In the last post I described the big idea for my submission to the Product Hunt Makers Festival: A better marketplace for makers looking to sell their projects, and even buyers interested in buy high quality projects. In this post I'm going to go into a little more detail what this means in terms of features that I'll need build.
One requirement we have for this project is to use the new Product Hunt API, but obviously I chose this project because I think it could make good use of the API, both for user authentication and project information.
What makes this project different?
There are a lot of other places (such as Flippa) to list your projects for sale, so why not just use them?
Most of the marketplaces seem to be filled with projects that appear to be made for the purpose of selling them on the marketplaces, often using similar (or the same) themes with little or no original content.
Some marketplaces are free to list, but most have a listing fee, and expect a "success" fee, which can take a big chunk out any potential profits.
It can also take a long time to build the profile to list your project, crafting the right message and finding the best images to showcase your work.
Off course we can use ProductHunt to fix a lot of these problems.
The solution
What if we limited the marketplace to only projects that had been featured on Product Hunt. We could allow you to filter based on all the criteria that Product Hunt offers. The number of upvotes the project received, or perhaps only projects that finished in the top 5 for that day. Or perhaps only projects that were featured a month ago or 3 months ago.
What if you list your project with just a couple of clicks? We could import all of the data that product hunt requires to post a project. The title, the tagline, the media, the makers and reviews could all be displayed on your projects profile. Really the only thing you'd be required to add is the price you wish to sell the project for.
What if you could see the profile of both buyers and sellers with their Product Hunt activity, before you contacted them. Would that make you more comfortable making a sale or a purchase?
We could also use the categorization that Product Hunt provides to organization the projects based on topics,
The Features
I'll flush out the features in more detail in a Trello board, but the top level features as follows:
As a seller
Sign in with Product Hunt
Add listing by allowing user to select from products they have been added as a maker.
Edit or Add additional details of the listing (including sale price)
Publish listing
Remove a listing or mark it as sold
As a buyer
Sign in with Product Hunt (to be able to contact seller)
See a list of the projects for sale
Search and filter the list based on a small number of criteria
See the details of an individual project
Contact the seller of a project to negogiate a sale.
As an admin
Feature certain projects on the homepage
Future features
There are lots of additional features that come to mind for the marketplace.
We could link to Google analytics accounts to display verified traffic numbers, or for a SAAS project link to a Stripe account to display verified revenue numbers.
Alerting or notification if a project of a certain criteria are posted.
However they are out of scope for the MVP, so we'll add them to the roadmap.
I already have a name in mind, but more about that in the next post!