- Business Growth & Analytics
One year of Botifex: what I built, what broke, what is next
Botifex turns one. It has been a year since launch, and this post is just me telling you what happened.
My team already wrote a look at where the company is headed: Rhev Williams on the Direction of Botifex LLC. This post is different. It is the version I would tell you over a table: the mistakes, the fixes and what I learned.
It started with a Corvette
I started Botifex at 16, in rural Idaho, on a Raspberry Pi. It was not a business idea. It was a personal tool. I wanted to know the moment a C3 Corvette showed up on Facebook Marketplace, so I built a bot to watch for me.
That is a very niche product. Its customer base was me.
I called that first bot Superbot. When it was time to name the company, I wanted Superbot again. It was taken. So I asked for a name with "Bot" in it, and Botifex came back. It stuck. Superbot would have made a better superhero, though.
The week one variable beat me
Every builder has a week they would like to forget. Mine was a stretch where I coded about 16 hours a day trying to get a dashboard and a login to work. Nothing worked. I tried everything I could think of.
The problem was one wrong variable. I was calling the wrong one.
I would love to say the bug was clever. It was not. The bug that costs you a week rarely is. You find it by staying with the problem.
My first paying user left
Then someone paid. My first paying user signed up, hit a bug, and canceled.
That stung. But it taught me the most important thing I know about this business. People do not pay for features. They pay for something they can trust to work when they need it.
It is why a lot of what we shipped this year is not exciting. If you open the updates page, you will see fixes for login sessions, notification delivery, and turning monitors on and off. I am prouder of those than I probably should be.
What Botifex does today
Botifex watches 8 marketplaces: Craigslist, eBay, Facebook Marketplace, OfferUp, Poshmark, Mercari, Depop and Whatnot. You set up what you are hunting, and it keeps looking so you do not have to refresh eight tabs.
A low price is not always a good flip, so listings get a Deal Score. It compares the listing to eBay sold prices, which show what items actually sold for, not what sellers hope to get. It is a quick filter, not a promise. You still have to look at the photos. For more detail, read How We're Improving the Botifex Deal Scorer.
Botifex Vision is the part I get most excited about. You take a photo of an item, or a shelf of items, and it helps identify what you are looking at and gives an estimated market value. I wrote about it here: Introducing Botifex Vision.
This year we also added hunt profiles for saving your searches, price history so you can see if a listing has dropped, and a way to import hunts from a spreadsheet. We moved Facebook, eBay and Craigslist hunts onto the same foundation as the other marketplaces so they behave more consistently. That one looks like nothing from the outside. It was a lot of work. The features page has the full list.
The other side of Botifex
Botifex also builds custom software for small businesses, and this is the side that is growing.
It came from a simple thought. If I can build tools that watch marketplaces and track inventory, I can build tools around how another business actually works. Maybe you need something that watches listings, organizes inventory, or pulls data you now copy and paste by hand. We scope it, give you an estimate, and then we build it.
I will not hand you a list of big names or flashy results, because I do not want to claim anything I cannot back up. I would rather you talk to us and judge for yourself. If that sounds useful, start at the custom software page.
Two things I learned in year one
Ship before it feels ready. You will not know what matters until real people use it.
Reliability beats features. See the section about my first paying user. I will keep repeating it.
What is next
More of the same, honestly. Make alerts and the Deal Score more useful. Keep fixing the boring things. Keep growing the custom software side.
Thank you
Thank you to everyone who tried Botifex, reported a bug, canceled and told me why, or stuck with it through the rough patches. You taught me more than I could have learned alone. Happy birthday, Botifex.
If you have not tried it yet, start your 7-day trial, no card needed. The pricing page lists the plans.
One question for you: what is the one thing you wish your marketplace tools did that they do not do today? Send it to me on LinkedIn. It might be what I build next.
Rhev