Launch HN: Thryft (YC W21) – Shopify for Instagram Sellers

[caprilynn]

Hi HN! We're Capri and Sam — the co-founders of Thryft (https://www.thryft.shop/). We're an easy way to sell things on Instagram.

Sam and I met in college at UC Berkeley and Sam previously built an app with 150k+ registered users that allowed users to see which other users, celebrities, presidents, etc. they look like.

We built and launched a few marketplace ideas throughout YC. We originally applied with a marketplace for shopping directly from brick-and-mortar thrift stores. While we were solving a clear problem with digitizing brick-and-mortar thrift stores, in the end we didn't see a clear path to scalability with that idea.

After that, we pivoted to a curated marketplace for secondhand clothing and accessories, but that didn't work because we struggled to find a differentiator from existing secondhand marketplaces that would solve a real pain point. However, while talking to sellers to get them onto our marketplace, we realized what they really wanted was to utilize their personal brand to sell to Instagram's 1B users. We learned that for thrift and vintage Instagram sellers, each sale is an inefficient, many-step process across collecting payments, buying shipping labels, sending tracking, and communicating with buyers. And Shopify doesn't serve these sellers because it takes a long time to setup and update with their constantly-changing inventory.

Therefore, we decided to build a platform that would make it easier for micro and small businesses to sell things over Instagram. We simplify the fragmented process of selling on Instagram into a single step. We automatically generate a website from sellers' Instagram pages and provide unique checkout links for selling over Instagram live.

For example, one of our sellers named Katelyn runs an Instagram shop (@abitchforbrandy) and she used Thryft to create her website (https://abitchforbrandy.com/). She also regularly uses our product to sell thrifted clothing over Instagram livestreams.

Our product is live and being used by our first 45 sellers. Anyone can have access to try out our product by signing up here: https://www.thryft.shop/signup. If you don't have an Instagram account, you can view some screenshots of our product here: https://www.notion.so/letsthryft/Thryft-Screenies-ba1d3d03e2...

Thank you for reading, HN community! We are looking forward to your ideas and feedback.

[johnboiles]

<3 <3 love it. I built something like this in 2014: https://web.archive.org/web/20150206132301/https://www.paywi... We got to ~70k sales volume before deciding to move on to other projects.

I think now is a better time for a product like this to exist than when we built Penny and y'all already have a better execution/implementation than we ever had. I definitely still believe there's untapped value in the idea.

If there's any way I can help y'all succeed don't hesitate to reach out. I'll connect on LinkedIn or you can email me at johnaboiles at gmail. I'm rooting for y'all!

[caprilynn]

Thank you! Dang, that looks super cool! I'll definitely reach out - I already have tons of questions about your experience building Penny! I appreciate it! :)

[qihqi]

Sellers can already sell on instagram shops. What is the advantage for another service?

[caprilynn]

In order to use Instagram Shopping, a seller needs to already have a website (current popular options are Shopify, Squarespace, Wix, etc.). These websites are time-consuming to setup & update, especially if you're a reseller with constantly-changing inventory. Most of our sellers just need a simple platform to facilitate the checkout but we do have sellers on our premium Website Plan that includes IG Shopping.

[ithriftedmynamw]

Great idea and I see a compelling use-case for it in categories that aren’t served by existing marketplaces.

That said, I’m curious about the thrift shop use-case though: what have you learned from your initial digital-thrift-shop users that explains why they’re choosing it over existing category-specific marketplaces — given that these marketplaces offer these features _and_ additional discovery that you can’t get just on Instagram?

For example, I know many people who run digital thrift shops on Depop that they also advertise on Instagram — is there a compelling case for them to switch to Thryft, or is this for a more specific need?

[caprilynn]

Great question! From what we've heard from our initial sellers, they really like the social features of Instagram that allow them to build a personalized brand and connect with their customers on a deeper level. With Depop specifically, sellers have to pay a 12% fee per transaction, have to upload all their product listings individually, and buyers have to create a Depop account before they can purchase through their bio link which isn't ideal. We noticed most of these thrift accounts post pictures of the items they're selling so we figured why don't we make those shoppable - this way they don't have to upload their products again to a site like Depop, especially when a large chunk of their purchases on Depop may come through Instagram (this varies depending on the seller)

[jklein11]

I took a look at @abitchforbrandy on instagram and I'm not really following? Why would they use your service over shopify?

[caprilynn]

It takes the average person 1-2 weeks to setup a Shopify site, and then you have to upload all of your listings to Shopify manually which is time-consuming. We realized that these sellers' Instagram posts are essentially product listings because they feature a picture, the item name, price, & details so instead of the seller having to upload every new item onto Shopify, they can setup and update their Thryft site with all of their product listings in <1min. We're specifically focused on sellers who are already doing the process of posting on IG to engage with their customers and grow their business. If you're @abitchforbrandy specifically, you're selling thrifted clothing so every item is unique and that creates an even bigger pain point when it comes to updating your Shopify site with constantly-changing inventory. Also, we realized that the sellers we're targeting don't necessarily need all of Shopify's customization - they just need a platform to facilitate the checkout. This article from Forerunner is a great illustration of this: https://medium.com/forerunner-insights/the-next-revolution-i...

[hynco]

“We automatically generate a website from sellers' Instagram pages and provide unique checkout links for selling over Instagram live.“

Hi guys, is it possible to see this feature in screenshots, how does it look like for the user?

[nexxus81]

This is very cool! Do the “drops” expire after a certain amount of time or just become able to be bought after a specified time? Wondering if in your research you discovered any use cases or demand for items that may expire and not be purchasable after a set time or not.

[caprilynn]

Thank you! Right now we leave it up to the sellers to create their own FOMO & decide how to use the drop feature. Right now, the drops don't expire after a certain time period automatically, but that is a really cool feature idea! The two most common things we've seen are sellers whose drops immediately sell out (in which case they just delete the drop from their website) or sellers whose drops don't fully sell out, and it that case they typically leave the drops on their website moreso as curated collections for people to shop after the typical drop window has passed.

[pimlottc]

FYI, the link for @abitchforbrandy goes to Twitter by default, not Instagram. Correct link should be:

https://www.instagram.com/abitchforbrandy/

[caprilynn]

Thank you!

[doublepg23]

Sent to my sister who sells products on insta, I will see what she thinks!

[caprilynn]

Cool, thanks!!

[ahstilde]

This makes way more sense than linktree! Congratulations on the launch!

[caprilynn]

Thanks so much, appreciate it!

[whymauri]

Wow, great product. Power to the content creators!

[caprilynn]

Thank you!

[emomu]

Congrats on the launch, this seems super exciting! Curious where you see Thryft in relation to platforms like Depop or Poshmark?

[caprilynn]

Thank you! :) While Depop & Poshmark are 3rd party marketplaces, we see our product as more of a tool to help micro & small businesses sell products directly to their audience on Instagram

[sjg007]

Great idea. I've seen similar products e.g. gumroad but this really turns it up to 11.

[caprilynn]

Thank you!! :)

[WORMS_EAT_WORMS]

Small nitpick. On mobile, I was convinced the site header was a form field.

[caprilynn]

Thank you for pointing letting me know! We just relaunched our website so that's very helpful feedback.

[whymauri]

Same here!

[shmatt]

* Your title is sell via Instagram, but your "free" product does not include selling via Instagram

* Yes, Stripe take a fee and that sucks, but you don't have to. Shopify had $0 monthly costs at launch. Obviously now they can charge what ever they want

* You just launched, putting some fake discount on seller fees just seems spammy. Like a 30$ product with a $60 + 50% off label. Seller fees were never 3.9%, there is no discount.

I think this is a great area to focus us. And you, or someone else will end up taking over the market. But I think whoever it is will give their product for free, or at a loss, for at least 6-12 months.

Before you figure out why people are/aren't signing up, why not see if price is the issue? Once people are locked in/love your product, raise the price as much as you'd like

[caprilynn]

This is great feedback, thank you. We have $0 monthly costs to use the product to sell on Instagram, however we do still charge a transaction fee + the Stripe fee. We thought that for the IG seller community, it would be good validation to see if people would start out paying a transaction fee to use it. But your point makes a lot of sense - definitely something for us to revisit!

[shmatt]

Maybe I (and any potential customer) am misreading the website. I'm seeing $6/month for IG shopping integration

What is your definition of "selling for free on Instagram" - does it mean not being able to sell tagged products?

[caprilynn]

IG Shopping is what Instagram has built to allow you to tag products from a website in your posts. In order to use that feature from Instagram, you have to have a website. Thryft sellers use our product to allow their customers to purchase from the link in their bio (for no monthly fee). If they want to be able to tag the photos in their pics, that's a separate thing, but we can set that up for them through IG Shopping (this feature is part of one of our premium monthly subscription plans for $6/mo). Thank you for brining this up - I can definitely see how that could be confusing to potential sellers. We'll figure out a way to redesign that!

[shmatt]

With all respect (and I completely expected the downvotes to my original post) - "link in bio" is not what people consider selling on Instagram

You make selling on Instagram easy by charging $6/month. I don't think you should be ashamed of that, nor tell people they can use your website to sell via "link in bio"

I believe the winner in this unclaimed race will offer Instagram Shopping integration for free, by figuring out a way to minimize losses, while hoarding customers

[imsamyang]

Hi, Sam here (other co-founder) -- I think you're correct if you're talking about e-commerce on IG in general, but for the thrift/secondhand sellers that we serve, selling is a much more individualized/personalized process involving comment-bids, negotiations on DMs, live sales/story sales, etc.

So for the majority of these folks, Instagram Shopping is a nice-to-have but not a necessity because they're mostly dealing w/ one-offs and the convenience of a product tag is not that important when customers don't mind just going to their link in bio & browsing their 5-25 available products (they may even prefer this, because they may want to buy multiple items).

That's the main reason we made it a premium feature: the small minority of folks that really need this are willing to pay for it.