Streetmarket: buying and selling used goods in the UAE
Classifieds in this region are noisy, and most of the friction sits in the sale itself — haggling in the open, no clear close. Streetmarket compresses it: list in under a minute, take an offer, close it in a chat.
Streetmarket is a marketplace for second-hand goods in the UAE — fashion, electronics, and whatever else people have stopped using. A seller photographs an item and lists it. A buyer makes an offer. The seller accepts or rejects, and accepting opens a chat to settle the details. That’s the whole loop, and it is deliberately short.
How it works
- List: photograph the item, add a price, publish. No listing fee, ever — the inventory side of a marketplace has to be frictionless or it never fills.
- Offer: buyers don’t negotiate in public. They make a private offer against the asking price.
- Accept or reject: the seller decides. Accepting is the commitment point, not the start of another conversation.
- Close: an accepted offer opens a chat between the two parties to arrange handover and payment.
- Commission on outcome: 5% is taken when an item sells, and only then. New sellers get AED 100 of credit against that commission, which covers their first AED 2,000 of sales.
Why I built it this way
Marketplaces die on the supply side. If listing costs anything — money, time, or a tedious form — the catalogue stays empty and the demand side never shows up. So listing is free and takes under a minute, and the business only earns when a seller actually gets paid. The incentive is aligned by construction rather than by policy: Streetmarket makes money when its users do, and not before.
What this demonstrates
A live two-sided marketplace — listings, offers, messaging, payments, moderation — built and operated by one person. The same approach I bring into client work: decide what the product actually has to do, cut everything else, and ship it. If you want that applied to your engineering organisation, that’s the Engineering Velocity Audit.