Holiday Pause on Yard Sale Interviews
This week's observation: getting interviews with folks is tough.
I'm not sure what the exact take away is from this observation yet, but I have three hypothesis. Here there are, and how I'll test them:
- It may be a "holiday season" thing.
To test this, I'll postpone the search for new interview candidates until after Jan 10 when normal business is expected to resume.
. - I haven't found the right channel yet.
To test this, when I resume interviewing in January I'll go beyond my immediate circle of personal and professional contacts. My gut is telling me I haven't been looking in the right places... like (duh) at garage sales.
. - Perhaps there's no market.
Test by process of elimination. If removing the above two variables, I'm still not getting interest, this may simply not be a good opportunity.
Even after the holidays, I'm still going to run into seasonality issues. Let's face it, the volume of garage sales is significantly lower during the winter.
All said, I still believe there's a lot of room for improvement out there in the fragmented, hyper-local long tail of the used goods market. There's got to be an opportunity burried in there somewhere - the kind of funky treasure that folks like ebay and Amazon are just to big to grab a hold of... and finding it is going to be as much fun as rummaging through the penny bin. Let the hunt begin!