OfferUp’s Mobile Marketplace

We all know the mother of invention. Nick Huzars necessity was finding a way to clear out a room for his soon-to-arrive baby girl.

My wife and I were at a spot where we wanted to have kids and when she said she was expecting, I kind of went into dad mode, Huzar explains. I remember standing in the doorway of this room, which was about to be my daughters room. It was just full of stuff and Im thinking, Theres got to be a better way to sell this stuff. It would take forever to sell it through existing channels.

Having moved on from his previous startup Konnects, a social media platform for magazines and newspapers Huzar was ready for his next challenge. Still, he confesses, I had no plans on doing another startup right away. Its a lot of work.

But the idea of streamlining the buying and selling process wouldnt go away. I was looking at my phone and just kept thinking, Why cant buying and selling be as simple as taking and sharing a photo? he says. That was the spark for OfferUp.

OfferUp is a Bellevue company that runs a mobile platform for buyers and sellers. Looking for a pair of size 12 Nike Richard Sherman trainers worn only a few times? In mid-March, Joey in Kent was offering them up for $150. Stephen in Renton offered up a 2014 Tesla Models S with 12,141 miles on the odometer for $76,000. Martin in Federal Way offered up a pogo stick in good working condition for $30.

Huzar says he and cofounder Arean Van Veelen did a lot of homework before launching. They talked with friends, family and around 100 local merchants.

“There’s a long history of companies that tried to compete in this space and failed, says Huzar. Keep in mind this was 2011 and the economy wasnt that strong, so they gave me a lot of time. I learned a lot about what they do and how they promote their stores.

Huzars research led him to distinguish his business from Craigslist by focusing on smartphones. Virtually everyone has a smartphone on his or her person most of the time. This lessens the friction involved in buying and selling things.

Why do we have underutilized assets at all around us? Huzar asks rhetorically. Because theres a ton of friction in the process. We look at those golf clubs sitting there, and we maybe move them out to the garage and then eventually they end up in the junkyard or somewhere else.

Huzar realized smartphones offer an easy point-and-click way to photograph unwanted goods and offer them for sale on the spot. A computer-based option like Craigslist, which does not have its own app, requires you to photograph the product, transfer the picture to your computer, sign in to your account and finally post the item for sale.

OfferUp was designed from the beginning to be a mobile app. Available for iOS and Android, the app reads a users location and offers tiled photos of items for sale in the local area. Users can set the app to show items within a specified range of miles and to put either the newest items or the closest items at the top of the display. Buyers click a button to make an offer or to send questions to the seller. For those wishing to sell items, its as simple as snapping a photo and keying in a price. You can easily post an item and offer up in less than 30 seconds, says Huzar.

Huzar also realized that, especially for internet and mobile apps, trust and safety were critical issues. So Huzars team decided it was important to have a real-time presence in the OfferUp app. In the chat system we are adding more tips, says Huzar. If we see things that we think are questionable, we are happy to engage. We are very proactive in that.

Even with the best of application design and management processes, of course, getting a marketplace up and running is a lot different from simply offering a product. There needs to be a critical mass of buyers and sellers. Building that critical mass was the next major challenge for Huzar and his team, which officially launched with a total of four employees, including the two founders.

There are a lot of challenges in getting the gears moving, says Huzar. He started by having his friends and family try the new platform. But that wasnt enough, so Huzar explored an array of marketing strategies.

There were a lot of failed things for sure, a lot of experiments that didnt bear a lot of fruit, he says. But we persisted to figure out the right mix.

While not willing to give details about what the right mix turned out to be, Huzar says that his team tried pretty much everything. Any way you could try to target an audience, we tried, he says. We even had a booth at the Bite of Seattle. We did experiments handing out fliers. We did print. We did digital. We did everything except skywriting.

While offerup is still privately held and has flown pretty much under the radar of media coverage, its growth at least as measured in terms of transactions and employees has been somewhere between strong and spectacular.

Huzar says OfferUp has been downloaded 18 million times. It recorded $3.9 billion worth of transactions in 2015. And from a staff of four in 2011, it has grown to nearly 80 today. The staff has more than doubled in just the past year. Its hard to speculate where we will end the year, says Huzar, but we are hiring aggressively.

Those numbers are impressive, but the company has yet to generate revenue. The service is currently offered free to buyers and sellers and there is no advertising on the site. The business also has plenty of competitors offering many of the same mobile-based conveniences. They include 5miles, an app developed in China that has its U.S. headquarters in Dallas and has already raised $50 million after just one year in operation. While far younger than OfferUp, 5miles, which places a strong emphasis on local service, already has six million downloads and $2 billion in transactions. It also operates in many international markets, including London, Manila, Mexico City and Sydney. Spain-based Wallapop is another company with a global footprint, and then there are niche players such as Canadas VarageSale, which focuses on providing a safe market for moms, and Poshmark, which focuses on fashion.

Craigslist remains king of the hill, with 45 million unique visitors in January alone. But the company has done little in recent years to improve the site and its unique visitor number is actually down 12 percent from a year ago, according to Millward Brown Digitals compete.com website.

OfferUp, meanwhile, has raised $93 million in venture capital and keeps finding new ways to grow. We dont spend a lot of time worrying about our competition, adds Huzar. We are singularly focused on creating the best possible experience for our users, and our traction in the market reflects that.

The venture capital community, which reportedly values OfferUp at up to $1 billion, certainly seems to believe. Its obviously a little scary big valuation, no monetization, Josh Breinlinger, managing director of Jackson Square Ventures, told GeekWire. Its easy to throw up the bubble flag. But Breinlinger insists OfferUp is no bubble: We own all of the usage, we own billions and billions of dollars of transactions. We can monetize that.

Huzar feels the same way. There are many different monetization initiatives were exploring, he says, though he declined to be specific about those initiatives or when the company plans to implement any of them. We feel like were still in the first inning as a company. We just want to make sure when we roll out things that they really add a lot of value.