Sam and I met in college at UC Berkeley and Sam previously built an app with 150k+ registered users that allowed users to see which other users, celebrities, presidents, etc. they look like.

We built and launched a few marketplace ideas throughout YC. We originally applied with a marketplace for shopping directly from brick-and-mortar thrift stores. While we were solving a clear problem with digitizing brick-and-mortar thrift stores, in the end we didn't see a clear path to scalability with that idea.

After that, we pivoted to a curated marketplace for secondhand clothing and accessories, but that didn't work because we struggled to find a differentiator from existing secondhand marketplaces that would solve a real pain point. However, while talking to sellers to get them onto our marketplace, we realized what they really wanted was to utilize their personal brand to sell to Instagram's 1B users. We learned that for thrift and vintage Instagram sellers, each sale is an inefficient, many-step process across collecting payments, buying shipping labels, sending tracking, and communicating with buyers. And Shopify doesn't serve these sellers because it takes a long time to setup and update with their constantly-changing inventory.

Therefore, we decided to build a platform that would make it easier for micro and small businesses to sell things over Instagram. We simplify the fragmented process of selling on Instagram into a single step. We automatically generate a website from sellers' Instagram pages and provide unique checkout links for selling over Instagram live.

For example, one of our sellers named Katelyn runs an Instagram shop (@abitchforbrandy) and she used Thryft to create her website (https://abitchforbrandy.com/). She also regularly uses our product to sell thrifted clothing over Instagram livestreams.

Our product is live and being used by our first 45 sellers. Anyone can have access to try out our product by signing up here: https://www.thryft.shop/signup. If you don't have an Instagram account, you can view some screenshots of our product here: https://www.notion.so/letsthryft/Thryft-Screenies-ba1d3d03e2...

Thank you for reading, HN community! We are looking forward to your ideas and feedback.