Resale
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Manish Chandra had already tried this once and watched it not quite work.

His first company, Kaboodle, spent the mid-2000s trying to get strangers to discover products together online. Hearst bought it in 2007, more out of curiosity than conviction. Chandra's read on why it hadn't landed wasn't that people didn't want to shop together. It was that the desktop browser was the wrong shape for how people actually shop for clothes: glancing, comparing, asking someone, changing your mind three times before lunch.

The iPhone 4 changed the terms of that argument. So did Instagram, which that same year was proving something specific: people would photograph their own lives, publish them, and follow each other doing it, for no better reason than wanting to be seen. Chandra's bet was that if people would do that with a sunset, they'd do it with a dress they were done wearing.

He tested the idea on Navin Chaddha, a Mayfield partner, over breakfast in Cupertino, telling him six months before the company existed that he was giving up his laptop entirely to find out what the product should feel like for someone whose whole day already lived on a phone. Mayfield backed the seed round in February 2011, when the company was still called GoshPosh. Poshmark launched three months later, built in a garage with Tracy Sun, Gautam Golwala and Chetan Pungaliya. Sun mattered as much as the funding did: Chandra was a database engineer by training, and he needed someone who understood why a stranger might trust another stranger enough to buy her old coat.

Here's the part that's easy to miss underneath all the "social commerce" language. By 2019, according to Poshmark's own IPO filing, a fifth of everything shared on the platform was one seller sharing a competitor's listing, not her own. Not the buyer sharing it. The seller. A woman selling dresses was routinely spending her time promoting another woman's dresses, for free, to her own followers.

That's the actual invention. Every other marketplace has to build or buy distribution for its sellers: ads, search ranking, email blasts. Poshmark got its sellers to build it for each other, because the norm on the platform was reciprocity. Share mine, I'll share yours. Poshmark just had to host the four scheduled Posh Parties a day where that instinct had somewhere to go, and users showed up 17% more during them.

It's a strange thing to build a company on: convincing people competing for the same buyer's money to do each other's marketing. But it's why Poshmark never had to pay to fill its own marketplace with attention. Its sellers already had.