Announcing dibs.net

You might be wondering what I've been up to since leaving my job several months ago. I made a movie to explain, in a series of pictures, what my day-to-day life of the last four months has entailed.

After countless hours of designing, coding, modeling, learning, networking, drawing, hacking, zipping, unzipping, scanning, testing, documenting, administrating, photoshopping, rewriting, tuning, fixing and launching, I have finally resurfaced with something I am really proud of.

I'm really excited to announce the opening of dibs.net, a local community online bulletin board for buying and selling stuff. (To check it out now, see what I'm selling on my personal site: http://kevin.dibs.net or read the "About" page: http://dibs.net/about).

Why did I build dibs.net? As the saying goes, "to scratch my own itch." There are other ways to advertise and sell online, but none came close to what people need. For example, eBay items need to be shipped; they charge high fees; plus everything takes a week to sell. Craigslist, on the other hand, works well for getting the word out, but the barrage of email is a nightmare if you have more than a couple things for sale; I could never keep track of who wanted what, when they offered, how much, or when they were coming over.

Enter dibs.net! I built in features for:

  • answering questions from interested buyers, and adding your answer right to your listing, so you don't have to keep answering the same darn questions over and over
  • managing many offers at a time, including accepting and rejecting
  • really great-looking listings, with no limit on photos
  • personal account URLs, so your stuff is listed exclusively at yourname.dibs.net

The result? There is no better way to buy and sell things in your community.

Of course, there is plenty more to it than that. You'll have to check it out to see everything it does. Now if you'll pardon me, I need a nap!