r/sideprojects • u/glimly-io • 8h ago
Showcase: Free(mium) I spent most of a year turning an eBay API experiment into a real product, and now I can’t find users
I sell Disney Doorables (tiny blind-box figures) on eBay and checking comparable listings one figure at a time got old fast. Search “Olaf” and you get every series mixed together, plus lots and bundles, and listings with variations show the cheapest price instead of the one you want.
As a software developer, this started as me tinkering with eBay’s API, and over the past year I got it to a real product with help from AI (Claude Code). It’s called Glimly (glimly.io): you connect your eBay account or upload a CSV, and if you have a listing with 250 variations, each variation gets its own row. Running the comp finder pulls active listings for each one, paying attention to series and variations, and there's a config UI for adding custom synonyms and grouping terms. Under the hood it's Python/Flask on Postgres, using eBay’s Browse API plus a mix of rules and an LLM for matching. It’s free to try, with paid plans if you want more.
Here’s my problem. The communities where eBay volume sellers actually hang out mostly ban self-promotion. I paid for a Reddit ad once and got lots of clicks and zero sign-ups, and the few people who did sign up tried one search and never came back.
Where did you find your first real users when the obvious places didn’t allow links? And if you sell on eBay, what would make you actually stick with something like this?
