Yardsellr

» see yardsellr.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Yardsellr was founded in October 2009 in San Francisco by people who had run parts of eBay, and the pitch was in the shape of the thing: an eBay that lived inside Facebook. It opened to the public in January 2010. Sellers posted items at fixed prices into categories called Blocks. Buyers followed the Blocks they cared about, and anything new in those Blocks turned up in their Facebook News Feed, which in 2010 was the most valuable distribution channel on the consumer internet and was being handed out for free.

For about eighteen months it worked. By November 2010 there were 1.3 million people following Blocks, and by late December that was 1.5 million and climbing by twenty thousand a day, with around a hundred thousand of them actively commenting on items in the feed. Accel Partners led a $5 million Series A that November, on top of $750,000 of seed money from Harrison Metal. The busiest Blocks were jewelry, guitars, quilting, knitting, and Star Wars collectibles, which is a fair portrait of what people actually have in a spare room.

The money worked backwards from eBay on purpose. Sellers paid nothing to list, and buyers paid a fee of around ten percent on a completed purchase, which inverted the one thing every seller complained about. You could pay with PayPal or pay Yardsellr directly, and in the second case the seller got a physical check in the mail.

A marketplace whose entire distribution was the American Facebook News Feed could not have exported here even if it had tried, and the second-hand trade here had already picked its own address years earlier. What I know about this company I know from a funding announcement and a goodbye letter, and that is the whole acquaintance.

~ the dossier ~

~ photons ~

Yardsellr had a second currency called Photons, and the design of it is the most interesting thing the company ever built. One hundred thousand Photons were worth one dollar against any purchase on the site. You earned them by finding dollar signs hidden around the pages, which Yardsellr called a treasure hunt, and you could collect up to a million in a day. You could give them away to other users. When somebody spent Photons on an item, the seller was still paid the full cash price.

And then the part that makes it a real mechanism: Photons decayed. Hold them and they drained away, so hoarding was punished and spending was rewarded. That is a demurrage currency, the thing economists argue about in papers about stimulating circulation, shipped quietly in 2011 as a shopping gimmick on a Facebook app.

It is also the clearest statement of what the company thought it was building. The site's own language talked about blending games with buying and selling, and the Photon economy is that phrase with an implementation behind it.

~ a new direction ~

The goodbye post survives in the archive, titled "A New Direction" and signed by Danny Leffel. It says that a few months earlier other companies had begun asking to borrow the Yardsellr playbook for their own ecommerce operations, that the growth and the margins on that business looked better, and that the team could not do both. "Today we are turning our attention 100% to the ecommerce services business and we will be shutting down Yardsellr." The new company was called CompoundM and would launch in a few weeks. Existing transactions would be honored, and anyone with a question was given Leffel's own email address. Three years of a community, wound down in eight paragraphs, by the person who built it, in order to go and sell the method to people who had not.

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