The Reboot

As we approach the reboot of Trampt in 2019 I thought I’d write up a little something about how we started, where we are, and where we’re going. Plus, I really need to test how we’re going to pull from Medium into Trampt … so why not murder a few birds. Pretty sure that’s the saying.

Blake and I launched Trampt in the summer of 2011, with dreams of it becoming a destination platform for collectors. A single place to find information, get the latest news, have conversations, and most importantly a peer-to-peer marketplace that helps fans easily find the pieces they want. We grabbed a last-minute booth at NYCC, got the crew from Red Mutuca to send us customs, debuted new releases from Ajee & Jon Knox, and we gave away some pretty amazing pieces from my collection. So what happened?

Honestly, life happens. Trampt was always a passion project and sometimes passion fades a bit. I personally spent thousands of hours designing several iterations of new features only to scrap them, start over, scrap them, and start over again. Over the years I realized you have to be honest with yourself with what you want to create versus how people will actually use it. Another huge misjudgment during this self-reflection was my own appetite to maintain the library, edit photos, or publish daily blog posts.

After some serious self-reflection and a giant leap in technologies that weren’t available just a few years ago, I think we’re finally in a place to launch the version of Trampt we always wanted. Plus adding another rock-star developer doesn’t hurt. I’m not being facetious, Chris is a true rock-star, I’ve thrown my panties at him several times.

Enough memories, so what’s coming?

We’ve designed tons of new features on Trampt, but a few will trickle over the next few months after we reboot. Some are insanely complicated to code, and we want to make sure the demand is there before pushing forward. There will be plenty to be excited about, and if you’ve been a fan of Trampt over the years you’ll have probably one question.

When is the f*cking marketplace launching? ~ said literally everyone

Trust me, we would never reboot the whole site without including that.

The library

At its core, Trampt’s biggest value has always been our library with over 175,000 toys, customs, art prints, and Fine Art pieces. We’ve made improvements to the item grids including larger images, hover states for title and actions (adding to your collection, comments, buying, and selling), and improved filtering system.

The Market … for reals no deals

Over the years, designing endless versions of the Marketplace I realized I don’t want to own and maintain an e-commerce platform. Most people think what’s the big deal? Just upload an image, add description & price, then call it a day. What they fail to realize is you also need to build out shipping, taxes, reputation, inventory controls, fraud detection, refund system, payment integrations, and blah and blah and blah. With such a niche market, we would never grow in a way to make that sustainable, and even worse what if no one ever ended up using it?

Single item — multiple ways to purchase

Instead of building an e-commerce platform, we decided aggregation would solve 90% of our problem, and we looked for ways to improve peer-to-peer selling found on most forums.

We group links to eBay, retails, artist shops, etc where you can buy a specific item. Trampt users who link up their Paypal(more on that later), will be able to post direct sales or trades for items.

To track down items simply, mark something in our library that you ‘want’, and when we pull in items from eBay, retailers, or our members post one for sale then you get a notification.

In conclusion …

Man, there are so many more things to go through like our new blog & Instagram feeds, alerts, search, item tagging & comments, plus the whole ‘Discover’ section I’ve yet to finalize, but this post is already longer than I imaged so we’re done for now kids.

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