First off, please don’t call it an eBay competitor. Sure, it’s in the online marketplace space, but it’s going after a specialized segment with a different approach. The startup is called Bonanzle, it’s based in Kirkland, WA, and it has one of the most promising trajectories of any young company in the Northwest. Bottom line: Bonanzle is already profitable, and has been turning away investors eager to get a piece of the action.
Founder Bill Harding got the idea about two years ago to build a website for people to buy and sell collectibles and niche items—things like old magazines, comic books, posters, and jewelry. Previously, Harding had studied software and physics at the University of Washington Bothell, and spent five years at Kirkland-based gaming firm Amaze Entertainment, where he was a lead developer. The idea for Bonanzle came to him when he was moving out of his last apartment and trying to sell off a bunch of his stuff. “My main criteria was to sell it fast, and to sell to people where if they saw one item, they’d see other items and potentially buy them in groups,” Harding says. It didn’t work out that way. After looking around online and not finding a suitable site, he held a garage sale in the pouring rain. Afterwards, Harding says, “I went in wet with most of my stuff, and $25 in my pocket. That was my pain story.”
So, in January 2007, Harding set out to create a site where people could sell a lot of items quickly, and give buyers combined offers and better deals. He quickly found the space was “as crowded as you can get,” and he needed to differentiate his site. “My mantra was to make it as dirt simple as possible,” Harding says. “Take away every link, every visual element that wasn’t necessary. I thought it would compete with Craigslist, but as many an entrepreneur has figured out, it’s not about the technology. I started going after eBay people instead. That’s where it started to turn around for us.”
After a year and a half of development, Bonanzle (“Bonanza.com was taken”) rolled out a beta site in June 2008 and went fully public in September. That month, the site had between 10,000 and 20,000 unique visitors. When all of the numbers are in for March, Harding says he expects to have hit 750,000 uniques. This explosive growth seems all the more remarkable given that there was no marketing—word spread solely through customers.
And that’s one of the keys to Bonanzle’s growth—the site is built to be social and interactive, so people can discuss what they’re buying and selling, and build communities around various hard-to-find collectibles. “Our niche is everything but the ordinary,” Harding says. “We want to build a
