u/Allversegpt

I go to USF and buying/selling stuff around campus has honestly become exhausting lately. Half the listings feel fake, people ghost constantly, prices are all over the place, and trying to search for anything specific is painful.

A few of us kept talking about how there should be a better way for students to buy and sell stuff locally, so we started trying to build something ourselves just to see if we could make the experience less frustrating.

The surprising part has been realizing how many other students have the exact same complaints right now. Pretty much everyone we’ve talked to has some terrible Marketplace story.

Is Facebook Marketplace terrible at other colleges too or is it just bad at USF?

Been realizing lately that attention is probably the hardest part of building anything online.

A few of us at USF have been working on a startup for a while now, and honestly the actual building part felt easier than trying to get consistent traction.

There are so many good products that never get seen.

Curious how other people here grew their first real audience without just spamming everywhere.

A few of us at USF have been building a marketplace startup over the last year, and one thing surprised us more than anything:

Building the product is honestly the easier part.

Getting people to trust a new platform, consistently come back, and tell their friends has been the real challenge.

We spent months thinking features were the answer, but distribution, community, and user experience ended up mattering way more.

Curious if other founders had a similar realization when building their first startup.

My team and I at USF have been working on a marketplace platform called All Verse.

One thing we noticed is how difficult it can be to know whether listings online are actually priced fairly, especially across marketplaces.

So we started building tools that help users compare listings and estimate pricing faster using AI.

We’re still very early and mainly looking for feedback from people who buy/sell online often.

A few questions we’ve been thinking about:

• What frustrates you most about existing marketplace apps?
• Would pricing transparency actually matter to you?
• What features would make a new marketplace worth trying?

Would genuinely appreciate honest thoughts from founders, resellers, or anyone active in e-commerce.