[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Thryft (YC W21) - Shopify for Instagram S...
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Launch HN: Thryft (YC W21) - Shopify for Instagram Sellers
Hi HN! We're Capri and Sam -- the co-founders of Thryft
(https://www.thryft.shop/). We're an easy way to sell things on
Instagram. Sam and I met in college at UC Berkeley and Sam
previously built an app with 150k+ registered users that allowed
users to see which other users, celebrities, presidents, etc. they
look like. We built and launched a few marketplace ideas
throughout YC. We originally applied with a marketplace for
shopping directly from brick-and-mortar thrift stores. While we
were solving a clear problem with digitizing brick-and-mortar
thrift stores, in the end we didn't see a clear path to scalability
with that idea. After that, we pivoted to a curated marketplace
for secondhand clothing and accessories, but that didn't work
because we struggled to find a differentiator from existing
secondhand marketplaces that would solve a real pain point.
However, while talking to sellers to get them onto our marketplace,
we realized what they really wanted was to utilize their personal
brand to sell to Instagram's 1B users. We learned that for thrift
and vintage Instagram sellers, each sale is an inefficient, many-
step process across collecting payments, buying shipping labels,
sending tracking, and communicating with buyers. And Shopify
doesn't serve these sellers because it takes a long time to setup
and update with their constantly-changing inventory. Therefore, we
decided to build a platform that would make it easier for micro and
small businesses to sell things over Instagram. We simplify the
fragmented process of selling on Instagram into a single step. We
automatically generate a website from sellers' Instagram pages and
provide unique checkout links for selling over Instagram live. For
example, one of our sellers named Katelyn runs an Instagram shop
(@abitchforbrandy) and she used Thryft to create her website
(https://abitchforbrandy.com/). She also regularly uses our product
to sell thrifted clothing over Instagram livestreams. Our product
is live and being used by our first 45 sellers. Anyone can have
access to try out our product by signing up here:
https://www.thryft.shop/signup. If you don't have an Instagram
account, you can view some screenshots of our product here:
https://www.notion.so/letsthryft/Thryft-Screenies-ba1d3d03e2...
Thank you for reading, HN community! We are looking forward to your
ideas and feedback.
Author : caprilynn
Score : 40 points
Date : 2021-05-18 17:45 UTC (5 hours ago)
| emomu wrote:
| Congrats on the launch, this seems super exciting! Curious where
| you see Thryft in relation to platforms like Depop or Poshmark?
| caprilynn wrote:
| Thank you! :) While Depop & Poshmark are 3rd party
| marketplaces, we see our product as more of a tool to help
| micro & small businesses sell products directly to their
| audience on Instagram
| shmatt wrote:
| * Your title is sell via Instagram, but your "free" product does
| not include selling via Instagram
|
| * Yes, Stripe take a fee and that sucks, but you don't _have_ to.
| Shopify had $0 monthly costs at launch. Obviously now they can
| charge what ever they want
|
| * You just launched, putting some fake discount on seller fees
| just seems spammy. Like a 30$ product with a $60 + 50% off label.
| Seller fees were never 3.9%, there is no discount.
|
| I think this is a great area to focus us. And you, or someone
| else will end up taking over the market. But I think whoever it
| is will give their product for free, or at a loss, for at least
| 6-12 months.
|
| Before you figure out why people are/aren't signing up, why not
| see if price is the issue? Once people are locked in/love your
| product, raise the price as much as you'd like
| caprilynn wrote:
| This is great feedback, thank you. We have $0 monthly costs to
| use the product to sell on Instagram, however we do still
| charge a transaction fee + the Stripe fee. We thought that for
| the IG seller community, it would be good validation to see if
| people would start out paying a transaction fee to use it. But
| your point makes a lot of sense - definitely something for us
| to revisit!
| shmatt wrote:
| Maybe I (and any potential customer) am misreading the
| website. I'm seeing $6/month for IG shopping integration
|
| What is your definition of "selling for free on Instagram" -
| does it mean not being able to sell tagged products?
| caprilynn wrote:
| IG Shopping is what Instagram has built to allow you to tag
| products from a website in your posts. In order to use that
| feature from Instagram, you have to have a website. Thryft
| sellers use our product to allow their customers to
| purchase from the link in their bio (for no monthly fee).
| If they want to be able to tag the photos in their pics,
| that's a separate thing, but we can set that up for them
| through IG Shopping (this feature is part of one of our
| premium monthly subscription plans for $6/mo). Thank you
| for brining this up - I can definitely see how that could
| be confusing to potential sellers. We'll figure out a way
| to redesign that!
| shmatt wrote:
| With all respect (and I completely expected the downvotes
| to my original post) - "link in bio" is not what people
| consider selling on Instagram
|
| You make selling on Instagram easy by charging $6/month.
| I don't think you should be ashamed of that, nor tell
| people they can use your website to sell via "link in
| bio"
|
| I believe the winner in this unclaimed race will offer
| Instagram Shopping integration for free, by figuring out
| a way to minimize losses, while hoarding customers
| imsamyang wrote:
| Hi, Sam here (other co-founder) -- I think you're correct
| if you're talking about e-commerce on IG in general, but
| for the thrift/secondhand sellers that we serve, selling
| is a much more individualized/personalized process
| involving comment-bids, negotiations on DMs, live
| sales/story sales, etc.
|
| So for the majority of these folks, Instagram Shopping is
| a nice-to-have but not a necessity because they're mostly
| dealing w/ one-offs and the convenience of a product tag
| is not that important when customers don't mind just
| going to their link in bio & browsing their 5-25
| available products (they may even prefer this, because
| they may want to buy multiple items).
|
| That's the main reason we made it a premium feature: the
| small minority of folks that really need this are willing
| to pay for it.
| whymauri wrote:
| Wow, great product. Power to the content creators!
| caprilynn wrote:
| Thank you!
| doublepg23 wrote:
| Sent to my sister who sells products on insta, I will see what
| she thinks!
| caprilynn wrote:
| Cool, thanks!!
| johnboiles wrote:
| <3 <3 love it. I built something like this in 2014:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20150206132301/https://www.paywi...
| We got to ~70k sales volume before deciding to move on to other
| projects.
|
| I think now is a better time for a product like this to exist
| than when we built Penny and y'all already have a better
| execution/implementation than we ever had. I definitely still
| believe there's untapped value in the idea.
|
| If there's any way I can help y'all succeed don't hesitate to
| reach out. I'll connect on LinkedIn or you can email me at
| johnaboiles at gmail. I'm rooting for y'all!
| caprilynn wrote:
| Thank you! Dang, that looks super cool! I'll definitely reach
| out - I already have tons of questions about your experience
| building Penny! I appreciate it! :)
| ithriftedmynamw wrote:
| Great idea and I see a compelling use-case for it in categories
| that aren't served by existing marketplaces.
|
| That said, I'm curious about the thrift shop use-case though:
| what have you learned from your initial digital-thrift-shop users
| that explains why they're choosing it over existing category-
| specific marketplaces -- given that these marketplaces offer
| these features _and_ additional discovery that you can't get just
| on Instagram?
|
| For example, I know many people who run digital thrift shops on
| Depop that they also advertise on Instagram -- is there a
| compelling case for them to switch to Thryft, or is this for a
| more specific need?
| caprilynn wrote:
| Great question! From what we've heard from our initial sellers,
| they really like the social features of Instagram that allow
| them to build a personalized brand and connect with their
| customers on a deeper level. With Depop specifically, sellers
| have to pay a 12% fee per transaction, have to upload all their
| product listings individually, and buyers have to create a
| Depop account before they can purchase through their bio link
| which isn't ideal. We noticed most of these thrift accounts
| post pictures of the items they're selling so we figured why
| don't we make those shoppable - this way they don't have to
| upload their products again to a site like Depop, especially
| when a large chunk of their purchases on Depop may come through
| Instagram (this varies depending on the seller)
| ahstilde wrote:
| This makes way more sense than linktree! Congratulations on the
| launch!
| caprilynn wrote:
| Thanks so much, appreciate it!
| sjg007 wrote:
| Great idea. I've seen similar products e.g. gumroad but this
| really turns it up to 11.
| jklein11 wrote:
| I took a look at @abitchforbrandy on instagram and I'm not really
| following? Why would they use your service over shopify?
| WORMS_EAT_WORMS wrote:
| Small nitpick. On mobile, I was convinced the site header was a
| form field.
| whymauri wrote:
| Same here!
| caprilynn wrote:
| Thank you for pointing letting me know! We just relaunched our
| website so that's very helpful feedback.
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(page generated 2021-05-18 23:01 UTC)