Looties – a marketplace for tech swag fans

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Hi HN,I'm Quentin, and I built something called Looties. Think Vinted, but for developers. It's a peer-to-peer marketplace where you can list and resell tech/company and conference swag. Hoodies, stickers, mugs, caps, onboarding kits… the stuff we all accumulate over the years.This started pretty personally.I've spent ~10 years in tech, the last 6 working closely with developer tools companies. Every onboarding, every offsite, every conference... I grabbed the swag. I'm a nerd at heart (gaming, DnD, the whole thing), so I genuinely liked that stuff. My laptop was covered in stickers. I now use a computer case to collect them and swap it based on my mood.Honestly, there's something weirdly powerful about wearing merch from a company or ecosystem you admire. It's not just cotton. It's signaling. Belonging. "I'm part of this world." That's why I'm so attached to my K8S sweatshirt.Then I left Strapi, and suddenly I had collector stuff from a brand I still liked… but wasn't part of anymore. That's when it hit me: some of this stuff probably means more to someone else than it does to me right now. And I knew community members (mostly web agencies) who would have loved to get their hands on that merch but couldn't. No public store, no secondary market, nothing.I considered building something back in 2022. Didn't. Marketplaces are notoriously painful (payments, logistics, trust…), especially when users immediately compare you to mature giants.Fast forward to late 2025. I was at PyTorch Conference in SF and joked to some colleagues: "I should build a marketplace for all this swag I've looted over the years." Instead of laughing, they said: "Honestly? I'd use that." What changed for me wasn't the idea, it was execution cost. AI coding tools + modern infra made it realistic to prototype and iterate on something like this solo without spending a year building plumbing.So I built Looties as a side project (I still work at Pruna AI as their GTM lead). It's early. Inventory is still growing. It's live. I'm witnessing first transactions between the very first buyers & sellersThe launch, a couple of weeks ago, went better than expected. We hit #1 Product of the Day, #1 Product of the Week and #1 Product of the Month on Uneed (think PH but smaller. We even got a media interview from CMCM (France's biggest second-hand media outlet), and we're exploring a "Museum of the Best Loot" installation with Station F.Right now, delivery is fully operational and battletested in Europe. Domestic US transactions is maybe 2 weeks away. It's built, currently in QA, looking for early beta testers.Genuinely curious: have you ever had that feeling of "I have too much swag, this is becoming a problem", or the opposite, "I NEED this hoodie but there's no way to get it"?