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.
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.
- 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 Abtain 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Had a client that had the exact same problem. We built them basically an "eBay for rentals" platform. They had a solid business plan and plenty of smarts on how to build it out. However, when it came down to marketing and filling up the site, their guy on the team with that job failed miserably. As a result, they were a non-starter and tanked horribly. Just goes to show: cashflow is king. Concentrate on that first, otherwise you've got to get really luck (like Twitter) and get investments without having solid plans in that area.
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?:)
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.
@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.
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).
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.
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...)