Brian Potter: commitment

Transcript context

…Yeah. Tell me about your eBay arbitrage with designer clothes. Oh man, you really did dive deep. Yeah, so this was a small business that I ran seven or eight years ago at this point. A hobby of mine was high-end men's fashion for a while, which is a very strange hobby for an engineer to have, but there you go. Basically, that hobby centers around finding cheap designer stuff, because buying new can just be overwhelmingly expensive. However, a lot of times, you can get clothes for a very cheap price if you're even a little bit motivated. Either it shows up on eBay, or it shows up in thrift stores if you know what to look for, especially because a lot of these clothes can last because they're well-made. They last a super, super, super long time–– even if somebody wore it for 10 years or something, it could be fine. So a lot of this hobby centers around finding ways to get really nice clothes cheaply. A lot of it was based around eBay, but it was really tedious to find really nice stuff on eBay. You had to manually search for a bunch of different brands and then filter out the obvious bad ones, then search for typos in brands that were pretty reliably put in titles and stuff like that. I was in the process of doing this, and I thought, “Oh, this is really annoying. I should figure out a way to automate this process.” So I made a very simple web app where when you searched for shoes or something, it would automatically search the very nice brands of shoes and all the typos of the brand name. Then it would just filter out all the junk and let you search through the good stuff. I set up an affiliate system, basically. So anybody else that used it, I would get a kick of the sales. While I was interested in that hobby, I ran this website for a few years, and it was reasonably successful. It was one of the first things I did that got any real traction on the internet, but it was never successful in proportion to how much effort it took to maintain and update it. So as I moved away from the hobby, I eventually stopped putting time and effort into maintaining the website. I'm curious as to how you even dug that up. I have a friend who was with you at the Oxford Refugees Conference, Connor Tabarrok. I don't know if you remember him.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.