Startmate begins: introducing GetStall

FLT will be covering the 2013 Startmate accelerator program, which aims to help early-stage companies become enduring internet companies. Here, we introduce Chris Raethke, Saxon Fletcher and Damien Brzoska of GetStall.

Chris Raethke got a good night’s sleep last night, dozing on his new mattress in the Redfern home he’ll be sharing with the other two founders of GetStall, Saxon Fletcher and Damien Brzoska, for the next three months.

Although, that only happened after days of worrying over back-and-forth emails, bank transfers, and couriers; trying to arrange the purchase and delivery of the futon he found on Gumtree.

He found the mattress being sold by an older couple on the site, and thought it’d be perfect for the time he’ll spend in Sydney. But, it turned out to be more complicated than he expected: the couple didn’t have a Paypal account, didn’t feel comfortable sharing the pick-up address until they had the money in their account, and a courier who wouldn’t guarantee delivery until he knew where it was coming from.

In a way, GetStall aims to address some of these hassles. GetStall has built an app which will allow you to sell anything via your social networks. Raethke describes it as ‘Instagram with a buy button’. Basically, you’ll be able to sign in using ‘connect with Facebook’, snap a photo of a t-shirt, and have someone in your extended social network be able to buy it there and then.

The GetStall founders want it to be simple, intuitive and take less time than eBay or Gumtree. They hope the social element will make people more comfortable about buying — you’ll see items being sold by friends, or friends-of-friends.

While all the team are technical, Raethke and Brzoska focus on development, while Fletcher mainly does design and looks after the front-end. The trio first started playing around with the concept while running their digital agency, Projuce. Part incubator, part consultancy; the Projuce promise was to turn a client’s idea into an MVP in a fortnight. They charged a client fee, but in some cases would take equity too. In the past 12 months, they’ve built things such as customer sentiment tracker Client Heartbeat, and MEDrefer, a referral management tool for health specialists.

They’ve worked much more intensively on GetStall in the past three months. GetStall has been running some user tests with TestFlight, but the app won’t appear on Apple’s app store until the company completes incorporation in the U.S. That in turn will give them the credentials needed to implement a more flexible payment gateway, such as Balanced Payments, with its escrow service. Meantime, it’s been hard to test with customers, because of the difficulties of using TestFlight.

“It’s been a bit of a problem because the point of GetStall is to remove the hassle,” says Fletcher. “In one way, we want to test it out with as many people as we can, but we need to wait until we can.”

For now, GetStall will target three customer groups: vintage stores, individuals and market stalls. It’ll be a matter of hitting the pavement and speaking to people. The trio plan to focus on Sydney hipster haunt Surry Hills at first, with its unusually large population of vintage and secondhand shops.

“We’re focussing on these shops which are all going to sell individual items, then we’ll look at market stalls and individuals,” says Raethke.

The GetStall founders first started thinking about Startmate during a week at Fishburners in early November. Some of the folks there filled them in. They went to the Sydney Startmate Q&A night and then decided to apply.

“On the business and marketing side, we are all chipping in,” explains Brzoska. “That’s where we’re inexperienced, although Chris tends to do the talking.”

Leaving their three girlfriends behind in Brisbane has been one of the most difficult parts of the move. Although Raethke says they’ll be coming down to visit every now and then, and will be helpful when it comes to scouring Sydney’s market scene. Other than that, there hasn’t really been time to settle in.

They have, however, discovered a couple of local secrets. Thanks to Chris Hexton of alumni company GetVero, they know where to pick up a Redfern delicacy — the $4 chicken and pork roll — from one rather authentic-looking, local Vietnamese bakery nearby.

Fletcher says the goal is to get to a point where individuals are signing up, and selling things on through their social media account. In the short-term, convincing secondhand retailers with stock to sell might be easiest. It will allow them to sell anything from a couch to a teapot easily, and leverage their existing social networks.

Whether the startup succeeds or not will depend on this, explains Fletcher, as GetStall’s income stream depends on its ability to grow a sizeable user base.

“With our app, it’s the type of thing that will do really well, or it won’t at all. I think the two months in the U.S. will be really useful (for growing users).”