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How do I piggy back on ebay classifieds?

Hi IndieHackers!,

I'm bootstrapping what I call the Shopify for the gig economy, basically I want to build tools (app, content and other stuff) to help people working in the gig economy (cleaners, delivery couriers, grocery shoppers, etc) start their own business doing the same things they currently do but without depending too much on the platform.

Yes, mine is a platform too but the focus in on building the tools for the gig workers so they can offer multiple services in the same app and grow their business, and not focus on using VC money to subsidize the consumers to bring them to the gig workers.

My website is www.eaziapp.com (I'm in Germany so the default is German but there are English and Spanish translations in the site).

I'm starting with cleaning because I used to work at a marketplace for cleaning and know the drill.. but later on I want to add grocery shopping, delivery, etc.

My current phase is testing out there is a market for what I offer and so far seems to be so but the gig workers are heavily focused on signing up for a platform that gives them customers right away, which I can't at the moment for what I explained about the not subsidizing with VC money.

So I think I could piggy back on ebay classifieds because many customers post there looking for people to do cleaning gigs.

The question is basically how I could do that, here are a couple of ideas I'm bouncing in my head but not sure which one could be better at this phase:

  1. Manually enter data from ebay into my backend system, the system will match it to the cleaners in the database and then will generate some text with the profiles of the cleaners. I would copy that text and then use ebay's built-in messaging system to send the offers to the customers. I tried this before but didn't work, still not sure if I should adjust it in some way and try it again.

  2. Instead of my backend generating that text, send a push notification to the cleaners in the platform so that they can write a short bid text (I might automate some part of that text) and if the cleaner submits the text bid then I will then forward it to the customer again manually via the ebay messaging system.

Any other ideas you might have and would like to help me with?

Thank you!!

on September 7, 2020