Building a blind auction site, hard time finding first users
My co-founder and I started a blind auction website: https://tryheartbids.com/ - We are both technical and could launch our MVP quickly by working a couple nights and weekends. To avoid falling into the trap of writing a lot of code before validating the idea, we decided to stop coding and try to find early adopters (no matter how much things we think we should improve).
We have been cold mailing about 50 people we think would be good candidates for our product. Most people we contacted are artists (jewel designers, painters, etc). So far we had no real response, and are running no auctions. We are running a couple of fake auctions as a showcase. Our guess is that most people are only willing to try once they see auctions running on our web site, but we have to get those first people.
Another idea we had was to offer sellers to embed the auction on their personal website via a widget instead of offering it via our website.
Can we get some tips on how to tackle this? Maybe getting traction on an auction site is too ambitious for a side project?
Some thoughts:
Your 1/3/7 day retention is not going to be good, and users will lose interest in the site quickly.
a) Have users sign up for auctions that they are interested in (turn them into newsletter subscribers)
b) hold all auctions at the same time each week (I only need to check in once each week)
c) hold flash auctions (make it more exciting and urgent, more check-ins each week)
Once you have newsletter subscribers, you can segment them by the products they were interested in. Then you have "300 users interested in jewelry" -- you can use that to get jewelry vendors to use your service.
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a) the formatting for products needs to be better
b) add a retail price (too much uncertainty is a bad thing for customers)
c) add a visible reserve price, or clearly show "NO RESERVE!"
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I don't want to bid on anything because I don't know that the project is legitimate. Use social proof and reviews.
Also seeing some great deals will entice/excite me to use the service.
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Pick a few niches to target, and make a category page for each:
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Maybe offer a special code so that the users can see the current bid price on one item,
or $10/$15/$25 off their final bid price.
Instagram story ads with live video of the products would do well -- this adds some authenticity / believability.
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Make a sample "charity" page, and show them what it could look like.
I would make a script email for them to use to send to potential artists/donors. Make it as easy as possible for them to set up auctions.
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These makers might have a lot of overstock products or merchandise from previous seasons, with no way to get rid of it.
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Other:
I would consider changing the name. I don't know what "heartbids" is and it doesn't excite me. I know what a silent bid / silent auction is, and I would guess most people are familiar with that.
Some names that I would consider:
Hushbids.com
hushhush.io
hush.auction
quiet.auction
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Thanks for the detailed feedback, members like you are what makes this community so awesome!
"The product lacks virality, urgency, and excitement." - I agree with that sentiment when I go on the site it feels very lifeless. My co-founder and I have been back and forth on if we need to implement user sign up, but after your comment it feels like it's essential now to make our users stick around. We thought of sourcing the site with a lot of dummy auctions but felt that was disingenuous.
Do you have any concrete tips on how we can make our product page better? Would it make sense of having a retail price for hand made items (for example an oil painting)? We thought about displaying the reserve price but decided against it because then we would prime people's valuation of the item. Maybe we should revisit that?
Good idea to show recent winners, unfortunately we have not found anyone yet who is willing to test out our product.
We have been focussing so far on jewelry makers and painters. Unfortunately our response rate has been 0 so far. We will try to implement some of your suggestions and reach out again.
Instagram/Facebook/Snapchat ads, this is a great idea especially with the special code. Regarding the live video, so far we have not found a willing seller even when we offer to do everything for them. How would you go about that?
Have not thought about charities but that's an interesting take. I assume they would not be as protective about associating their brand with us and are more willing to give it a try.
We spend a disproportionate amount of time trying to come up with a name. Heartbids came from heartbeats but it seems that is lost :) We would brand it with "bid to your heart's desire" but we are not native English speakers so we are not even sure that the sentence even makes sense. I like the hust suggestion though.
Thanks again for the thoughtful advice!
Hi,
Hopefully you can see this.
I'm looking to see something similar, you could email me on panashe@bidforit.co.zw
, since I have no way to email you, and I believe I already have a community.
Sorry your project couldn't take off.
Did you shut this project down? Why?
We did shut down this project. We had a very hard time building a community and we did not see how we could make this project successful as a side project.
Hey! I need an auction feature for my site! We could be a good match, I have an audience in mind, but haven't started targeting anyone really because I'm non-technical and just started working in earnest on this project within the last 3 weeks.
So, how can we connect? I'm new here, couldn't find a way to send you a private message!
Hey there!
Let's see if we can work together, you can contact us here: https://tryheartbids.com/contact/
Why would someone choose to list an item on an auction site with virtually no demand instead of on the many other existing consumer platforms they could sell their product on like eBay or Tophatter?
It seems they would be likely to get a lower price selling on your platform, which I'd guess is a primary concern of most resellers.
If you can't provide a very compelling answer to this question, you should consider changing your approach.
One potential solution could be to find a profitable niche to focus your marketing efforts on -- instead of being an auction platform, be an auction platform for luxury watches, or high-end sneakers, or Magic the Gathering Cards. Actually, you probably wouldn't want to pick any of these specific niches, because there are already good solutions in place for each of them (e.g. StockX and Mage), but you get the idea. Classic niche to win stuff.
One other suggestion I will throw out (as someone who has little interest in building consumer products) is that you could repurpose your app into a lightweight "reverse auction" procurement tool and sell it to enterprises.
You could also repurpose this to be an "auction as a service" platform you white label and sell to businesses with large, expensive assets they need to auction off -- think used car or boat dealers, farm equipment dealers, etc.
Currently it looks like you've spent a lot of time building out a beautiful, well-architected solution without considering the problem space or what kind of audience you have easy access to that already knows / trusts you and would try your new thing. The last thing you want is to be a solution looking for a problem, even if it is a nice solution.
Interested to hear how this goes as your team seems capable of building a solid product!
Focussing on a small niche is a great suggestion, currently we are trying the shotgun approach of reaching out to multiple niches. But if we can get some traction in a niche, we will certainly double down on that.
The auction as a service is an interesting take, I could imagine large customers looking for an auction platform don't care that much about community aspect. They are looking for a reliable, cost effective solution.
Mea culpa on building the solution first, there might be a problem to solve though :) This post about custom keyboards and Vickrey auctions is what inspired us: https://keycult.io/blogs/typings/the-vickrey-auction-and-why-were-using-it. My co-founder and I both have a technical background so it's very easy to fall into the pattern of building the product and then trying to build a business around it. On a rational level, we know that it's putting the horse before the cart but building things is what excites us.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment!
I’d stop all coding and go back to the basic problen you are trying to solve. What is the problem and do you understand it well enough? How many people and who specifically have you talked to that say they have this problem? Go and see if you can find these folks to understand is what I would suggest.
I actually really like this concept. It's basically like Etsy, except you have very unique options with the bidding.
With platforms like this you are cursed with the chicken and the egg problem. This is by far the hardest challenge in entrepreneurship. I've known a ton of people with this problem, and unfortunately I don't personally know anyone who has solved it. The secret is to figure out who you need on your platform first. You are on the right path, you need the sellers to hop on your platform before you get buyers to hop on.
One thing is to not be afraid to get offline. Us Indie Hackers love hiding behind our computers, but I think you could gain some traction by getting out face to face in front of vendors. Find your local street fair or art festival, go hand out cards, strike up a conversation with the vendors. I'm assuming you're making your money by taking a percentage of the sales, so you're not even really selling anything. People will sign up for something like this, simply because they like you. Go make friends with some artists. After you have made friends with some artists start hosting meetups. Hold classes showing artists how to make money from selling their art. Don't make it a sales pitch, just genuine good advice on how they can make money from selling their art. (one avenue being listing their art on your site).
Also I think this is something that would do really well with an organic Instagram and Pinterest. People love following crafty things on those platform. Just post really cool crafty pictures, build a following then once you have a following start mentioning your site 1/5 posts.
Finally with B2C Chicken and Egg platforms you just need some luck! The more things you do to promote the more lotto tickets you will get, but at the end of the day you are going to need some luck to make this successful.
Good luck!
That is great advice! And agree, we too love hiding behind the safety of our computer hoping to create that business we can control from our keyboards. But we will take the advice of getting offline to heart!
Great work on the site/app.
I can really see the embedded widget/plugin working very well. Artists are already directing people to their own site, it would make sense that they would like another possible way to close a sale (also, something to talk/promote about on social).
Just a guess regarding established artists:
Because it's a blind auction, it means they could sell products cheaper (more accessibly priced) than they would usually be willing to list them (cheap product listings would ruin their perception of quality, and stop the big sales that really move the needle forward). However, with your plugin, they could now take advantage of an additional market of customers who aren’t willing to pay high-end prices, without damaging value-perception with their core audience.
Maybe, you could pool all the bids from your plugin around the web on tryheartbids.com? Then, you would get to run the plugin idea and have a kind of auction/marketplace as well.
Our rationale is that offering an embeddable widget / plugin for their website is less risky for them. They don't have to associate their brand with our brand and still get the benefit of using a platform that can handle the auction logic. We would still list their auctions on our platform as well.
To protect artists from selling for less than they are willing to list them for we use a reserve price. Our assumption (which is unvalidated as of yet) is that products would command a higher price than in a real auction. But we could be wrong here.
Hi,
I don't have any tips but would like to follow along.