HeartBids

Last week, my co-founder and I decided to shutter HeartBids. We are not getting the traction we were hoping for. It was very hard for us to convince artists to add items for auction on the platform and without those items, the platform is useless.

Neither me and my co-founder feel particularly sad about this, we had a lot of fun working together and learned a lot of things.

Here are some random things we learned during our 3 month journey:

• We need to spend more time validating the market. Blind auctions seemed like a great idea in our initial enthusiasm. In the end, nobody cared for it and I'm sure most people (even HeartBids users) did not even fully understand it.
• Building a product that requires network effect is hard, and even harder on 1 to 2 hours per day. We are on the lookout for a product idea that can provide immediate value even if only 1 person uses it.
• It's amazing how much you can accomplish in that initial steak of enthusiasm!
• It's crazy how much of a grind it can be to work on a product once that initial streak of enthusiasm is over.
• Boring technologies rule! We built the site with Python / Django / Bootstrap / JQuery and we could get an MVP online in no time.

We would like to thank everyone here in this great community for their support and advice!

As we don't have an automated process to start auctions on our platform yet, we have to do it manually. We have a 'start an auction' page that tells people to contact us when they want to start an auction.

I got a message through our live chat of someone wanted to sell his artworks directly on Heartbids.

A few hours later, the auctions for his works were online!

When creating the MVP a lot of questions already popped into our minds (most of them we didn't had a clear answer to). We knew we wanted to build something very rough and limit the amount of work in order to make sure we don't build fancy features that are not needed. I believe data & feedback is important, so getting something out fast helps us getting data faster.

In our MVP we need auctions to start off with. During most of November we tested out different platforms (twitter, instagram, facebook) in order to reach some early adopters.

In this process, we found that we got the most response from painters. That's why we started to focus on artists on Instagram.

After a lot of conversions and explaining the platform to artists we found 13 artists willing to start an auction. Some artists wanted to sell multiple items, because of this we launched with 47 items up for sale in auctions on Heartbids.

The idea was born. My co-founder and I got the idea from reading an article on the workings of Vickrey auctions (published on hacker news). We decided it was time to experiment because we have the belief that a decent blind auction platform could boost the prices on unique items (where supply < demand). and just got with it and see where this journey brings us. Heartbids was born!