Remove the Friction and the Market Grows Itself

01 /The Concept

Bought launched with a paradoxical promise: "Everything you've bought is automatically ready to sell"

To make that happen, users connect their email to the platform. Bought's engine then scans for order confirmation emails from online retailers and monitors for new ones going forward.

From those emails it extracts links to purchased products, then pulls images, names, and descriptions from the linked product pages. Everything gets added to the user's inventory automatically.

The real magic: Bought's AI assigns each item a current resale value – and keeps that estimate updated over time.

From there, users can play a kind of Tinder with their stuff. Browse the inventory periodically, swipe away the things they're ready to part with, and Bought automatically lists those items for sale on its built-in marketplace at the estimated price.

That price is a starting point, not a ceiling – other users can submit offers. If the seller agrees, all they have to do is drop the item at a shipping location. The buyer covers delivery and marketplace fees, so the seller pays nothing.

Bought launched in Finland last October and has just raised its first €1.5 million.

02 /Why It Matters

Bought looks a lot like Haz ([related review](/review/drugaja-prostaja-mehanika-vmesto-marketplejsa)), which raised $1.4 million in its seed round last May. The overlap is instructive: it doesn't matter that "something like this already exists" if it hasn't captured the whole market yet. If the idea is good, there's nothing stopping someone else from building a version that does.

And this is a market worth racing into. The global secondhand goods market reached €156 billion in 2024 and is projected to hit €346 billion by 2028.

In countries like the UK, the US, France, Germany, and Mexico, more than half of adults over 18 already buy at least one used item per year.

The most popular categories: clothing, footwear, furniture, appliances, electronics, children's products, pet supplies, and sporting goods.

Despite this demand, supply-side friction is severe. While 80% of buyers in developed markets prefer to shop online for secondhand goods, 93% of secondhand stores don't list their inventory online – because digitizing physical items is genuinely painful.

That supply-side problem is what Minimist ([related review](/review/v-jetoj-teme-mozhno-sdelat-novyj-shopify)) tackled. Its app lets store employees photograph incoming items, whereupon the AI identifies the product, pulls descriptions and pricing data from the web, and lets the staffer push the listing to an online storefront in one click. Bought is essentially Minimist for private sellers – letting individuals digitize their own possessions the same way.

03 /Opportunities

Shopify famously struggled to raise its first funding round because investors didn't like the size of the target market – there were only 40,000 online stores at the time.

Years later, when Shopify was worth $100 billion, one of those early skeptics asked the founder what he'd missed. The answer: "You were right that the small number of online stores was a problem. What you didn't account for was that Shopify was the solution to that problem. There were only 40,000 stores because opening one was hard, slow, and expensive. Shopify made it easy, fast, and cheap."

The founder's broader takeaway: "Most people thinking about markets miss one important detail hiding between supply and demand – friction, which prevents potential demand from being satisfied. My theory is that removing friction is the simplest way to change the world, and most people overlook it."

The secondhand goods market has a similar dynamic. Most people have a pile of things at home they no longer use and could theoretically sell – but don't, because doing so requires effort. That's friction. And eliminating that friction might be what unlocks the market's real potential.

So the first direction worth exploring: platforms that reduce friction in the secondhand goods market, à la Bought, Haz, Minimist, or something you build yourself.

The second, broader question: what other markets have strong latent demand being suppressed by friction? What specifically is causing that friction? What would it take to remove it?