Building A Bidding Platform: Ensuring Quality in the Auction Industry
In this episode of the No Reserve podcast presented by BidWrangler, host Tim Peters is joined by Andy Harbick. Together as the co-founders of BidWrangler, they discuss their journey building their online bidding platform. They delve into principles that allowed BidWrangler to aggregate demand effectively, resist quick gains, add value to the platform, and embrace strategies benefiting the entire community. Additionally, they highlight the significance of automated testing in ensuring software quality, developer responsibility, and continuous improvement, reflecting on the complexities of mobile-centric operations, technical challenges with app development, and evolving platform policies.
Guest Background
Harbick shares his background, including experiences at Amazon and Rosetta Stone.
Starting BidWrangler
Peters and Harbick discuss the genesis of BidWrangler, which evolved from a Startup Weekend event in 2013 at a local university. They also discuss challenges faced in transitioning from a prototype to a functional, market-ready platform.
Ensuring Scalability
BidWrangler has the foundational architecture and key principles that allow for growth.
Technical Hurdles
Peters and Harbick share their journey, including funding, partnerships, and market entry strategies. They also share challenges with mobile app development, including platform compatibility and app store policies.
Evolution of Technology
The BidWrangler co-founders share the complexity of managing platform policies over time, leading to improvements in app deployment.
Navigating Early-Stage Operations
They also discuss stressful aspects of early-stage operations, including dealing with scheduled and asynchronous jobs at scale.
A Platform-Centric Approach
BidWrangler leverages automated testing to maintain software quality and prevent deployment issues.
Quotable Moments:
"We built a foundation, an architecture, and a platform that then allowed us to continue to build more and more components on top of that to serve auctioneers' needs."
"We learned a ton. We talked to a lot of people that had a lot of opinions about what we were doing right, what we were doing wrong, and we came back and ended up asking for advice."
"But if you're disciplined in writing tests, then whenever you find a bug, you write tests for that bug to ensure that that bug doesn't ever happen again."
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