Apply HN: Townsourced – A locally moderated community bulletin board

Townsourced is a locally moderated community bulletin board, built to help your communities discover events, share, shop and sell locally.

Problem: Craigslist is broad and doesn’t cover smaller communities, and when you want to buy or sell something, you need to share your personal contact information, and make the trade in cash. This can be an unsafe and scary proposition. Individual Facebook pages are being created to fill in the gaps that Craigslist has left, but they are impossible to search through and frustrating for buyers and sellers both.

In Townsourced users create and moderate “Towns” which can be used for buying and selling goods, posting events, jobs, housing, volunteer opportunities, or anything else that is going on around their local communities.

“Towns” are communities of any size, from your entire city, to a single dorm, club or school. Users can post to all of their communities once, simultaneously. And moderators can manage which posts they want visible in their towns.

Buying and selling can be coordinated through built-in messaging, and users have the option of completing these transactions electronically so they don’t have to worry about carrying cash to a meetup with a stranger.

We currently have a working demo, and are seeking our first investors to help us launch.

Check out https://www.townsourced.com/pitch for more information.

Your comments, questions and feedback are appreciated.

Thanks