onedollarpixel

The cold start

An empty board is a dead board. This is the single biggest reason a launch fails, and it has nothing to do with the software.

A visitor who arrives to an empty list has no reason to believe anybody else will ever see their listing either. Rank #1 on a board with no traffic is worth nothing, and everybody can tell.

So the first job is not marketing. It is making the board look like a place where something is already happening.

The first week, in order

1. Seed it, then replace the seeds

npm run seed:demo

That puts five placeholder listings on the board so it is not empty while you work. They are placeholders, not a strategy. They carry no payment rows. Reconciliation ignores them because they are not revenue.

Remove them before you take real money:

DELETE FROM listing WHERE identity_key LIKE 'seed:%';

2. Place your own listings, and pay for them

Put five to ten products you genuinely like on the board and bid real amounts through the normal checkout. Not fake rows in the database: real payments, so the totals are true and reconciliation balances.

This costs you money and it is the point. It sets the price of rank 1, which is the number every visitor reads first, and it means the board is honest from the first minute.

3. Tell the people you listed

Every one of those listings is a company that just got free traffic. Tell them. Some will raise their own bid to keep the spot, and that is your first organic revenue.

This step is the one people skip, and it is the one that works.

4. Pick a niche and say what it is

A general board competes with every other general board. A board for one industry, one country, one community or one ecosystem has an audience that can be reached and a reason to exist.

Put that in board.tagline in outbid.config.ts. "The paid leaderboard for X" beats "a paid leaderboard" every time.

5. Only then, announce it

By the time anybody arrives, the board should have real listings at real prices with real click counts. Launching to an empty list burns the attention you only get once.

What the board does for you once it is running

  • The outbid email is the highest-converting thing in the product. Somebody who has been passed has a reason to come back and one dollar to fix it. Keep notifications.outbidEmail on.
  • The click count is the evidence a bid was worth paying for. It is why a listing bids a second time, so leave the click tracker on even though it is optional.
  • The embeddable badge puts your board on your bidders' own sites. Ask them to use it.

Setting the minimum

bidding.minimumFirstBidCents is the price of being on the board at all.

Too low and you fill up with listings nobody clicks, while Stripe's fixed fee eats most of each payment. Too high and nobody starts.

The reference board uses 200 minor units — two dollars. That is a reasonable default and npm run doctor warns below 100 for the fee reason.