I wonder if it would be possible to scale the business. If you wrote a script that could flag potentially lucrative items for manual review, you would likely be able to cut out much of the searching, allowing you to target CLs in multiple cities. If he's making $38/hr in one city, he could hire someone for $18/hr in another to drive around and pick up / drop off items and pocket the $20 difference.
I'd be interested to see how well this would work out.
As he mentions several times in his posting, time sensitivity is critical. Minutes, even seconds can make/break a deal... automation may be much slower than a human who's constantly scanning.
Furthermore, it's clear that it's not just "pickup" and possibly "delivery"... the author is making a clear buy/sell/bargain decision on the spot... what happens when the pickup results in a fraudulent item?
Clearly this means that whoever is driving around needs to be trained, and once trained, can be your competitor (I see few barriers between a trained pickup-person and the author scanning craigslist)
Kudos to the entrepreneurial spirit here, but I highly doubt it's scaleable.
With sufficiently good automation, he could be running the automated search while he's out driving around on pickups/deliveries. The search could send alerts to his phone (SMS, email, dedicated app?).
Eventually, you scale to having multiple drivers in multiple cities who spend their work time on the road, with the "back office" alerting them to new potentially valuable postings. Maybe even tracking their general location, and alerting them to lower-value postings that happen to be near their current location?
Given the entrepreneurial nature of the buy/sell/bargain decisions that need to be made on the spot, maybe it should be structured something like a franchise? You sign drivers up, they get a territory, and get sent alerts for their their territory. Several people mentioned paying the drivers hourly wages; instead, you could charge them (per month or per alert?) for the alert service, or you could do some sort of percentage profit sharing (though you'd have to trust the drivers to accurately report all transactions).
Your spot on with what I've been wrestling with over the past months. It's difficult, but possible. I did a trial with a friend in Houston and it worked out well. We made a little over $200 in a day on one laptop. Communication wise, it's definitely labor intensive at first as I'm trying to make wise decisions over the phone and looking at pictures.
It is possible to pull it off, it's just going to take a lot of work finding the right detail oriented/trustworthy person in another city that's in the right situation to pull it off. Hopefully in a year I'm writing about how I was able to scale it to multiple cities.
Could you hire people on www.taskrabbit.com to go pick things up for you? You'd have to probably pay them on retainer to get the responsiveness you need, but it's a way to recruit in different cities.
uhh, automation is going to be much, much faster than a human who is constantly scanning
of course, it can't analyze the data as efficiently, but it would definitely be faster to have an automatic filter that saves time in looking through obviously overpriced or useless postings
With automation it could be much better, with a lot of machine learning: trusting users with whom you have already made good deals, the cities/neighborhoods most trustworthy, the articles more profitable, etc.
