Ahead of tomorrows Townhall with me (9PM EST on zoom!) I wanted to share a brain dump of some things going on with the marketplace we are building because I know you have questions and ideas. So here’s where we are at now in bullet form so it’s easy to digest.
- We are in the early design, concept and protoype stages of the project
the goal, while ambitious is to go live in October with our MVP (minimal viable product) - our requirements for that MVP are that members can all buy, sell, trade with each other on our platform and have their on profile and showcase
- This means all your standard features such as offers, looking for, adding cash on top for the trade etc
- We are building KYC (know your customer) into the marketplace. This means to participate in any type of transaction on the marketplace you MUST submit your photo id (front and back), take a picture fo your face, provide a credit card and address. This is similar to NBA TOp Shot, buying Bitcoin or staying with Airbnb.
- We are doing this to ensure the identity of every user on the platform. A large part of scams in sneakers are around users with bad intent so our first step to authenticity is to ensure you are who you say you are. This way we can easily track down and charge scammers.
- The marketplace will be free of any type of fees except for standard processing fees (credit card 3%) needed. So we will not be charging you to participate in our marketplace
- The only fee you may see is if you chose to pay for authentication of the sneaker. In this case it would go to a third party that we partner with (TBD) and they would verify it before the transaction goes through
- The marketplace is included in your membership price and your plan will not change when this launches
- The goal for us is to provide a safe place for our thousands of members and growing to transact (buy/sell/trade) with each other and within our community because we believe what we have here is the best sneakerheads in the world
- the more power we take away from GOAT and StockX the better, this is why I want to keep our community within our ecosystem. You the people are the most prized asset in the industry so why fuel the pockets of the companies ripping us off when we can keep it all between the people
- The CORE of the marketplace to me is the profiles we are building for everyone. The marketplace is a people first platform, not about the shoes. Our goal is not to shill sneakers on you, our goal is to help you discover sneakers and the people behind them
- Your profile will contain a showcase where you can upload your collection and show off what you own without needing to list it for sale
- We want the marketplace to be something fun, social and engaging
- We plan to have restrictions in place so that no one member can have multiples of the same shoe or sell the same shoe more than once (TBD). Our goal is to ensure know one sneaks in and is secretly reselling the same shoe over and over.
- We have a lot to think through on how members are pricing shoes in their collections that we will engage the community in but for now don’t stress about this. We’ll have this conversation soon.
- All of our content currently (written,audio,video etc) will feed into the marketplace as well
I think thats it. I share the screenshot of the very tiny early design concepts below because I want to show the scope of the project to everyone. It is a massive undertaking for us and one that will likely cost nearly $500,000 USD to build but it is worth every penny as I feel like it is one of the missing pieces needed to help round out the membership offering. I hope it is done in 4 months, fingers crossed! Maybe everything above won’t make it in for v1 but we are going to try our best.
If you have any questions drop a comment in the thread or join me on zoom tomorrow night at 9PM EST where we can talk about everything SoleSavy and what the future holds!
