Collaborative Pioneer: An Inside Interview with Gee-Hwan Chuang, Co-founder of Listia

Gee-Hwan Chuang worked on a number of web and networking companies prior to creating Listia. He enjoys solving hard problems and secretly dreams of one day becoming a pro bass angler. In the meantime, he’s trying to earn as many Listia credits as he can in the hopes that someone will list a fishing boat.

Speaking of credits – credits are the currency for Listia, a 7+ million member marketplace for giving and getting free new and used items. Over 100 million items have been traded on Listia since 2009.

1.) How did Listia get started?

We started Listia to solve a problem we were experiencing in our own lives. The amount of clutter and unused stuff in our homes was growing rapidly and there wasn’t an easy way to deal with it, short of just throwing everything away. Specifically, my co-founder James was trying to give away a pair of snowboard boots he didn’t need anymore, but found it difficult using existing marketplaces such as Craigslist where he was bombarded by emails after creating a free listing.

Although these marketplaces are great for many things, we thought we could build a marketplace better suited to tackling the problem of what to do with all the things you bought and used a couple times, but no longer need. So, we set out to build Listia as an easy, fun, and most importantly, safe community that helps people unlock the value stored in their unused goods by trading them for free with other community members.

2.) What is Listia?
Listia is a social marketplace where people can trade items they no longer want for things they would love to have, cash free. The marketplace is powered by a community of people who want to reduce waste and consumption by giving away and reusing their old items instead of throwing those items away. The Listia marketplace is available on the desktop, iOS and the Android.

3) What makes Listia unique?
The biggest difference from traditional marketplaces is that Listia is completely free to use – you can trade your items and shop in the marketplace without spending any money. However, Listia isn’t just a marketplace where you can buy and sell items, it’s actually more of a community and social network where people are genuinely trying to help each other by reducing waste and saving money.

We built Listia from the ground up to be a very fun and social experience to differentiate ourselves from all the other major online marketplaces, and it turns out these features are a huge motivator in getting people to start decluttering their lives. An additional benefit of the community is the safety and transparency that it provides. You can choose to deal only with trusted and verified individuals which is much better than the anonymous experience found on many other marketplaces.

4.) What sort of trends do you notice with Listia users?
The most obvious trend we’ve noticed over the years is that Listia members are trading more and more valuable items as Listia matures. When we first started, Listia was designed for and almost exclusively filled with lower value items in the $1-$10 range as people still opted to use more traditional cash marketplaces for their expensive items. However, as time went on and the marketplace got larger, people started to realize that they could get even more value out of their used stuff on Listia by trading for things they wanted instead of dealing with fees selling and buying in other marketplaces. These days, we routinely see very high value items such as computers, tablets, cameras, jewelry and fashion accessories.

Another huge trend that isn’t necessarily unique to Listia is the shift in online shopping from the desktop to mobile devices. Looking back over the past 18 months, the amount of people using Listia’s mobile apps to buy and sell on Listia has grown over 300% and over half of all transactions are occurring on mobile devices now. The mobile apps make it so easy to walk around your home, snapping photos of items you no longer need and uploading them to Listia instantly.

5.) How do you see Listia evolving in the future?
Looking out a few years from now, I imagine that Listia will evolve into one of a few major collaborative marketplaces and communities that people will rely on daily. These marketplaces will become the new service providers for essential services such as transportation (for example Lyft), accommodations (Airbnb), and in Listia’s case the buying and selling of physical goods. Specifically, we want to build a global catalog of goods that anyone can contribute to or take from.

For example, after you are done reading a book, or after your kids have outgrown a certain toy, or even after you upgrade your phone or tablet, you can immediately list your used item on the Listia marketplace as something that someone else can use, creating a virtuous cycle of giving and getting. With consumption of natural resources at dangerously high levels, the concept of reusing and recycling will play an increasingly important role in the future and Listia’s long term goal is to help people consume less and reuse more.