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 & sellers

The 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"?

quentindotpy

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