Backstory: A client came to us with a unique business idea around selling comics online to fulfill his personal hobby/side hustle. Without getting into the details of his project, the auction chatbot was one rejected solution that appears to have legs. On facebook there are multiple private facebook groups to sell and trade comic books. People manually manage these near realtime auctions to sell their comic books.

The Idea: Build a simple CMS behind a chatbot designed to auction store items, similar to ebay.

Deep Dive: The bot would have a few prompts to get started. The first being list all available auction items, the next would list details for that specific item. The CMS would have to keep track of the time left, number of bids and current bid price. The user could "subscribe" to the auction item and receive updates when they are outbid or when there is limited time left. For the initial version, the transferring of funds could happen outside the system via paypal or venmo.

Validation: We've seen people manually do this with a live facebook video in multiple facebook groups. This would help organize and automate the process.

Monetization: This part is easy. As adoption grows, integrate a payment system and take a cut. Ebay has already proven this one.

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