SellShed shedding money?

This is not how you are meant to do it: Online seller SellShed starts up

The seven-person firm has invested hundreds of thousands of dollars building a website and free iPhone app and was now on the hunt for “smart money”

A very bad sign. Rasing money just to build a website and app implies they outsourced the technical stuff (and the question is what on earth is left), and every change from now will cost money. And they will need a lot of changes.

SellShed does not have a payment engine and does not charge a commission. Howell said it instead encouraged users to contact one another and trade direct, believing its service could be funded through advertising and possibly in future by paid “premium services”

Another very bad sign is that there is no revenue model, so the flow of money would continue. A payment engine is pretty basic for this sort of thing – at the very least for premium listings of the ability to buy Facebook ads.

The app had been download nearly 5000 times in its first week,

Better – but this is a vanity metric. The next metrics to track are the actual use, number of completed transactions and, the only one that matters, revenue.

It’s sad to see a lot of money wasted. Time will tell, but the early portends, at least from this article, are not good.