products which are desktop apps and (in one case) do some of the basic omit-what-I've-seen stuff that AuctionHero does, though more crudely. Think 1990's technology. I would guess those products have a user-base on the order of 5-10k, but this is easy to overestimate.
Maybe these products are successfully filling the requirements of my target users, but I'm not aware of any similar product which can run on a mobile device. I have pitched to users who spend seven figures on eBay annually and were using nothing more than the eBay site itself, so the market penetration of the competition seems pretty weak to me.
Startup Stage
The app is live, and though it fulfills its promise, I don't consider it feature-complete and I have some big plans for further work.
I'm bootstrapping this thing solo and while it's a full-time job at present, I haven't yet begun looking for money. I do have patents pending in the US and overseas.
Customers
It is difficult to find customers who have a need for this product, but once they "get it", they are hooked. I don't actually need that many customers because users who need a product like this can spend many thousands on eBay monthly. I've been using (earlier versions of) AuctionHero for the many years -- it was once a major competitive advantage for me and unavailable to the public -- and in a month in which I accidentally earned a commission on my own purchases, I received a check from eBay in the amount of $2800. Oops.
Why Me?
I have connections in the collector community, a long history of power-buying (not to mention power-selling) on eBay, and expertise in the underlying technologies. I have a deep understanding of the problem and a mind that seems constantly bent upon exploiting data and market inefficiencies. After 15 years, I still cannot shake the belief that this is an awesome solution, and that keeps me excited and motivated on a daily basis.
If you read this far, THANK YOU, you get a link!
You want to browse eBay every night, or five times a day, looking for specific items (or unspecific items) but each time you visit the eBay site, eBay insists on showing you everything you've already seen. It's burdensome to try to stay on top of large searches or a category with thousands of listings.
AuctionHero remembers what you've seen, so you only see stuff you haven't. It also orders what it shows you, so you see the auctions that are ending soon or the buyable listings that were just posted sooner. This sorting is dynamic and occurs in real time, so new listings are magically placed in front of you ASAP as you browse your results.
AuctionHero can also collate disparate searches into a single result set that benefits from the above features, and it can apply a single search to multiple eBay sites worldwide simultaneously. eBay's search result size limitations (10,000 items) do not apply to AuctionHero; you can browse a search that yields 10 million results just as quickly and easily as one that yields 10,000.
Finally, the results are heavily cached and prefetched in the browser so that all images are preloaded and paging is instant. All the item listing's images are presented in the results so you don't miss any details, and you can click on them to load the largest available zoom.
Who is it for?
eBay buyers who "know it when they see it", want to browse more items in less time, want to see more listing images more easily, or want to better organize their searches and collate results.
Certain forms of search enhancement, such as blacklisting 100 sellers or uploading 2,000 UPC codes to search for, are trivial with AuctionHero but unwieldy or impossible on the eBay site.
Who is it not for?
AuctionHero is not designed for simple ad hoc searches; use eBay for that. Similarly, if you aren't going to revisit your search over time, it makes less sense to use AuctionHero.
The Market
eBay has over 165 million users worldwide (of which at least 140 million are buyers) and around 1 billion items for sale. In 2015, eBay sold items totaling $82 billion.
How many buyers want a better search tool? I assume not very many, or more tools would already exist.
Product Analysis
AuctionHero is free to users; I make money via eBay (and other) affiliate programs. Because what it does is so unique and so valuable to its users, it is very sticky and encourages frequent return visits. There's a built-in incentive to return to AuctionHero and benefit from previous progress browsing through your large search results. Once you drink the Kool-Aid, you're unlikely to want to use the eBay site directly.
I know of a couple vaguely competitive products which are desktop apps and (in one case) do some of the basic omit-what-I've-seen stuff that AuctionHero does, though more crudely. Think 1990's technology. I would guess those products have a user-base on the order of 5-10k, but this is easy to overestimate.
Maybe these products are successfully filling the requirements of my target users, but I'm not aware of any similar product which can run on a mobile device. I have pitched to users who spend seven figures on eBay annually and were using nothing more than the eBay site itself, so the market penetration of the competition seems pretty weak to me.
Startup Stage
The app is live, and though it fulfills its promise, I don't consider it feature-complete and I have some big plans for further work.
I'm bootstrapping this thing solo and while it's a full-time job at present, I haven't yet begun looking for money. I do have patents pending in the US and overseas.
Customers
It is difficult to find customers who have a need for this product, but once they "get it", they are hooked. I don't actually need that many customers because users who need a product like this can spend many thousands on eBay monthly. I've been using (earlier versions of) AuctionHero for the many years -- it was once a major competitive advantage for me and unavailable to the public -- and in a month in which I accidentally earned a commission on my own purchases, I received a check from eBay in the amount of $2800. Oops.
Why Me?
I have connections in the collector community, a long history of power-buying (not to mention power-selling) on eBay, and expertise in the underlying technologies. I have a deep understanding of the problem and a mind that seems constantly bent upon exploiting data and market inefficiencies. After 15 years, I still cannot shake the belief that this is an awesome solution, and that keeps me excited and motivated on a daily basis.
If you read this far, THANK YOU, you get a link!