For all its incredible success, Craigslist isn’t always a welcoming place. Though practical, its interface isn’t terribly user friendly, and if you use the site to buy other people’s stuff, then it’s likely you’ve excitedly clicked on what looked like a great deal – only to realize that you’d have to drive half way across the city to pick it up.
It’s that sort of situation that new Toronto startup Tradyo is looking to solve. Billing itself as a mobile Craigslist, Tradyo aims to create a mobile classifieds network based on proximity first and everything else second.
“We think of ourselves as a social marketplace,” says co-founder Gideon Hayden. “Our idea is that hopefully we can get people to redefine buying and selling within their communities.”
For now, Tradyo works exclusively through an iPhone app. After signing up, users can browse what others are selling based on how near they are; the app uses your phone’s location tech to roughly determine where you are. Find an item you like, and you communicate with the seller directly through the app by sending an instant message. A fully functional web site that integrates with the app will launch soon.
The aim is to create a kind of location-based version of the classifieds section, turning Tradyo into a virtual neighbourhood bulletin board. The simplicity of letting users photograph and post an item all through one app would certainly seem to serve that goal. But there’s also a couple of interesting social or environmental dimensions to the app. Hayden hopes apps like this “will help communities re-engage with each other” in the face of overwhelming urban anonymity. Moreover, in lowering the barriers to peer-to-peer selling, the ostensibly environmentally-friendly nature of what Hayden calls “redistributing goods” becomes easier and more widespread.
Those are lofty goals, and the significant challenge will be scale. A “social marketplace” needs equal amounts of its two halves, people and goods, and it’s likely that Tradyo will need thousands, if not tens of thousands of users to make things work. For that reason, the company is focusing on one market right now, Toronto, and will only branch out after establishing itself here.
Of course, a major problem for all online classifieds is the issue of trust. Buying from other citizens carries inherent risks, and we’ve all heard stories about someone getting jacked after arranging to buy an Xbox in a parking lot.
For its part, Tradyo is looking to mitigate the unknown by attaching an identity to each transaction.
“The thing with Craigslist or Kijijiji,” says Hayden “is that there’s always that thought in the back of your mind: ‘okay, I just invited this stranger over to my house, what am I doing?’ So we tie every item to a user profile.”
Doing so lets users check out the public Twitter and Facebook profiles of the person they’re buying or selling from. Though a long way from the kind of security you get with an eBay transaction (who have developed complex mechanisms for fraud and arbitration), it seems a definite step in the right direction.
Co-founders Hayden and Eran Henig are heading to San Francisco this month to secure a round of funding and mentorship through Upwest Labs (“Right now, all the money in this industry is still in the Valley,” says Hayden). In the long-term, however, Hayden envisions Tradyo as an ad-supported service, asking users what they’re looking for and then offering that information to local businesses who can in turn react to location-based market trends. Also on the books is a payment system that would work through NFC tech, that lets smartphones communicate “and pay for things” using radio frequencies, much like Mastercard PayPass or Visa Paywave.
Tradyo is currently available for download for free on the App Store.
Navneet Alang is Toronto Standard’s Tech Critic. You can follow him on Twitter @navalang.
