Advertising on Reddit

There was a recent post on Hacker News about one person’s results with advertising on Reddit.  I thought I would write up a quick post to share our results as another example.

Designing an Ad for Reddit

The most important thing that we learned is that it is critical that the ad be well suited to the Reddit environment.  It has to fit alongside typical Reddit content, but still stand out enough to receive attention.  Here is a sample of two approaches that we took:

The first is a direct advertisement that used our tagline with the thought being that Reddit users would prefer a no nonsense approach.  We threw in our cat mascot since we all know that Reddit loves cats!  The second is a play on the awkward penguin meme that plays up the negotiating capability of BidKat.  Which do you think was more effective?

New BidKat Feature: Auction Galleries

Having a moving sale, estate sale, charity auction, or just have lots of items to sell?  The new auction galleries in BidKat make it simple to advertise and track all of your items at once!

New BidKat Feature: Verified offers

We’ve recently added a new feature to BidKat that allows buyers to verify the offers they have made on items. This makes it easier for sellers to distinguish real offers from potential spam.  Here’s a brief look at how it works.

Teaching a computer to negotiate like a person (or at least how to fake it)

When we were first fleshing out the concept of BidKat, one of the key features that we wanted to support was automated price negotiations. Having to manually negotiate with a bunch of people has always been tedious and frustrating – especially when their final offer ended up being way too low. What we soon discovered was that trying to automate the process was equally tedious and frustrating…

Behind the scenes: Designing the look and feel of BidKat

Most of the time, you only get to see the finished design for the websites that you use everyday.  We thought it would be fun to give everyone a behind the scenes look at the different design iterations that BidKat went through as we moved from our minimum viable product to the design that you see today at https://www.bidkat.com, a service that is aimed at helping people sell their stuff for more money with less hassle.

When we first came up with the idea for BidKat, we knew that there were going to be three main components to the design.  There had to be a way for sellers to create new auctions, for buyers to make offers on items, and a way for sellers to see the results of their auctions.  We’ll look at how the design of these components changed over time as we learned more about the requirements and our users.

Does BidKat actually work?

We’ve been getting a lot of mail from people letting us know that they love the idea of BidKat but are curious if it actually works.  I came across this conversation on Twitter that, over the course of 13 minutes, answered this question quite nicely.

Garrett had a Firewire Apple iSight camera that had been sitting on his desk taking up space since he was unable to use it with his monitor. It had always been too much of a hassle to try and sell, but BidKat makes it so easy that he decided to give it a try.

Unexpected BidKat Downtime

BidKat was down this morning from approximately 2:15 AM PST to 6:25 AM PST due to a misconfigured server.  After the initial outage, we decided to take some additional downtime to fix the underlying problem. No data was lost as a result of this downtime, however, all auctions were unavailable.

We greatly apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for using BidKat!