Listex

A marketplace, where you can describe your intention in every detail using semantic tree and automatically get connected with contrary intentions (you're buying — someone is selling) worldwide.

We envision the economy where customers need only a single service to connect to world's marketplace. Instead of visiting many stores looking for what you're after, you declare the intent just once and we magically do the matching.

It took us lots of time, careful thinking, and some amazing engineering to design our system. It relies on three pillars:

1. Semantic Product Catalog. Every product ever created can be uniquely identified by our system. Therefore it's not only possible to find anything, it's also possible to express customer intentions to marketplace in every detail.
2. Search. Built on top of state of the art ElasticSearch, our search engine matches in real-time all the intentions that flow into the system. Its sole purpose is to literally synchronize ecommerce on any scale.
3. World's Marketplace. Every online marketplace that exposes their data via API can be connected to our system. Semantic catalog creates meaning and we can universally act on that meaning no matter where the data comes from. We believe with this approach we can join different marketplaces into a single network — world's marketplace.

Pain

We think advertising is failing on the Internet. We believe that people know what they want and they find online advertisement's guesswork, tracking, and re-targeting irritating and often violating customer privacy. What customers bring to market is more than just money. They bring what only they know, believe, think, and can say. None of that can be fully represented, much less duplicated, by anybody or anything else, including "big data" constructions. For most of the Industrial Age, companies have been obsessed with getting the attention of prospects and customers. That obsession was born in a time when reaching and connecting with more than a handful of people was difficult and expensive. Reaching large markets required advertising in mass media and other forms of attention getting. This is no longer the case.

Solution

We strongly believe that there is a better world with no advertisement, no spam, no guesswork, and no clever tricks. Where every commercial transaction customers make is initiated by them, welcomed by them, and comply with their own terms of engagement. We want to see confident, empowered consumers able to make the right choices for themselves — to get the best deals, demand better products or services, and be able to resolve problems when things go wrong. The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit.

We build a worldwide market platform that allows customers to express any intent to buy, and sellers compete for the buyer's purchase. Simple as that.

But we would like to go even further. We will give even more power to customers and it will even go beyond our platform. Users will be able to express all their intents, preferences, and terms in a single place and then take this data with them. And no matter where they travel in the Internet or in real world, any web site and any offline shop will be able to read, understand, and act accordingly. This is how we think we can built ad free marketplace and lift today's market limitations – everything will be driven by customer intentions.

Story

You're experienced snowboarder and you fly to Munich, Germany where you're going to rent a car and then drive to your final destination which is Sölden, Austria. For reasons unknown, the airline has lost your equipment. While the airline might find it eventually, you need one now as you arrived late in the evening and there's little time left to get to your hotel. Moreover being an expert means you prefer certain snowboard models and other equipment. So, rather than searching through countless ski rental offerings on the web — which was your only choice back in the static web days, you get on your smartphone and issue a notice of intent to rent specific equipment in the next 3 hours along the route to your hotel. All the ski rental agencies in your matching area receive notice of your intent to rent, and in a few minutes, you have serious responses that exactly match your request. After a couple of conversations with the rental reps, you accept one, payment is made automatically, and contract is signed with your digital signature. Shop address is added to the route on your smartphone. Ten minutes before your arrival rental agency is notified, and it prepares rented equipment to be loaded in your car.

Software

The platform consists of two major parts. First is a finely designed single page website where people are connecting to buy or sell, rent an apartment, give something away, find a job, or just anything you can think of. They can search existing items or post their intent if there are no matching offers. Any kinds of interactions are supported: person to person, person to business, business to person, and business to business. Some serious engineering done on the backend to make it scale worldwide.

Second part is a live web API (real-time duplex interaction) that any business can integrate with. There are two kinds of integration possible — inside out and outside in. Inside out integration will allow businesses to listen to customer intentions concerning their business and react to those intentions in real-time. In a story above rental agency is an example of such business. Outside in integration allows different kinds of businesses building different client applications on top of platform data. Smartphone application mentioned in a story may not necessarily be written by us, but by some third-party developer.

Technological IP and Innovation

Listex architecture design includes two innovative ideas and we call them filter tree and filter query. Filter tree is a data structure to represent product and services catalog with infinite number of custom dependencies between any number of its nodes. For example, if you look for a job on Fifth Ave in New York, the list of jobs to narrow your search down cannot possibly contain coal miner, whereas in rural areas it will. Or if you go to Germany and look for a SIM card for your phone, the list of mobile operators will have Orange and Vodafone, and not AT&T and Verizon. Possibilities are limitless. And it also gives us the power to have arbitrary large catalog on backend and its very concise representation on the client that fits a single screen space.

The second aspect is filter query. This is the form of notation that can represent and describe in every little detail an arbitrary intent. For example, "I want to buy a genuine souvenir in Bhutan", or "I'm looking for an apart on the fifth floor and no neighbors below or above with pets", or "I'm looking for the best deal to exchange my phone for a unused snow tires", anything you can imagine can be represented with this special syntax. It's URL friendly and you can even understand it without special training. For example, "I would like to buy Mercedes CL500 of year 2009" will translate to buy/mercedes/cl/engine:5.0/year:2009 URL. We believe this notation can be simplified even further and standardized. This gives an opportunity for different businesses to integrate and speak the same language understanding customer's intent as it flows from system to system.

Competitive Advantages

• Built around user intentions. Any intent imaginable, be it buyer's or seller's, with any level of detail can be expressed and posted.
• Simple. A disruptive product creates a whole new way of doing something, yet it must be familiar enough so that it's easy to learn and use. It is a single web page application with simple, intuitive and engaging user experience. Every element, every interaction has been carefully designed and usability tested. How simpler can it be?
• Worldwide. Web is a world that can be seen as a sphere. It's growing larger and larger, and yet inside, every point in that sphere is visible to every other one. That's the architecture of a sphere. Nothing stands between any two points. That's its virtue: it's empty in the middle. We want to deliver on that vision of the Web and be able to connect anyone with anyone.
• Privacy. Any user can define their own terms of engagement with other users and they will be enforced by the service.
• Quality content. We've developed terms & contracts feature that efficiently allows users to report terms violation. It blocks spam and irrelevant messages and preserves genuine ones.
• Ubiquitous. It works the same way everywhere. No matter where you're you get consistent user experience.
• Transparent. There are no double standards in serving content nor there locally sponsored campaigns that are misleading to users.
• Enjoyable. You can explore an infinite number of all sorts of things all without leaving a single page. Once you tried it, you wouldn't want to use any other alternatives.
• Costs. The v1 was developed by only two people. Yet it has one of the best user interface designs on the Internet and its architecture is designed to scale infinitely. It is a single application and there will be a single deployment that is accessible worldwide. There is no need to purchase any hardware in advance. There is no overhead cost for running the service. We only pay for what we use.