Nz Marketplace looking for feedback ;)

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Networkn
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#3502582 13-Jun-2026 09:30

I don't want to be discouraging, however, I feel like a market place looking to take on established players, isn't really going to work, if you are 'learning as you go'. Even the most likely challengers failed, despite having significant experience, reusing existing platforms, and having a LOT of experience in their team.

I think if you want this to work, you need to establish firmly some pillars in your plan. One should be security for example. This covers security of your platform and data. Security of your payments and of peoples goods, whilst transacting, and of peoples personal information. The fact you ever thought routing funds through an account you had any access to directly, rather than through an established mechnism like stripe is wild to me.

Do you have a business plan? Understand your market and how big is it, or understand fully the costs vs revenue you are likely to be working with? Does the return seem worth it? Do you have a marketing plan? Budget? Funds ready to fund all of this?

What security and business process systems are you going to align with? Is your hosting environment going to meet a particular security standard? ISO27001? PCI?

I can be one of your 5-10 if you'd like, depending on what's involved. I feel like you are quite a long way from that yet though, and to be honest, I'd feel a lot more comfortable giving you my time, if I knew you had a properly fleshed out plan.

TRangi0623

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#3502593 13-Jun-2026 11:02

Thanks for the feedback, I genuinely appreciate it.

You're right about a lot of what you've said. Building a marketplace is incredibly hard, especially when you're going up against companies that have been doing it for years with huge teams and budgets behind them.

I'm definitely learning as I go, but that doesn't mean I'm just throwing things together and hoping for the best. Every week I'm improving the platform, fixing issues, tightening security, and listening to feedback from people who have more experience than I do.

Security is something I take seriously. Protecting users, payments, accounts, and personal information has to come first. If people don't trust the platform, nothing else matters.

As for business plans, marketing, costs, growth, and long-term sustainability — those are all things I'm actively working through. Right now my focus is on building a solid product, getting real feedback, and making sure the foundations are right before trying to scale.

I don't pretend to know everything, and I'm sure there are things I'll get wrong along the way. But I'd rather start, learn, improve, and keep moving forward than spend years planning something that never gets built.

If you're willing to test it when you're comfortable, I'd genuinely appreciate it. Even if your feedback is critical, that's often the most valuable kind because it helps me see the things I might be missing.

Thanks again for taking the time to write such a detailed reply ;)

networkn

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#3502595 13-Jun-2026 11:10

TRangi0623:

As for business plans, marketing, costs, growth, and long-term sustainability — those are all things I'm actively working through. Right now my focus is on building a solid product, getting real feedback, and making sure the foundations are right before trying to scale.

See, this is the key problem. This comes FIRST.

Stop building the platform, and define success, and define your milestones, and what consistitutes a stop point if you can't acheive x by Y. There needs to be the point you stop when you are simply throwing good money after bad, and sunk cost fallacy is a genuine issue in startups. A business plan is critical and its not that hard, it's the sort of thing AI is brilliant at. I could even probably give you a prompt that would ask you questions and then build it for you.

You don't need to answer these questions, but honestly, if you don't have > $250K you are willing to set on fire, then this isn't something you should even be considering doing. I probably wouldn't seriously consider this if I didn't have $5M I was prepared to throw away.

Some of the countries most wealthy people have thrown in excess of 20M at doing this, and failed miserably, but they had it to lose. It's like gambling.

Without all of that, you aren't building a genuine platform, you are playing with something as a hobby, which is entirely fair and reasonable and absolutely your perogative, but then the framing becomes different.

TRangi0623

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#3502596 13-Jun-2026 11:18

Thanks for the reply, I appreciate you taking the time to be honest.

To be fair, I don't disagree with a lot of what you've said. Building a marketplace is hard, and there's a reason so many people with more money, experience, and bigger teams have failed trying to do it.

The difference is I'm not looking at this as "spend millions and hope for the best." I'm trying to prove whether people actually want it first.

Right now I'm focused on simple things:

Can I get people to sign up?
Can I get listings on the platform?
Can I get buyers and sellers completing transactions?
Can I get people coming back?

If I can't achieve those things, then there's no point pouring more money into it.

You're right that security, trust, payments, and protecting user data have to come first. If people don't trust the platform, nothing else matters. That's something I'm constantly working on and improving like i said in the previous post.

I also agree that having milestones and knowing when to reassess is important. I don't want to fall into the trap of endlessly throwing time and money at something that isn't gaining traction.

At the same time, every successful platform started at zero. Nobody starts with millions of users, and not everyone starts with millions of dollars either. Sometimes you have to build something, put it in front of people, listen to feedback, and see if there's actually demand before making bigger decisions.

Maybe it succeeds, maybe it doesn't. But I'd rather find that out by trying than spend years wondering what would've happened if I never gave it a shot.

Either way, I appreciate the feedback and the reality check. It's the sort of stuff I need to hear, even when it's not always what I want to hear thanks anyways lol

gzt

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#3502599 13-Jun-2026 11:36

To expand on Networkn's comment: Wheedle could do all that - and tanked very early with very basic security and scale problems. TradeMe was able to grow through that phase organically starting way back when they did. In contrast new entrants in the established market today will be hit with volume almost instantly, which is kind of exactly what everyone wants, and it's a double edged sword that may cut you down like Wheedle.

TRangi0623

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#3502600 13-Jun-2026 11:41

I remember Wheedle as well, and it's a good reminder that getting users is only half the battle. Making sure the platform can handle growth, security, and reliability is just as important.

Definitely something I'll be keeping in mind as Sky Drop grows. Thanks for sharing your perspective.

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TRangi0623

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#3502602 13-Jun-2026 11:42

as sky drop maybe grows****

networkn

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#3502605 13-Jun-2026 12:37

I think that actually whilst getting customers on board may seem like the first part, with enough marketing, you can get people to sign up to anything.

Actually, getting them to stick is the real thing. First impressions matter, if you don't hook people pretty much immediately, they will go back to what they are already familar with, and know and trust,

If your platform has any major issues up front, you'll lose absolutely all the work you've put in and money you've spent, but happy customers tell two people and unhappy people tell 10. One security issue, slowness, site down, transaction gone wrong, the press will get hold of it, and you'll be done.

Look at how much money MightyApe (Kogan) spent on their new site. It was a nightmare and they wrote off massive number of millions, AND then they had a badly handled security incident.

I know this may be hard to hear. It's true though.

Do you know how much it will cost to host securely and speedily enough, 100, 1000, 10,000 and 100,000 users. The thing is, you get one good bit of marketing boost you could blow through those numbers almost instantly. How quickly can you scale your platform? What's the cost? Can you fund that level of explosion. Many good sites failed due to a lack of capital.

Like I said, I'm happy to through some time casually at it, but to spend reasonable time looking at it, I'd want to know you have a plan, otherwise we are both wasting our time :)

kobiak

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#3502606 13-Jun-2026 12:44

IMHO. I strongly believe that any market place build for the sole idea of be a market place = instant fail in our days. Because:

As a seller or user I want my listing to be seen by 10ks-100ks of potential buys.

Only social media platforms can deliver that. TradeMe's second hand small goods side is dead. It's all about properties and vehicles now (well and jobs listings of some sort)

helping others at evgenyk.nz

TRangi0623

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#3506663 27-Jun-2026 20:36

Just a quick update!

I've made a lot of improvements to Sky Drop since my first post thanks to the feedback from everyone here, so thank you for taking the time to help.

I'm now looking for a small group of beta testers to help put the platform through its paces and give honest feedback before launch.

If you're interested, either:

Email me at rangitr16@gmail.com, or
Send me a message on Geekzone and I'll invite you to the private beta forum.

One small note: I probably won't be replying to discouraging or unconstructive comments. I've found it's a better use of my time and energy to focus on people who want to help test, provide feedback, and improve the platform.

Thanks again to everyone who's supported the project so far I really appreciate it! 😊

TRangi0623

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#3508230 3-Jul-2026 00:31

Hi everyone,

I'm excited to share that Sky Drop is now live.

Sky Drop is a modern New Zealand marketplace built to make buying, selling, renting, offering services, and finding wanted items as simple as possible.

One of the features I'm most excited about is AI-assisted listing creation. Instead of filling out everything manually, the AI can help generate titles, descriptions, categories, pricing suggestions, and other listing details, making it much faster to get something listed.

The platform is currently in beta, so while the core features are ready to use, I'm continuing to improve everything based on real-world feedback.

If you come across:

🐛 Bugs
😕 Something confusing
💡 Feature ideas
⚡ Anything that could be improved

there's a Feedback button built into the site where you can send feedback directly. Every submission is reviewed and helps shape future updates.

A lot has already been improved thanks to community feedback, and there's plenty more planned over the coming months. My focus is on building a marketplace that's fast, intuitive, and genuinely enjoyable to use.

I'm currently working on a long-term plan to keep Sky Drop growing and sustainable. As a solo developer building this alongside my full-time job, there may occasionally be bugs or issues that take a little time to resolve, but I'll always be working to improve the platform and release updates as quickly as I can.

I'm also planning to launch a Sky Drop Discord community in the future where I'll share updates, new features, development progress, and communicate directly with the community.

If you have a few minutes, I'd really appreciate you taking a look and letting me know what you think.

Website: https://skydrop.co.nz

Thanks to everyone who gives it a try and shares feedback—it genuinely helps shape the future of Sky Drop.

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amanzi

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#3508238 3-Jul-2026 07:44

I genuinely appreciate your enthusiasm and ambition, but I don't think you're really taking onboard the advice provided in this thread. This site looks like it was vibe-coded, and the lack of attention to quality, privacy, and security seems to back this up. Broken links on the home page, no details on third-party processors, who the company is and why it should be trusted, and the new AI chatbot is trivial to exploit with simple "IGNORE PREVIOUS INSTRUCTIONS" text. (Not only that, but the AI chatbot can be POSTed to from a third party API client without any credentials.)

These fundamental issues make me think that you are a long way away from releasing this as a viable product. My advice would be to start with some smaller projects first to get experience for this type of work.

Chills

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#3508454 4-Jul-2026 00:56

After checking out the site - I think it is an ambitious idea but no one got anywhere without ambition.

I do have some things to touch on regarding the website design and functionality:

It does unfortunately look like what people are calling "AI Slop" - This isn't to say using an AI Agent to create something like this is bad, but it needs to be done in a very contained way.
Trader profiles aren't viewable, and appear to be broken - "Seller not found"
The hover affects on the "Trending right now" are also broken.
The product pages follow the common AI sizing, and don't use the entire width of the page.
You have 2 "To Top" buttons when you scroll to the bottom.

I also have to worry about the security of the site. If so many of these design mistakes got through to production, I have to wonder if any security issues got through as well.

This is all constructive as I'm not one to kick dirt on someone’s idea, and figured I'd give some of my time to give you some feedback.

mattwnz

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#3508455 4-Jul-2026 01:04

As soon as I go to the site I get a popup that says it wants to access my microphone. Heck no. Never had a site do that before.

shk292

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#3508473 4-Jul-2026 09:59

mattwnz:

As soon as I go to the site I get a popup that says it wants to access my microphone. Heck no. Never had a site do that before.

I got that too, and again when I reloaded the page.

No photos are loading on the page, not sure if that is just me? Browsing on chrome on ipad

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