Used goods marketplace powered by AI

We are building a faster, more convenient FB Marketplace. Here’s how 1) AI powered recommendation system 2) Auctions 3) Rigid location boundaries

AI powered recommendation systems that will change the way that we shop for goods. We have built a TikTok like interface that allows users to interact with listings. We feed these interactions into our recommendation system and present a unique set of listings based on their real time feedback.
Auctions nix all the annoying, but unfortunately necessary messages buyers send to sellers. Buyers ask “Hi {sellerName} is this still available?” and or try to negotiate a better price. With an auction it is obvious how long the item will be available and what the current price is.

Implementing rigid location boundaries in a used goods marketplace can significantly improve efficiency by reducing the activation energy required for buyers to complete a transaction.

Mountain View, CA / Mountain View, CA

We launched a San Francisco Auctions FB group in August and grew that to 115 users in 2 days (https://www.facebook.com/groups/sanfranauction). After talking to group members and sellers in the group we decided to go all in by launching an iOS app. It took us 4 weeks to launch. We’ve grown revenue from $0 to $20 from the second to third week. Then $20 to $132 from the third to the fourth week.

We’ve been working on this since we moved out to Mountain View on July 2nd, 2023. We started working on it full time August 10th, 2023.

We have 15 active users. 2 are paying. One user has spent $132 on three different auctions and has bid on an item everyday since downloading the app.

We grew to 115 users in just two days from our SF Auction FB group. Our revenue growth rate from week 2 to week 3 is 560%. These two points validate our hypothesis that there are sellers and buyers looking for a more convenient and fast marketplace.

Our last idea classclutch.com notified students when spots in full classes opened up. We were profitable in our first year and were planning to expand to other schools after we graduated. We figured out how to pivot into growth and learned what growth actually looked and felt like. We grew to 100 free signups in 1 week. Then to $1000+ in revenue in the first quarter. After our personal experience using current marketplaces, talking to buyers and sellers on these marketplaces, the growth of the FB SF Auctions group, and that FB Marketplace has a billion monthly active users we decided to pivot into something bigger than notifications.

No.

Moving to Mountain View taught us how hard it was to use platforms like FB Marketplace. We needed to move out and sell our stuff fast. But we ended up throwing most of it away. Then when furnishing our apartment in Mountain View we realize that it’s just as hard for buyers. We became domain experts by interviewing 20 buyers and 17 sellers throughout the bay. They told us that they suffer from the same problems we have. They told us deals fall through due to miscommunication, lack of trust, and lack of convenience. Despite these challenges 1 billion people visit FB Marketplace every month.

FB Marketplace, OfferUp, and Craigslist all lack successful payment integrations. Users have bad experiences on their apps because they don’t care if a successful purchase occurs. They want users to spend lots of time on the app because they make more ad revenue. We use revenue from transactions to measure how our listing recommendation system, auction, and location boundaries improve user experience. Ebay has a payment system, but it doesn’t have infrastructure built out for local in person transactions.

We buy from sellers on FB marketplace and sell to the buyers on our app. Our profit is the difference between what we pay for the item from the seller and the final sale price of the auction. We plan to make money by keeping a percentage of the sale price 3-5%. We plan to fully integrate payment on the app, not on third party apps.

Racct, Inc. is incorporated as a Delaware C Corp.

Jack Ogle, CEO has 50% equity.
Jonathan Merril, CTO has 50% equity.

NA

No.

Jon and Jack write the code. No.

No.

- Stripe for Signup flow.
- Upscale 2 Good 2 Go. Get the leftover food or ingredients from Michelin star restaurants and refurbish them into excellent dishes at a fraction of the original cost.
- AWS for LLMs
- Solving the recommendation system cold start problem for businesses online storefronts

I don't think this is on the application anymore. Instead I've included our individual founder profiles.

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Jack’s Founder Profile

Please tell us about the time you, jogle20, most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage.

I hacked my way into UChicago. I won an ROTC full scholarship before I applied. Now instead of being 1 in 34,291 applicants, I was 1 in 4. Other qualified students overestimated the cost of the post grad years of service. In the fine print, I discovered that there was a part-time option and I could work just 1 weekend a month for 8 years.

Please tell us in one or two sentences about the most impressive thing other than this startup that you have built or achieved.

Built a company whose profits are funding this startup with my current co-founder (classclutch.com). We automated a robust course catalog scrapper to only deploy when college students pay to receive open course spot notifications.

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Jon’s Founder Profile

Please tell us about the time you, jrmerril, most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage.

I built my own parking spot that was 10x cheaper than what my apartment charged for parking. In front of the apartment, the sidewalk extended with just enough space to park my blue Subaru Forester. The two biggest challenges were calculating the cost of parking tickets and shielding the spot from others. I solved the first by finding out the street cleaning schedule was a pretty good proxy for when police would be checking the street. I solved the second with traffic cones, official looking caution tape, and a sign from the city that said scolded the people parking here.

Please tell us in one or two sentences about the most impressive thing other than this startup that you have built or achieved.

Built an open seat notification company that funds our current venture. We launched it before the scraper and notifications were functional, and I didn’t sleep for 3 days until it worked; I adapted the same scraper to scrape all the FB Marketplace listings from Mountain View, Sunnyvale, and Palo Alto to boost the supply for our marketplace.

Family and friends encouraged us to apply.

I watched PG's lecture Before the Startup when I was a sophomore in college and I was hooked ever since.