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By Aaron Tilley, Forbes.com
If you’re like most people, you’ve got a lot junk you don’t use piling up in your garage. And San Francisco-based startup Yerdle wants to help you get rid of it.
Yerdle is today launching its marketplace of free stuff that people don’t want nationwide. Using a credit system, Yerdle’s marketplace allows users to bid on or “buy” bread makers, bikes and electronic gadgets that people have long forgotten. Credits are acquired by sharing your own stuff on the marketplace. New users start out with 250 free credits. (With 250 credits, the most expensive thing I could find was a Linksys Wireless Router.)
The national launch includes shipping anywhere in the country for $2-$4 as well as an update to the app–which includes a curated front page of interesting stuff for sale and an “add to shopping cart” and “checkout” buttons that are meant to replicate internet shopping experiences.
Founded by a former Walmart executive and an environmentalist, Yerdle has been working on its marketplace for a little more than a year now just in San Francisco and has gotten nearly 30,000 users signed up since its launch on Black Friday 2012. The company has learned along the way that getting the marketplace experience to be more like buying anything else on the internet works best. Its credit system, for example, didn’t start until October of last year and that’s when members started using Yerdle more.
“When we launched credits, we saw a huge spike in activity,” Adam Werbach, cofounder and head of product at Yerdle, says. ”People could understand all of a sudden the social and emotional components of the exchange. … It needs to approximate shopping.”
Read more at Forbes.com.
Abstract:
Alumnus Andy Ruben co-founded Yerdle, an online marketplace for buying and selling free goods.
DateAdded: 2/17/2014