[00:00:12] Barry O'Kane: Welcome back to HappyPorch Radio, the circular economy technology podcast. 

I'm Barry, and this is Season 10, which we've titled “Technology Isn't Magic.” And that's because we're exploring what happens when circular economy tools meet the reality of how organisations and people actually make decisions.

My guest today is Chris Lucas, founder and CEO of Secondsense, which he describes as the Google Flights for luxury resale. Secondsense pulls the scattered listings for luxury handbags across dozens of vendors into one place and then tells you what it's actually worth.

Now, Chris comes at this from deep on the technology side. Stanford AI, a stint writing recommendation algorithms at Instagram, and then Harvard. So I found his thoughts on the tech striking. He reckons models, the apps, and the front ends are not the place for startups to build value. Instead, he describes Secondsense's crown jewels as years of clean, structured data on a market and the AI technology to gather then clean that data, and then the knowledge of why, for example, a caviar leather handbag sells for a different price than the same bag in lambskin.

In our conversation, we get into the TikTok video that launched his business and then the snap decision to jump in and raise money off the back of that, why he thinks the cost of building front-end software has gone to zero, and the fact that the sustainability story behind Secondsense isn't actually what's pulling his customers in.

As usual, full transcript and all the links at happyporchradio.com. So let's meet Chris.

[00:01:39] Chris Lucas: Hi, everyone. Thank you for having me. My name is Chris Lucas. I'm the founder and CEO of Secondsense. We are building the Google Flights for luxury resale. Excited to talk more about that.

[00:01:49] Barry O'Kane: Awesome. Yeah, very much looking forward to it. Thanks for joining us. I'm really excited about the conversation. And one of the things, just to remind everybody for the context, this is season 10 of the podcast, and we're entitled "Technology Isn't Magic." 

So I'm really interested on the backstory and why you're building this tech, and then how that sort of hits humanity and the reality of as you're trying to build the product out and building out the business. You described Secondsense as the Google Flights. So tell me a little bit what that looks like now and what the actual product is and who your audience are.

[00:02:16] Chris Lucas: Yep, definitely. So our initial product is a consumer-facing platform found at Secondsense.co. And basically, the idea for the platform came to me from a firsthand pain point. So I am a luxury secondhand shopper and a consumer, and I noticed that the same products, the same handbags were being sold across various different platforms like eBay, The RealReal, Fashionphile, Rebag, Farfetch, What Goes Around Comes Around, long list of vendors.

And these SKUs were being sold in varying conditions and in hundreds or thousands of dollars in difference in price. And basically, that market fragmentation led to market inefficiency. And so the idea for Secondsense was, okay, what if we bring all of this inventory in one place? We normalize the attributes based on, what are the determinants of its price, what is the product, what size is it in, what's the hardware, what's the material, and then, what condition is it in?

And can we build this level of market clarity to inform our decisions as consumers? So if you go to Secondsense.co, you can find a luxury handbag that you're looking for, and you can see all of the comps basically for it. And you can then see what is the fair market value of this particular product that you're interested in based on other transactions on the market.

[00:03:32] Barry O'Kane: Thank you. That's a really beautiful description and very clear. One of the things that has actually come up several times across the years we've been doing this podcast, is that challenge you said that the mess, I guess you can describe of the secondhand market, driven not just by the explosion and the rate of change but there's a fundamental issue there of it's a one of one product. Each product is unique. It's unlike traditional linear where you can rack them up and say, "Here's X thousand of exactly the same thing," but each one has a different state, a different history, a different condition. And so I'm assuming when you say the attributes, it's that kind of stuff that guides you towards trying to provide a price that people can understand.

[00:04:07] Chris Lucas: Completely. So I think that there are two major problems in resale. There's a major business problem and then a major technology problem. And so what you are mentioning is the technology problem, and I really see it as messy, unstructured data. That is the resale landscape and the noise in different product listings and the descriptions that are provided or not provided, and the quality of the images that are shown or not shown. And given recent advancements in artificial intelligence and GPT computing and natural language processing, which is essentially like a machine's ability to make sense of, like messy, unstructured, human-generated data, that is what unlocks our ability to do something about this now. And just quickly about me, I actually, I grew up a competitive dancer, which is just a rogue fun fact, but my life was headed in a very different direction. But I tripped and fell into computer science and artificial intelligence at Stanford for undergrad and grad school, and then I worked in big tech at Instagram as a senior machine learning engineer writing content recommendation algorithms for that, for people on the app. And so I'm coming at this from the tech side, and that happens to be my background.

And so that's kinda why I'm here.

[00:05:15] Barry O'Kane: That's brilliant. And really clear and as much as I'd love to go and talk about the dancing, that sounds even more fun. But as you said, coming from the technology background and therefore being able to understand that problem and see this moment in time when the technology is reaching a point where that's genuinely solvable.

But then you also mentioned the business problem as the other problem. Can you touch on that a little bit?

[00:05:33] Chris Lucas: Yeah, totally. I think the headline business problem is supply and demand mismatch, and it's a byproduct of what you were saying about one-of-one SKU processing, right? So think about The RealReal, right? When everything is one-of-one SKU processing, everything has to be merchandised, authenticated, copy written for it, it has to be warehoused and stored, and then fulfilled and shipped, all just for one SKU that is monetized once.

And what that leads to is supply and demand mismatch, as I said. So someone comes to The RealReal and they don't have the thing that the person is searching for. Meanwhile, they have a bunch of inventory that no one wants and they can't liquidate. And like that's the Achilles heel, I think, of these like reselling and consignment store platforms in this industry.

And the antidote for supply and demand mismatch is aggregated demand and knowing what people are searching for. So hence why our initial wedge into the market is this consumer-facing shopping platform or tool, basically.

[00:06:29] Barry O'Kane: Yeah. Talk a little bit more about that. I can totally see that. So I go and I search on these things. I'm sure everybody listening is familiar with this, you're looking for something and they almost have it, but it's the wrong size, the wrong type, the wrong color, the wrong whatever, and then it becomes easier to just go and say “I'll buy the new one because I know they've got racks of them."

Is that a fair sort of summary? Is that what you mean? And describe a little bit more when you say aggregated, how that solves the problem and how you do that in Secondsense.

[00:06:52] Chris Lucas: Totally. Yes, I think high level, like the consumer shopping journey in resale is extremely broken and it's opaque and there's, especially in this product category that we've started with, there's a lot of authenticity concerns, right? There's a lot of bad emotion surrounding the process.

And so I think by building the technology that we're building, we can streamline that experience, we can make it easier and thus encourage more people to shop this way and unlock more TAM and prevent what you mentioned about just defaulting to retail because resale is too complicated.

On the second part of the question about aggregated demand, so the idea is that because we've built a platform that has total market comprehensiveness, we have all the inventory, right? We know what SKUs are trading at. Then when people come to Secondsense and they are searching for different products, they are saving different things they are showing high intent to purchase, that becomes like a monetizable asset basically back to these resellers.

So being able to understand and like, almost like forecast, but like an inventory management play basically that, Oh, we can see supply for this particular product is rising on the market, it's becoming oversaturated, and the demand isn't rising with it. We should probably scale back on consigning these types of goods, for example.

Or the inverse, where supply is constrained, demand is rising. This is the kind of supply that you want to go after that's showing like the highest margin.

[00:08:16] Barry O'Kane: Exactly the sort of thing that you said that retail, like new retail just have optimised to the nth degree but which is difficult to do in this market because messy unstructured data and so on. 

So let's step back into the technology. I'm interested in your background... and I know there's quite a fun story maybe we can share about how you ended up launching Secondsense.

But I'm interested in that journey of how you went from working in, I assume a nice job in an impressive company to, "I want to build my own thing and take that step out and the risk."

[00:08:46] Chris Lucas: Yeah. Oh my gosh. I can't believe people do this. It is so challenging and rewarding. But I think I'll answer this question by going back to a bit of my childhood, actually. So I come from a family of entrepreneurs. My grandfather immigrated from Pakistan with basically nothing and built our family's real estate business from the ground up and built his suit.

My father independently built and sold a business. My mother built up her own real estate portfolio, and now is at the helm of the family business. So I grew up with that mindset around me, and I think that Stanford and then working at Instagram, and then after Instagram, I went to Harvard to get my MBA.

This was a period of my life where I was, like, collecting all the tools and all the skills that I would need to then eventually go out and build my own thing. And so the genesis of Secondsense was like I said, participating in this market, observing the market inefficiency, looking at homes and looking at cars, and seeing that these are goods we're technically buying secondhand, but our decisions are informed by a level of what is the fair market value of this home or of this car. Why don't we have that when I want to buy a handbag? 

So I tinkered around. I built a really ugly MVP or a prototype that was just for myself, basically, to see if I could do something about this. And this was while I was at Harvard, and a TikToker came to campus. She had a few million followers across her platforms, and I had the opportunity to pitch her, and she put my, I don't even want to call it a company at that point but my project, my class project on her TikTok.

And the demand of people going to the website actually crashed the platform that night. I didn't sleep for a couple days. The next day, I opened a raise. This was, like, at the end of my MBA, so classes had ended, but we hadn't graduated yet. And I fundraised my first institutional round in those few weeks, graduated, got married, hired a team, built and launched the product, and now we're here.

[00:10:28] Barry O'Kane: Yeah. Wow, what did you do with your spare time? 

[00:10:30]Chris Lucas: Yeah, exactly.

[00:10:31] Barry O'Kane: So one, I love that story, I find it interesting as you said, it's always interesting the motivation to do the sort of slightly risky thing. I'm gonna build something and I've seen a problem or an opportunity, and I'm gonna make that happen.

Because that is a scary and challenging thing to do, as well as stepping out into that risk 'cause you don't know what's gonna work. So I always think that's an interesting journey. 

Fascinating that was, as you were going through the education and as you said and your first job, that was you building the tools you said 'cause you always had that in mind. I think that in itself is really interesting. 

But I wanted to dig a little bit more into it because obviously I'm interested in the technology side of these, is when you said you built that prototype. So what we're seeing quite often more and more, and some of the folks that I speak to on the podcast, they don't have that. They'd always describe themselves as non-technical, which is a term I challenge. But they haven't done a course, they haven't really studied that stuff. And so maybe when they're building that prototype, they're vibe coding or throwing something together in a light fashion. But that sounds like it's different to what you did 'cause you had a depth of understanding and experience there. 

So what did that prototype build look like?

[00:11:28] Chris Lucas: Totally. It was me hunched over my laptop in a dingy apartment in Boston, super unglamorous stuff. And actually, like, when I think back on that time, this was 2023, summer of 2023 maybe. something around there where LLM coding tools, agentic coding hadn't really made its way or fully broken through developer workflows. ChatGPT was out, so I was a back-end machine learning recommendation algorithm engineer. I had never built a front end before. That's hence why it was so ugly. So in order to get that up, it was me copying and pasting parts of my code base into ChatGPT, bouncing between Stack Overflow. It was still very manual. That was the initial days. And at the beginning, I just built scrapers. I think that the first four vendors were, like, Rebag, The RealReal, Fashionphile, and Farfetch, I believe. And I built scrapers to go and get the product data, and then I used some LLM APIs to see “Okay, can I detect what SKU this is?”

Let me parse out the different attributes and stuff, and then build that first financial ledger of what the prices were. Now today looks very different, where we actually partner with, I think we're up to 30 vendors right now, and we partner with them directly. We have a product feed.

We're not needing to web scrape. And also the accelerated coding tools are at our disposal. So it's no longer this clunky, awful process.

[00:12:40] Barry O'Kane:  But it feels like often, that is kind of, one, it's the kind of process that anybody needs to go to build an idea, 'cause you can't go from here idea to tomorrow perfect idea, even as the tools massively improve. But there's that kind of messy, "I'm building this just to solve a problem." 

And then you've presented it or you pitched to this TikToker, and suddenly there was a huge flood of interest.But it looked like, like often people go, "Oh, that was cool. Isn't that amazing? Aren't I cool?" But it sounded more like you reacted to that and jumped on it "I'm gonna now build this. I'm gonna raise some money, and I'm gonna make it real." 

Was that a deliberate plan or was it like, "Here, oh, I'm just gonna jump on this opportunity now it's in my lap"?

[00:13:12] Chris Lucas: Oh my gosh I love this question. I didn't have much time to think because I realized that you have to act that quickly and you kinda have to shoot to kill when you're given lightning in a bottle like that. So I didn't really have the space to sit down and think "Is this really going to be my next step?"

I'm so grateful I didn't have that because who knows? I could have like over intellectualized it or talked myself out of it. And it really came down to more of this higher calling, like entrepreneurial thing where I just, I like this quote that says, "If you have a home to come home to, you should be jumping out of the window to see if you can fly."

And I really felt that's what it came down to. I am safe. I have a loving family. I have a loving husband. I will be okay. Take a big swing with my life. And it helps that when you're graduating HBS, they ask you this one question about what will you do with your one wild and precious life.

It makes me emotional to think about. But all of these kind of thoughts were swirling at the time, and then I was given this opportunity, and so I just had to sprint ahead.

[00:14:08] Barry O'Kane: And I find that interesting as well. And my assumption is that you had, and that's why I was interested before when you described as you thought this might be something or something you wanted to do. You'd seen it possible, you've experienced it in your family, you built the tools, you created this environment, the thing came up and you were like, as you said, you just jumped in it because that was what felt natural.

I'm paraphrasing slightly, but that's how I see that cool little story arc.

[00:14:31] Chris Lucas: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. And I realized too, like some of my friends who are also founders or aspiring entrepreneurs were also featured in TikToks, for example, and got some traffic, but then waited until after we graduated or waited a couple months to go out to the market and fundraise, and we've had conversations about this where their own reflections are like, "I didn't realize that that story or that opportunity wasn't going to sustain me." And the momentum wasn't gonna sustain itself until I, as the founder, felt ready to go to market or until I felt like the product was good enough to really be launched. And actually those companies unfortunately, we might cut this out, but they're my friends and like these are their own reflections, but like those companies actually had to shut down because they couldn't fundraise thereafter.

[00:15:08] Barry O'Kane: Yeah, I think that's really interesting and that reflection on I'm not ready or the product's not ready. I don't know about anybody else listening, but I know that I would probably never reach that point if I waited for that point. It's pretty tough. So that's awesome.

Wonderful. Let's come back a little bit and then talk about what happened next, in terms of you building out the product and so on and leading up to where you are now. 

What's the point you are now, having spent the last couple of years building this tool?

[00:15:31] Chris Lucas: Totally. So this is the sequence that I have in my head: build the team, build the product, and then build the business. So I built the team. I think people are everything. Finding the right engineers, the right growth people to rally behind this mission. Then building the product.

So I don't necessarily even mean like the UX/UI and the front end because my belief is that the development of those kinds of things are, it’s like the cost of development has gone to zero, right? You can spin up new front ends. You can rip other people's features, like instantaneously, like the application layer stuff.

So what I mean by build the product, I actually mean fortifying our like under the hood, our AI core, filing patents on our algorithms landing all of those partnerships that we need for the product feeds, right? To build this comprehensive data lake of transactions that we need. And then now, like we're building the brand, we're building the business.

And so yeah, where we are today, we have 30 vendors. We have thousands of users, hundreds of thousands of users that we've been able to reach, thousands of users using it every day, and I guess every month at this point. And I think again, because I come at this from the technology side, my belief is it's all about the data.

I really just care about the data and making the landscape of supply of these products legible. Once they're legible, then they're actionable. So right now it's actionable for a consumer to make a purchasing decision, but for future evolutions of Secondsense and products that we will release, that's turning that supply landscape into something actionable for a secondhand enterprise, for a reseller, for firsthand brands to understand how their goods are trading on these markets for, again because the application layer and the products you can build on top of this data are so quick to spin up basically. We're mainly focused right now on building that crown jewel as comprehensively and accurately as we can.

Does that answer your question? I feel like I went a little sideways.

[00:17:16] Barry O'Kane: No, that's brilliant. And actually, you've almost answered my next question, which was or is I guess a little bit more about what you're describing there is having been through that journey and you have this product, and we'll come back to your vision and where you wanna go next in a second.

But I'm quite interested on your reflections on that. As you said, in the last two years, 18 months, two years, like the tool development, it's just transformed. We've seen the explosion of whatever decades of work, and we're at this real inflection point right now.

And you touched on it there and you've identified the part of the puzzle that you see as your crown jewel, as the thing that is defensible and is valuable and so on. And I suspect that maybe has changed or my feeling is, that has changed over the last couple of years.

But I'm interested in your thoughts a little bit more about that, and especially in thinking about listeners who are maybe at an earlier stage of an idea or a project and they're looking at the technology landscape and trying to work out where they fit. 

Talk a little bit more about when you say things like “cost of some of those things has gone to zero”, where the real value is now your experience in all of that.

[00:18:10] Chris Lucas: Totally. And I think because the industry moves so quickly, it's nauseating or head-spinning to keep up with everything. And so when I zoom out and at a high level and I think about, Okay, in this new age of AI or GPT computing, I should say, because AI's actually been around for a long time.

Neural networks were invented in the '40s or '50s or something like that, but whatever. New era of GPT computing, how I think about the stack is you have the data layer, you have the modeling layer, and then you have the application layer, and you have the hardware layer that underpins the entire thing.

Use data to train models, use models to build applications that businesses and consumers use, and then it all runs on GPU chips and whatever. We see any advancements at the modeling layer, the application layer, and the hardware layer completely democratized throughout the industry like almost instantaneously.

Think about all the foundational model providers, Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, for example. One releases a new model, it's like best in class, best on the market, and then within a couple weeks or months, the next lab releases the same thing, right? Like they operate alongside one another at the frontier rather than in front and behind.

Then application layer, yeah, so even like some non-technical people on my team, as you say, are now technical in that you can copy and paste a website and throw it into Lovable or CloudCode and like immediately spin up an exact duplicate of the website. So like front end UX and UI are, you know, the application layer is also scorched earth.

And then, hardware, I'm not a hardware engineer, but same thing. Like the chips and the compute power are accessible to everyone. We can all run models on AWS and whatnot. So it's really about this data, and the way I think about it is if we can find, build our unique proprietary data that will enable us to build models that no one else can build and then build applications that have build a certain experience that no one else can provide.

And so for us for people earlier in their journey, as you said, thinking about it, like a new idea, I would just really focus on what is the unique proprietary data that no one else has and that no one else can replicate. And so for us, there's the market comprehensiveness, which I said, but then also the element of that is the temporal aspect. So it's not just a static snapshot of the market, right? But it's having these realtime feeds and building like, like Bloomberg basically, right? This is what a certain financial, like vehicle is trading at but for, luxury handbags. So it's a little bit more glamorous and fun than pure play finance.

But that data moat can't be replicated very easily because you can't like backfill years' worth of data and data that's been like scrubbed and cleaned and made accurate also. If it's just like a big mess that doesn't matter. It's obsolete. The proprietary algorithms that we're using also help fortify the durability of our, what I view as our moat.

[00:20:47] Barry O'Kane: Yeah. That's really interesting. And just, when you talk about the value of that data there, data there rather than data layer. One of the questions I have or one of the challenges I have is that it often feels easy to just gather data and just throw it in. But you came at this understanding the market a little bit, so you understood, like, how to model that, attributes, what information you wanted to get out of it.

I guess to phrase this as a question, how valuable is that? “I need to understand the market or the product or the space in order to model that data or gather that data in a way that I can then know is gonna provide valuable products.”

[00:21:19] Chris Lucas: Yeah, completely. It just, it was a non-starter for me. I built that expertise. I don't have formal academic training in fashion or in luxury handbags, but that I taught myself just from my own passion or, like love for the sector.

So understanding what that end consumer will actually eventually want, then you backpedal out of there and you arrive at “Okay, how do I need to structure the data in order to serve that use case?” And I think that also leads to our, like differentiation on the market and seeing that “Okay, if I'm trying to assess what the fair market value is of a particular luxury handbag, I can't be comparing one that's made out of crocodile and one that's made out of leather. I can't be comparing the large model to the small model because obviously those prices are gonna be different because there's more or less material or like the value of the material is, like more or less expensive, right?” So yeah, it was very important in, like how I attacked the problem basically.

[00:22:11] Barry O'Kane: And I think that is really interesting for me because often the people who are looking at this space or looking at "Oh, I've got an idea," they have that really deep understanding. They have that experience or history or understanding. But they might be looking at the other conversation about data and attributes and AI and algorithms and going "Oh, that's a big, scary area that I don't understand."

I guess my projection or my sort of thoughts on what you were describing there is I think those things are equally as valuable. Like it's possible to bring somebody in and help you work out the technology and build that, the technical value. But to start from either of those expertise means you've now got two places to learn or two problems to solve, and I think that's a tougher problem.

[00:22:52] Chris Lucas: I do feel like sometimes I'm trying to, like search for unicorns when I'm hiring people that understand technology enough and then care about luxury handbags or know enough about them to be dangerous, and like a Chanel, like caviar leather bag is very different and sells for a different price than the same model in lambskin  even though like to a layperson they look like the same bag.

And it's like even the champagne versus silver hardware or the stitching on an Hermes bag, if it's a Sellier or a Retourne style, has a material impact on the price, and finding people who care about that is definitely a sport. 

[00:23:23] Barry O'Kane: But it's interesting to reflect that you had that passionate interest, so you built that knowledge enough to a point where you can bring your technical skills along. Anyway, I'm belaboring the point, but I think that's just an interesting reflection for the listener.

I wanted to segue to another word you mentioned, especially when you were talking about building the team and how people are so important and you used the word “mission.” And I come at this conversation very much from a resale and secondhand as pre-loved as a space within circularity, and there being a sort of broader sustainable social value in that conversation as well as the business aspects.

And so I guess my question is, What does your mission look like? How does that fit in? And then we can segue then into how that's gonna lead into where your vision is for what you're gonna build next.

[00:24:02] Chris Lucas: So it really goes back to what will you do with your one wild and precious life? It's doing something impactful. It's taking a big swing and getting to the end of my career knowing that I tried to find my ceiling or I hit my ceiling. And what this looks like for Secondsense is if we can make the market efficient, consumers, enterprise will be happier and better off, and thus encourage more participation.

And like under the hood, basically, there is this sustainability mission or doing something that's like leaving society and the planet at, like a net better position than had we not built this level of market clarity and we kept it as this like very opaque, defunct system. 

Transparently, we haven't, for better or for worse, heard that value, like the sustainability value come through as much for our initial ICP in this product category. It is primarily like someone who is price or value conscious and wanting to find the best intersection of condition and price. But it is something that we view as like our, I don't want to say ulterior motive, but just like our under the hood, like doing this and know that at the end of it, we will have left the world in a better place

[00:25:07] Barry O'Kane: Yeah. My version of that question is being able to look in the mirror and feel proud of what I'm seeing at the end of the day, being the long journey of life. But at the same time, needing to know you're building a business and you say you're building and employing people and you gotta care and look after them and give them opportunities.

How crucial is that? Like, when you're bringing people on, you're looking for the technical skills to the role, you're looking for a genuine interest or understanding in the product and the space you're working in. But how important is that ulterior motive in your team as well?

Or are you just seeing that as a personal motivator?

[00:25:35] Chris Lucas: I would honestly say the latter. I think like the thing that is actually most important for when I'm thinking about hiring and the people I brought on is it's cheesy, but like grit and resilience and like I, I just ask people flat out, I'm like: What's the hardest thing you've ever done? And just see what they say, and I've gotten a whole range of answers. 

Like I remember one person said that the hardest thing they've ever done was like received, like constructive feedback at work, for example. I was like: “Ugh, okay, sorry, like that's not gonna cut it, like gonna cut it.” And then I spoke to someone who said “Oh, for three years I built, I bootstrapped this salad making business out of my apartment and I would wake up at 4:00 AM, I would make salads until 7:00 AM.

I would deliver them throughout the day until 11:00 PM, and I did that for three months at a time, over the span of three years.” And I was like: “Okay, that's really hard and impressive. Like good for you.” And so that's really what I'm screening for most. But I think the reality is like people who understand resale enough to work in it or care enough to like devote their careers to it and spend so many hours of the day thinking about it inherently have that built in.

[00:26:34] Barry O'Kane: So let's segue slightly then as unfortunately we're running out of time in this conversation, but I wanna make sure that we really explore, like what's next for you and not just what's next, but what's the vision for Secondsense. You talked about, you built this product, you've got a very clear product category, the vision?

[00:26:49] Chris Lucas: Yeah, completely. So yes, right now we are just focused on luxury handbags as an intentional strategic choice modeled after Amazon only selling books for the first few years of its existence. And once we really nail this product category, we built the underlying technology to be horizontally scalable because we knew like that's eventually where we want to go.

So starting with luxury handbags, but then scaling out to really any product category that trades inefficiently on the resale market. And so there are a bunch of fashion consumer goods that applies to. But then you kinda learn as you're going through this process, like there's high end liquor, art, wine. Equestrian saddlery. Like it can really go, electronics and cars. Like iwas fascinating to learn about all those things when we started with luxury handbags. But yes that is the ultimate goal.

[00:27:36] Barry O'Kane: I love it. And what are the barriers? What are the big challenges, what do you see as the big hurdles you need to overcome to reach that ultimate goal?

[00:27:43] Chris Lucas: Yeah. That's a great question. I think the main thing as a founder you get so many streams of input about what you should be doing. You get feedback from every which way or there's competition, there's a lot of scary forces out there.

And I think what I really come back to is just zooming in on just building the best product. If you just build the best product and that is also the greatest challenge to overcome because it's like the hardest thing that you need to get perfect and you need to get right. But if you can do that, the rest will take care of itself. The funding comes, like the competitors won't matter. It's just about building the best product. So like for us, what that looks like is really that AI core work that I mentioned, like getting that shored up to be perfect. But that's the hardest thing about all of this..

[00:28:22] Barry O'Kane: Thank you so much. And I wanna make sure that we kind of finish on a positive. You talked about that vision and that being the aim, but what would be the thing in all of that, if, say, in X years' time you were to look back, what would be the thing you would like to point at with pride and say "I did that"?

[00:28:38] Chris Lucas: That we made the resale market efficient. We determine the fair market value of any product in any condition.

I know that might sound uninspiring. Like it's very quantitative, but it does excite me. You know, it's like the meaty technical challenge that has a lot of, you know, societal value as well. That's how I view it.

[00:28:56] Barry O'Kane: Wonderful. Thank you so much for sharing that and being so open in this whole conversation. I really enjoyed that. 

Just finally, for those listening, two questions. One, for those listening who wanna learn a little bit more about Second Sense or connect with you, where should they go? But secondly, who do you want to hear from?

[00:29:08] Chris Lucas: Yeah, completely. So you can find us at Secondsense.co. Our Instagram is Secondsenseco and TikTok Secondsenseco. And then my LinkedIn is Chris Lucas. Please feel free to reach out. We'd love to speak to ICPs, people who love this product category as much as we do. ICP is, like ideal customer, ideal consumer profile.

So people who love this category, who shop resale. If any of the problem statement that we walked through resonated with you, I would love to speak with you. And my direct line is [email protected]

[00:29:36] Barry O'Kane: Thanks again. Really appreciate that. As normal for everybody listening, all of those links, full transcripts, and all the information will be on happyporchradio.com in the show notes. Thanks, Chris. That was really fun.

[00:29:46] Chris Lucas: Thanks for having me. Have a good one.

[00:29:50] Barry O'Kane: I hope you enjoyed hearing about Chris's story and Secondsense as much as I did.

If you want to catch every episode this season, join the email list at happyporchradio.com. And we're celebrating Season 10 in person in the UK later this year, so watch this space for more news.

Thanks for listening, and I'll see you next time.