Seeking Technical Partner
A little about what I’m doing: I believe there is a better way to run consumer-to-consumer marketplaces. We can provide services to simplify shipping, including cross-border shipments, increase buyer security and reduce seller fraud. Deliver retailer-level product recommendations (Think Amazon’s “You may also be interested in”), and more. Our focus is the automotive market due to its size and my experience (I am [or was before this company acquired all my time and money] a fairly serious car guy, as are a few of the investors). I believe there is a large opportunity (and I have quantified it, the numbers are shocking) to improve classifieds seen on forums and message boards.
What has been accomplished so far: We have a fairly polished MVP (www.styckyd.com and partners.styckyd.com), a few customers and partners, a handful of others who are interested, a number of executed test marketing campaigns receiving above average CTRs and a current conversion of between 15-20% (This is unsustainable for the long term due to user acquisition cost [~$3] and resulting revenue per user but validates interest and is a viable solution to seed the system). I have previously secured funding for $150k and can secure more (As much as needed, if needed) for future growth and development but I’m aiming to grow incrementally for the next few years through customer growth. We’re using Rails and a number of gems/OS libraries and are hosted with Engine Yard/Amazon.
Some of the challenges you’ll encounter: Developing solutions to negate all kinds of fraud, from credit cards to buyer and seller scams. Indexing all of the products of an industry from crowd-sourced information – how do we avoid, identify, and consolidate duplicates? How do we seamlessly integrate with a number of third party platforms (vBulletin, Static websites, Vanilla Forums, etc.) where the individuals may not be technical and will have a wide variety of hosting environments? Some of these have working solutions that will need to be improved and some are currently unsolved.
A little about me: I’m a jack-of-all-trades type. I have spent ten years in B2B marketing and sales. I have successfully sold to middle management in small-to-medium businesses (selling <$10,000 products), and executive management in large (sub F500, selling >$500,000 products) businesses. I have managed industry-leading brands in both the construction and mining industries. I am an adept designer and a novice/intermediate front-end developer, all of the front-end work on the sites has been done by me. Both of these skills can be improved but it won’t be our bottleneck in the short term, if it needs to look good and work well from a UI perspective I can make it happen. I am far stronger with front-end design than I am with back-end coding, I make many rookie mistakes (many of which I am not skilled enough to understand yet) but I do intuitively understand how to code and can quickly and easily grasp the structure and scale of the application. Lastly, I do not give up easily. I have been working on this for four years and have gone through many setbacks and overcome even more challenges. The road is long and the walls are high, but not insurmountable. I strive to be the best in everything I do. Although I accept that the path to success is lined with failure, at the end of the day losing isn’t an option for me. If I don’t (along with other’s help) make this happen, someone else is going to.
Location: Anywhere in Canada/US/Europe. I am based out of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada and have established a strong network of investors but Winnipeg is not a tech town. I am looking to either establish a fully distributed team. If you have extensive experience with distributed teams it will be an asset. I am comfortable working with remote teams and can travel when necessary.
Payment: As stated in my first paragraph I’m looking for someone who can work with me long-term but I’m not interested in getting married on the first date. So what I would like to do is work with you on a few small things I need to complete and see how well we work together. This can be done on the side during your evenings or weekends, whenever works for you – it doesn’t matter to me.
If the above sounds interesting and/or intriguing please get in touch with me. I am happy to discuss further and clarify any details I may have left out. Ideally you’re also an auto enthusiasts and either modify cars or race competitively (autocross, Formula V, Spec Miata, track days, whatever). Knowing our customer is vitally important.
Thanks for reading, Kerry at that strangely spelled domain above (forum users will recognize it)