Comments on: Etsy Raises $27 Million; Accel’s Jim Breyer Joins Board

By: You-DesMo

You-DesMo — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 12:20:57 +0000

Great news. I hate ebay, now its just a big shopping plattform, not what it used to be in the beginning.

By: Ego

Ego — Fri, 15 May 2009 16:51:10 +0000

Super

By: cuothiseo

cuothiseo — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 10:32:45 +0000

Congrz, hope he will more develop on next year!

By: casey

casey — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 00:05:36 +0000

care to share your marketing research and #’s with me? ::)

By: angie

angie — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 04:36:44 +0000

it is such a disappointemnt to hear people are putting more money into this thing. i hope the boycotters will pipe up.

By: charles

charles — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 15:52:16 +0000

word around brooklyn is that they’re going to get into distributing music direct from artists. (i guess music qualifies as handmade–wonder if they’ll include electronica). not mentioned at all here, but it might help explain the bigger buck$. might set up an interesting showdown w/ lodwick’s new mysterious music endeavor.

By: rubu

rubu — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 14:05:45 +0000

I am excited about what they are going to do. I know this market well and they have an amazingly loyal and vocal community.

By: rubu

rubu — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 13:57:03 +0000

How will taking locally made goods that used to be sold locally and selling them with tons of transport costs save the planet? Etsytools is worth a look, a site run by disgruntled Etsy sellers (there are lots of them).

By: Andreina

Andreina — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 08:17:21 +0000

As someone who has an Etsy shop through which I’ve been able to sell many of my fine art prints, I am very happy to see this news!

By: Lisa

Lisa — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 08:04:26 +0000

When you buy handmade goods, you do not always know what you are “searching” for, that is why etsy’s browsing tools are actually quite inspiring for a buyer. You stumble across things and the way the merchandise is displayed is WAY better than an ebay or many other sites. Everything is one off and therefore it is important that they continue to inspire, entice and grab a buyer’s attention.

I am excited about what they are going to do. I know this market well and they have an amazingly loyal and vocal community. I think the stats are interesting to see 1million in US but 1.6million world wide … there’s a lot of demand world wide if you get it right.

By: HotorNot

HotorNot — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 03:04:49 +0000

It is unclear what Jim Breyer was thinking here, but with that much money perhaps they can just build him a whole new marketplace just like the one he called for a few years ago in Business 2.0. This one doesn’t even come close to Jim’s old vision.

By: Erick Schonfeld

Erick Schonfeld — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 02:31:07 +0000

@9, my glasses would be pretty thick if I didn’t have high-index lenses.

But the chart clearly states “Total Unique Visitors (000).” That means you add three zeros to the numbers along the left (i.e., 1,000 = 1,000,000).

By: Michael Vu

Michael Vu — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 01:21:31 +0000

Congrats to the Etsy community. My mom sold her first few items not too long ago and she was ecstatic. To see her react like that made me happy too. Right then and there, I realized the power of Etsy. Here are my quick thoughts on it:

# It taps into a global community of passionate and highly skilled people.
# It also follows suit with the green movement, which is flourishing as we speak.
# It offers a lot of high quality, hand-made items that you can’t find anywhere else. Ipod socks, laptop cases, iphone cases, etc. are just the tip of the iceberg.

By: sd

sd — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 23:30:02 +0000

why so many flash neway

By: Debbie Davies

Debbie Davies — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 23:10:35 +0000

Why pay Etsy or any other site to sell your stuff? Why not put it on your own blog and have people find you through search? If it’s any good, people will find you and your stuff will sell. I don’t buy the PR that comes out of the over staffed Etsy head office about saving the planet by buying handmade. How will taking locally made goods that used to be sold locally and selling them with tons of transport costs save the planet? Etsytools is worth a look, a site run by disgruntled Etsy sellers (there are lots of them). It tries to give sellers useful stats but was having trouble with data feeds being turned off last time I looked. Surely not the big hearted, altruistic folks at Etsy?

By: Golden Crafts

Golden Crafts — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 23:10:25 +0000

Yes but will it float? Etsy has a great site that feels very home grown. They even swear to never send a link by email. How unique is that?

By: yongfook

yongfook — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 22:46:15 +0000

I love how “fix search” is one of the action items, like that couldn’t be achieved without $27 million in VC funding.

Honestly, all it takes is to hire a coder for a few thousand dollars to hook up Lucene or something. There are already easy to use, enterprise-ready search engine solutions out there that you can just slot into your site.

By: mike

mike — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 22:12:38 +0000

I think this is great news for many sellers that make and sell thier own items……especially on the heels of that joke of an announcement from ebay on thier new fee structure. This is a niche market that Etsy concentrated on and should become successful at. Now if some VC’s looked into other’s such as blujay.com and gorage.com, there could be some real nice alternatives for all sellers.

By: HonestMall.com

HonestMall.com — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 22:05:46 +0000

for all the haters posting to this thread i would love for you to link to your exceptionaly designed sites so we can check them out.

By: internet user from the 90's

internet user from the 90's — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 22:03:08 +0000

i wonder if they could have continued on course without the 27m. like, its the andreessen style to stuff yourself with cash whenever u can get it but is this really the way to go?

By: Waste of money

Waste of money — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 21:48:09 +0000

They took too much money. Yes, it is waste of VC money. If they decide to compete small startups. Watch they’ll kill $27 million dollar company.

Anyone can make that website less than $27 million.
Remember Boardcast.com ??

Oh man, Mark Cuban & Boardcast.com couldn’t beat one billion dollar Youtube. Yahoo waste money buying Boardcast.com

By: MikeT

MikeT — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 21:47:15 +0000

Andrew, thanks for the good words and encouragement. You made me want to do it sooner, however I have a couple of things to do before I get to this type of business:
1. I have to change (disrupt? innovate?) the way news are aggregated – direction is defined, general site structure and functionality is finalized, a good domain name is purchased and I just need the money. Google news is strong, but hard to use, Digg looks better but I would not get my news from there cause the news do not cover everything I want to read about, Yahoo, MSN and others are ok, but again you cannot get lots of news from them without many clicks. I do not write about the others, smaller ones…
2. I have to change the way kids are taught school material because this system is definitely faulty. Again, direction, concept, site structure, domain name are ready. The software requirements are almost ready. Add here my teaching assistant experience in stat for undergrads and current tutoring practice and you get the picture. There, I’ll need even more money than in point 2

So, now I am trying to get something off the ground to have a small war chest to not have to go to work every morning, but to concentrate on my ideas and bring them to life.

artisanbox.com was intended mostly for leisure and pleasure, not for making the money of my life. Let’s see fhow the other guys will do it, and I’ll decide whether to compete with them or not.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 21:23:32 +0000

why are you letting a crappy functioning site kill your dream? Nothing is wrong with a little bit of competition especially when you know you can do it much better.

Hell its even better for you, because you can have a point of reference to improve on. And that site has already created the market which you can cannibalize on

Google took on Yahoo and won. And even if you fail and your site is just another mediocre copy, you’ll probably still make more money than you do in your 9 to 5 job, because your site will be the alternative to them. And when you have only 2 choices, its pretty hard for one to get 99% and the small fish 1%. This isn’t a car classifieds site which there are 5,000 out there, this is a very specific niche, and if its just you and them, that 1% of 100mm/yr market would give you plenty of money to live on as long as you keep your fixed costs low

By: MikeT

MikeT — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 21:07:12 +0000

@21: I am trying to get out of the “salaried man” category. Artisan shopping site was just another idea, so Etsy did not killed my “dreams” cause guess what: I have many and much better ones
Right now, for example, I am getting one of my ideas off the ground – the site is being developed and will be launched in 2-3 months.

As for my idea about artisan work: I had a very good direction (and still have it – who knows, if Etsy will not improve their site I may become their competitor) and an execution plan. I just had to go with a less expensive project and artisanbox.com requires more money than I can afford to invest right now…

But kudos to Etsy – they did something and will grow it the best way they can. Good example to follow.

By: billy

billy — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 20:59:31 +0000

@19…

yea, google, facebook, microsoft, apple…all did the same with my ideas.

Ideas are just ideas…getting your idea off the ground is different. Sounds like you just bought a domain and had no direction.

Also, as far as fixing the search….how do people know what they are looking for if the stuff is a bunch of one offs?