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Ask HN: How can a non-tech create a MVP for a peer-to-peer marketplace?

4 points by way_seriously ↗ HN
Airbnb for sports gear. Not looking to monetise or process payments. There’s a few startups on similar sports but there’s nothing on mine, so I can’t rent the specific gear I use. The size of the market for the gear is about $500m. I looked into near-me.com and sharetribe but it’s too expensive. An airbnb wordpress clone is the only off the shelf option I have.

I’m trying to boil down the functionality list, how should I go about making the mvp?

    search
    signup
    post listing
    message buyer/seller
    booking calendar 
    review transaction/user

9 comments

[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 28.2 ms ] thread
jaworrom
I was doing similar research a few months ago and came across http://structureddomains.com/. These guys look pretty solid, but I haven't inquired about their pricing. You might give them a call.
phantom_oracle
You definitely need to learn how to code to get this going.

Market-places are no longer a business-model I would consider "low barrier to entry".

You need thousands of users going both ways and you need your users to be demographically near each other as well.

You also need to handle financing (not so tough anymore with Stripe), but then you will face issues like "abuse", which always seems to happen with sports-gear.

Punctured X-ball, broken X-bat ... where X = sport-name

Their was someone attempting a similar marketplace where the items were low-cost and the consensus leaned towards "too risky for the price of renting out low-value item".

way_seriously
cheers but I really would like to have those problems you mention and for that I need a script, without the mvp there’s nothing I can do.

Hope someone will know a way

sixQuarks
The first question I would ask is: How are you going to get your first users?

It might be possible to simply learn HTML/CSS (which you can do within a month if you dedicate time), then create a site where the entire "back-end" is manual. Any submissions go directly to your email inbox, you then turnaround and create a page for that submission, etc.

This would be mainly to test out your ideas. If you begin gaining traction, find a freelancer that specializes in PHP (yes, this is an old language, but it's easiest to find a competent programmer) - go with people from Russia, eastern europe.

way_seriously
Will try to find users within the sport, going to sport clubs and manually signing up people, shops, online forums, it’s a niche sport with a cool community around it and I’m a player.

Thanks for this, the html site with manual ‘back end’ is an excellent suggestion, I wonder if not more work than adapting one of the wordpress airbnb clone themes, that comes with post, calendar and messages plugin?

iDemonix
I would argue with this, a system this archaic and slow would put people off using it. I get annoyed when my eBay listing isn't visible within 5 minutes, having to wait days for someone to craft a HTML page would make the site unusable for me. Also it means any stuff like user messaging is no longer possible, they'll just have to publicly display contact details.

IMO if you took this kind of approach, you'd learn to make up a design using a framework like Bootstrap, then pay someone to either code something basic (on a framework like Laravel for a good developer it shouldn't take much time at all for a user system with listings and a search) and use your design. It's an expense, but not too much, and it'd make or break the idea IMO.

way_seriously
agree. seeing your post go live and an up to date functioning calendar might be important, I’m trying to be open minded so something goes live, that’s my priority.

if i provide wireframes, user journey and flat psd design, can you quantify 'not too much'? avoiding to pay someone to validate the idea would be ideal though.

I might just buy an airbnb clone to test it out, why is no one suggesting it, does it not work at all or is it just bad practice from a tech perspective but could solve my case?

iDemonix
It's entirely up to you how you create the end product, but the thing with clones is typically they're a bit clunky and are designed to be a clone, not to be something easy to use and modify like WordPress. I have no exp. with Airbnb or its clone so maybe that's a good system though, would need researching.

It's hard to clarify not-too-much as I've been out of the freelance game for a long time. I think your best bet would be to come up with a design mockup, and a good chunk of information about how you want the site to work, UX, user flow, that kind of thing, then approach some developer circles and see what offers etc. you get.

Places like Ask HN, or Reddit's /r/webdev would be good places to post a plan and ask for quotes maybe?

If you think this is a solid business idea though, I wouldn't try and do it on the cheap or bodge it on to a framework it doesn't fit with, otherwise you'll be worse off down the line when people have already had a bad taste of your brand and don't come back.