Technical Founder - Asseta (YC S13) - San Francisco, CA
Asseta is building a marketplace for manufacturers to buy and sell used equipment. We launched in 5/13 during YC S13. Over the past 3 months we sold ~$385k work of equipment and made ~$37k in net revenue.
If we are successful, we will empower a new generation of hardware startups. The next Jawbone, Nest or Soylent will use us to get started faster and with less capital.
The full job description can be found below, but feel free to contact me directly, anton at asseta dot com if you are interested..
This is way off. All the groups I know of that came from outside the bay area rented in the peninsula not in SF, where it's noticeably cheaper. There are also "YC" houses that are passed down that are affordable. Finally, I never heard anyone worried about having to payback the 80k YCVC note.
1. DoveBid, Equipnet, eBay all take a consumer-centric approach by just providing basic information and a countdown timer. Very few companies can purchase anything in that type of system. Our customers are not individuals but organizations that have more complex requirements, i.e. approval chains, inspections, contract negotiations, etc.
2. Auctions work well for sellers who have many items for sale and a limited time-frame, typically facility closures. The vast majority of idle equipment does not fall into that category.
> Very few companies can purchase anything in that type of system. Our customers are not individuals but organizations that have more complex requirements, i.e. approval chains, inspections, contract negotiations, etc.
All of the major auctioneers pre-announce the auctions and have inspection windows. They're used to working with companies that have those kinds of requirements.
> The vast majority of idle equipment does not fall into that category.
Yep -- solve this and that's amazing. I know several large biotech with huge amounts of idle old-ish hardware that we'd love to buy from them, but right now it's hard to crack that. Convince them to sell, lease, loan, whatever all that stuff and we'd be all over it.
I think you'll find that a lot of industrial equipment sold on eBay goes through a buy-it-now listing. They have been moving away from auctions -- aggressively, some say -- for years now.
For consumer sales, auctions still seem pretty popular, but in those cases the buyer has to be crazy not to use a sniping service. So even the true auctions on eBay are more like sealed-bid affairs.
Thanks for the feedback. Price transparency is one of our main goals. Pricing for items is actually posted on the site as long as the seller added it. Currently, we do not require seller's to include a price because they have no basis to do so (no KBB in this market). We are currently aggregating price information, on and off our site, and will be offering our version of KBB once we have a meaningful data set.
Great deals can always be found at auctions but they only represent a small portion of all the available equipment. Most of these items are sitting in warehouses all over the world gathering dust. Their owners don't see the value and have more important things to worry about, manufacturing a product. The solution is a product that compliments their main business focus, manufacturing.
For buyers this means we're going to provide them a complete price for a transaction, equipment price, deinstallation, rigging, crating, installation, etc. I would love to speak more with you about our roadmap, please send me a PM.
Jigsaw (https://www.jigsaw.com) can be a useful tool to confirm email addresses and also get direct phone numbers. An easy way to bypass their credit payment system is to click "Update All" on the contact screen and then unlock all of the fields by guessing their email address. Enter the common variations listed in this article and once you have the email format for the company you can quickly unlock their co-workers.
