[minouye]

Etsy tapped into one of the most passionate communities out there, which happened to be on eBay not by choice, but by necessity. If you want to find opportunities, I'd say look at who is using eBay, Amazon, etc. (as a platform) out of necessity due to a lack of alternatives. Once you find those niches, you've already established that there is a market, and if you design a product for that community, customer acquisition should be directly related to the quality of your product.

[parkern]

Do you think when they made those initials pitches investors had a hard time seeing the market potential for hand made items?

[joshu]

It seemed really obvious at the time. It was one of the clearest good ideas I've seen.

[bdickason]

Precisely. A good example of this is vintage furniture sellers and refurbishes. They don't really fit well on eBay because of high shipping costs and difficulty to identify pieces and Craigslist is very hard to crack due to regionalization. For example, Hudson, NY has tons of stuff on Craigslist but New York, NY is hugely lacking in antique furniture.

Anyone that is caught in limbo between eBay and Craigslist and thus resorts to flea markets or other 'in-person' gatherings for sales are good targets.

[acgourley]

What is funny is that as Etsy grew a lot of sellers got dissatisfied and left to 1000markets. The sellers that all left were able to organize this because of the strong community communication tools provided by Etsy.

[julio_the_squid]

What strong community communication tools are you referring to?

As far as I can see, actually cultivating community has been a big shortcoming for Etsy. The 'teams' section of the site is very underdeveloped (it's been the same for years and isn't tied into the rest of the site very well). The forums are frequented by the a small group of focused people, mainly all sellers, and the tone on there has been very negative for years. The in-house messaging system ('conversations') is extremely lacking, with no serious organization tools for your messages. The shop/item favoriting system doesn't function as a social networking 'friends' system, it's geared only towards shopping.

Etsy sellers tend to network through their own blogs (mainly on blogger), independent craft blogs, and use Twitter for communication.