I already explained that.
Tell people up front how many bids we need to sell before the auction can start.
That way if they want the auction to start soon they need to cause bids to be sold faster.
If they don't mind waiting a few weeks for the uaction to start, they can keep the site secret so that it takes forever to sell enough bids to enable us to start the auction.
Want that iPad soon? Tell everyone you know about the site.
Not in a hurry to bid on an iPad? Keep the site secret so we never sell enough bids to buy an iPad thus never start an auction auctioning an iPad.
Simple.
You can still entice using things they need. Ashop has a wishlist, you can look at the wishlists to see what people wish we would auction, and announce that if we sell enough bids we will auction one.
You claim the method of auction is lucrative.
If so once we have auctioned one iPad we should have profits from that enough to buy two or dozens more.
If not, again, the thing is not even paying for itself so should be abandoned as sorry the founders were not afterall the awesome marketers they imagined themselves to be, their mailing lists were not large enough or responsive enough to bring in enough traffic to sustain such a site, maybe they should build their mailing lists a few more years until they do have enough hundreds of thousands or millions of people on their mailing lists to be able to drive enough traffic to sustain such a site.
Why are you so determined to have your mom's iPad bought for you by us? What is this drive you have to get us to buy you one?
It seems suspicious, as if you already figured out the "tell only your friends family and cronies about it so you can scam us out of shitloads of gadgets" scam.
If the damn thing is so damn lucrative it damn well should be able to pay its own way.
If not then sorry you were totally ignorant of how lucrative those things are, it is not afterall the latest and greatest how to get rich on the internet website type afterall.
Such sites are probably extremely expensive to market because no one has any incentive, normally, to tell anyone about them as more users means more competitors in auctions which means higher priced goods. So maybe you should start figuring out how your television ads are going to attract more users than qibid's television ads...
Or, tell people item X will not be auctioned until Y number of bids have been sold, so that if they want the auction to ever start at all they'd better tell all their friends and family to come and buy bids.
Maybe even tell them some clever stragegies, such as picking an item they do NOT want to bid on, and advertising the upcoming auction of THAT item on forums etc where people who are into THAT kind of stuff hang out, so that floods of people will come to buy bids for the "white elephant" causing enough bids to be sold for the iPad you want to finally come up for auction. (As well as the "white elephant", of course, but you don't care about that, you just want elephant lovers to come buy bids so your iPad auction will start...)
NOTE: REMEMBER too that the VAST MAJORITY of users of such sites basically get ripped off. So expect to need constant NEW floods of users as you probably will find you lose users at a massive massive rate. Also most people who ever used any such site also mostly got ripped off so expect that maybe a vast majority of them already know better than to use such a site. So you will probably need to spend far far more on television ads than you ever spend on things to auction.
-MarkM-
No I do not have an alternative motive don't worry. lol the way I think about it is that people would not join to buy bids unless the product offered infront of their eyes. So there is the drwaback of people keeping it a secret yes.. and to combat that I think your idea of preselling bids is good so we don't fall into that trap, and it might work out better as when demand picks up we will have more bids selling and more funds to buy things etc etc... Im not sure how it would work trying to presell people on bids based on telling them what they may get after they have the bids... just not sure about that, but it is a safer strategy, and really up to everyone else. Personally I prefer to have inventory upfront, its a safer approach to be able to sell what you have. We can always make sure we have inventory sold for atleast breakeven by setting a reserve auction at first, that maybe will re leave some of your suspicion? I will leave others to read it and decide what the best way to go about it is. I think what you said is a possibility and it is an option. I think some healthy competition to devtome would be good however and it is badly needed.
Remember that profits go to devcoin and not me so by you saying maybe the founders should have built up a list of more people to market it to, doesn't make much sense to me because whoever does it is for the good of everyne here, so why dont YOU do that and help get that list bigger and if YOU don't know how then get someone that does or help in any way you could to help market? After all the idea is looking or trying to look after YOUR best interest in rising coin value.
The early penny auction sites did have people feeling ripped off, and quibids still does but competition helped that... what others did was allow people to buy it now and give back the bids they used for the auction. If you read my proposal you would have seen the part I talked about the worst case buying the item at marked value we deem appropriate probably plus a small markup for our service (since they had a chance to buy it cheaper, but decided to take back their bids). That way if they feel they are overspending, they can simply use buy it now and buy it... this is a way for people NOT to feel ripped off. I think we should probably support this. This means that we would have to be able to buy the product on demand based on a buy it now, and tell the user that hey if you use buy it now, you may be waiting a little while until we procure another item of the same description.. since mostly it would be people who ended up overbidding and didn't want to throw their bids away.
However im not sure how preselling bids would work with this, and may not work with it... so at first we may want to do a presale, and later on switch over to be funded by devcoin after it gets going with enough people who already know about it. That is when we turn on the buy it now feature and really get the ball rolling.
Im probabyl going to buy this template that gives us full source, and it has all of these features that I proposed... I will play with it and make it look good I want to change a few things, text font etc add devcoin logo etc and then get people to try it out.... I want to talk to the developer first though... waiting for a response.
