Bootstrapping a startup with Craigslist arbitrage

I appreciate the post, but in the end it just isn't that useful. It's like "I did all this stuff to sell MacBooks and didn't really make any money, so I started this startup."<p>Obviously you can't do it for long if you're not making coin, but either a more in-depth analysis of how many you sold for what prices, or any success / fail stories, would make this a more useful post for readers. Instead it's all the build-up of an objective study with no real payoff.<p>Hopefully this comes across as a useful critique and not something that's personally attacking. I like the idea, I just want something more out of a post like this.

<i>Find a deal with the data and intuition on Craigslist. Then, meet in person and barter at least $50 off the asking price.</i><p>You mean, agree to $X over email and then demand it for $X-50 when you meet in person? That's really, really tacky.

Properly speaking, this is not arbitrage. There are two criteria for arbitrage, it has to be riskless and self-financing. Looking at an item and saying, I should be able to sell that for more is not an arbitrage. If you were able to locate a buyer willing to pay a certain price prior to purchasing the item, and then buy an under priced item and sell it to your buyer for more money, that would be arbitrage. Arbitrage is a sexy three dollar word that people like to throw around, but if you are risking loss in order to hopefully make a profit, then plain and simple it is not arbitrage.

&#62; Here’s an interesting graph from the data that proves the price difference increases with price: [followed by a graph of nearly random data]<p>Drawing a straight line through loosely correlated data doesn't "prove" anything.<p>&#62; I didn’t do Craigslist arbitrage for long because it was not worth my time and effort.<p>So a more appropriate title for this post would have been "Failing to bootstrap a startup with Craigslist arbitrage"?

&#62; For example it quickly became apparent that a unibody Macbook was worth more than one that wasn’t a unibody.<p>Then that's just another variable. Not intuition like the author claims. Intuition would be in recognizing the important variables.

He posts a math formula, a fancy graph, and even the Python script but barely mentions the end result.<p>I would have loved to know how many he actually bought, sold, and for what profit.

Slightly unrelated to the blogpost, but how do your cameras work in low light settings? I'm looking into a similar system for a business my wife and I run.

I wrote a (fairly) successful e-book on this topic, freely available over at my site.

the word is "bargain" not "barter".