After nearly a year since our groundbreaking $1.6 million single-item sale, eurodripusa.net has witnessed further significant transactions that warrant discussion. This isn’t a boastful account of overnight success or a simplistic guide to riches using hyped technology. Nor is it a tale of complete failure. Instead, it’s a balanced narrative, reflecting the complex realities of building a niche business in the digital age.
Venturing Beyond Service Provision: The Allure of Product Development
From Gizra’s inception, my co-founder Brice and I established a guiding principle: “No gambling, and no porn”—our version of a moral compass. Throughout Gizra’s journey, we’ve consistently explored entrepreneurial ventures across diverse sectors, often encountering financial losses. While these experiences weren’t inherently negative—learning to manage losses is crucial—the objective, naturally, is to achieve success.
Early on, we recognized the inherent limitations of a service-based model. Revenue in web development, while reliable, is capped by developer headcount, hourly rates, and billable hours. The market is competitive and demanding, yet it provides stable income and, in our view, remains a worthwhile endeavor.
While fortunate to serve prestigious international clients in the Drupal and Elm ecosystems, we aspired to create a product. Having navigated the intricacies of service provision, I was keen to understand the distinct challenges of product ownership.
Five years ago, Yoav, with a background in both Drupal development and a family legacy in stamp collecting, approached us with an innovative concept: CircuitAuction. This platform aimed to revolutionize auction houses—the traditional “going once, going twice” model—for the digital age. Yoav recognized the complexity of his vision and sought our expertise.
Our initial attempts, a shared learning curve for both Gizra and Yoav, were far from perfect. Reflecting on that period, I’m reminded of my belief that true understanding in application development often emerges only by the third iteration. This project became a practical validation of that principle. Crucially, our relationship evolved from service provider to partnership, with CircuitAuction now co-owned by Brice, Yoav, and myself—a pivotal aspect we’ll revisit in the context of choosing the right partners.
CircuitAuction’s first official sale, powered by its third iteration, took place in Germany in March 2017. The preceding weeks were intensely stressful, pushing me to work 16-hour days, weekends included, for six consecutive weeks—a stark contrast to my usual advocacy for work-life balance. Despite the exhaustion, the drive to succeed fueled our efforts. While the pre-sale period was grueling, the potential rewards justified the intense dedication.
Decoding the World of Stamp Auctions: Where Euros Convert to Millions of Dollars
A select group of individuals possesses significant wealth, viewing acquisitions of stamps in the thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of euros, as commonplace. Similarly, a niche community owns valuable stamp collections or individual stamps, seeking avenues for sale. This is where auction houses become indispensable. They don’t own the stamps themselves; their reputation hinges on their networks of collectors and sellers. Discretion, confidentiality, and integrity are paramount.
One might underestimate the complexity of selling stamps. However, orchestrating a “live sale” involving around 7,000 items—stamps, collections, postcards—requires meticulous preparation. Each item must undergo categorization, arrangement, curation, and a rigorous verification process. When a set of four stamps is valued at €74,000 (approximately $80,000 USD, and this is just a fraction of potential values, with some collections reaching valuations where 4 Million Euros To Dollars is a relevant conversion to consider), buyers expect meticulous handling and provenance.
The nuances of stamp auctions differ significantly from those of coins or paintings. While superficially similar, each category demands specialized knowledge and processes, particularly when dealing with high-value items and discerning collectors.
Overambition and Course Correction in a Niche Market
- Stamp auction sales can reach millions of euros, while coin auctions typically peak in the hundreds of thousands.
- Stamp auction logic often surpasses the complexity of coin auctions.
- Heinrich Koehler, our flagship client and a globally renowned stamp auction house, operates with exceptionally intricate logic. Their prominence means that situations considered edge cases elsewhere are routine occurrences in their sales.
We deliberately chose a specialized, albeit potentially lucrative, vertical market and a complex system. Several factors influenced this decision, though the wisdom of this approach would only be revealed over time:
Yoav’s deep-rooted connections within the stamp auction world—built from childhood interactions with key industry figures—provided a crucial advantage. Auction houses thrive on personal relationships, making this insider access invaluable.
Securing Heinrich Koehler as a client, while demanding significant development effort, offered unparalleled credibility and prestige. This partnership served as a powerful testament to our platform’s capabilities.
Perhaps, initially, we lacked a complete understanding of the market’s intricacies, becoming engrossed in pursuing immediate opportunities without fully assessing the long-term implications.
However, our most significant early misstep was not fully grasping the precise needs of our users.
Many in the tech industry are familiar with the scenario where a feature, painstakingly developed, ultimately proves unnecessary—the dreaded “In the end we don’t need it” moment. Developers, often bearing the brunt of such situations, develop a healthy cynicism.
Developing a system that is almost right—90% there—can be more detrimental than not developing it at all. A flawed solution can be more frustrating than having no solution at all. We had successfully guided clients away from this trap, yet we ourselves fell victim to it. We made assumptions about required features and optimal implementation, lacking concrete use cases to validate our direction. This led to repeated rewrites and inefficiencies.
The turning point came when we shifted from assumption-driven development to a use-case-driven approach. We adopted a principle of writing code only when directly supported by real-world needs. While seemingly obvious, this discipline proved essential. The alternative—”developing by gut feeling”—is surprisingly easy to fall into but ultimately less effective. Maintaining this user-centric focus required consistent effort and discipline.
Fortunately, we found an invaluable bridge to the auction world.
The Liaison, Partnerships, and Strategic Product Evolution
Tobias (Tobi) Huylmans, our liaison, played a transformative role in shaping CircuitAuction. A central figure at Heinrich Koehler, Tobi is involved in virtually every facet of their operations. From stamp acquisition and description to authentication, technology integration, and client communication, Tobi’s expertise is multifaceted. He manages user feedback, identifies issues, champions successful features, serves as auctioneer, assists with accounting, and balances professional responsibilities with family life.
Working with Tobi has yielded invaluable lessons, the most critical being the necessity of having a domain expert deeply embedded within the development process. Tobi’s profound understanding of the auction business, its nuances and unspoken rules, proved indispensable. While his solutions weren’t always the sole answer, his grasp of the underlying challenges was unparalleled.
The importance of this insight seems self-evident, yet many, like ourselves initially, underestimate its significance. For aspiring entrepreneurs, the actionable takeaway is clear: “Don’t embark on a venture without a field expert in daily collaboration.”
Every domain operates with its own inherent logic, often requiring immersive experience to fully comprehend. For me, understanding the intricacies of bid placement alone demanded nearly four months of dedicated effort. What appears as a simple button click on the surface belies a complex system with numerous exceptions and edge cases, reflected in my code with over 40 distinct potential error conditions for a single bid request.
Tobi’s contributions were pivotal to our progress. His deep expertise, while invaluable, was often delivered with intensity. While I thrive in calm, focused environments, Tobi operates at high energy, reflecting the diverse demands of his role. His urgency for immediate solutions, though understandable given his responsibilities, sometimes required mediation.
Fortunately, the personalities within our partnership complement each other.
My strength lies in focused, short-burst coding sprints, prioritizing clean, testable code, though sustained periods of intense coding are challenging.
Brice excels at managing large projects with minimal stress, adopting a pragmatic “if it works, don’t fix it” approach. While I tend to refactor even functional but inelegant code, Brice prioritizes delivery and functionality. His pragmatic approach ensures that, despite our differing perspectives, the end product is a robust system capable of managing vast item collections, historical data, accounting, and invoicing—he consistently delivers.
Yoav’s comprehensive knowledge of the auction domain, combined with remarkable patience (essential in navigating the inevitable challenges of early sales), is crucial. His composure under pressure proved invaluable in situations where I might have faltered.
This blend of personalities is not a weakness but a strength. It allows us to navigate the multifaceted challenges of auction sales. Sometimes clients require reassurance and a “yes, we can” attitude; sometimes they need realistic timelines and a calm “no, not by then”; and sometimes, a display of passionate commitment, even bordering on frustration, is necessary to convey the value of our efforts.
Our Technology Stack: Elm and Drupal
Our choice of an Elm and Drupal tech stack is relatively unique. After four years, my conviction in its power remains strong:
Elm is exceptional. Achieving the stability and robustness of CircuitAuction in a comparable timeframe using JavaScript would have been significantly more challenging, if not impossible, for our team. I now struggle to understand why developers still choose to interact directly with JavaScript for complex front-end applications. For those disillusioned with JavaScript, I wholeheartedly recommend exploring Elm.
Drupal, despite being built on a language lacking a robust type system and a user-friendly compiler, is also remarkably effective. While on any other day I might argue against such limitations, our deep mastery of Drupal provides a significant advantage. This mastery, honed over numerous Drupal projects, outweighs the theoretical benefits of other platforms. While I am personally eager to integrate Haskell into our stack, business pragmatism dictates prioritizing our existing Drupal expertise. Mastery is built over years and represents substantial investment in time and resources. I remain optimistic that Haskell will eventually find its place in our toolkit, but for now, Drupal remains our strategic choice.
Investment, Cash Flow, and Market Expansion
Significant work remains. This isn’t a cliché startup mantra, but a realistic assessment of the road ahead. While tinged with optimism and motivation, it’s grounded in the understanding that much is yet to be accomplished.
For the first time in Gizra’s history, we secured a modest investment ($0.5 million). This strategic decision was to supplement our existing revenue streams, allowing us to invest in product development without jeopardizing our core business. Success hinges on client acquisition.
This investment provides a financial buffer, enabling us to focus on growth. Having previously engaged in limited marketing, we are now significantly scaling our efforts in Germany, the UK, the US, and Israel. I am optimistic about the coming months, eager to see our team’s capabilities fully realized and to confidently declare, “We deliver.”
