The global sneaker resale market is arguably one of the most competitive marketplaces due to the limited availability and high value of some popular resold sneakers. When Adidas announced its collaboration with Ye (formerly Kanye) West back in 2013, the initial release of the Yeezy Boost 750 sneaker was limited to 9,000 pairs and sold out within 10 minutes.
And this trend doesn’t stop at sneakers. It’s predicted that the global second-hand and resale market will reach over $350B by 2027, which includes anything from vintage clothing to houseware. With this rise in demand for resold items, it’s important for resellers to get their hands on these items in the first place faster and easier.
That’s why Duke University student Lasal Mapitigama created Hayha Bots, an automated software that helps resellers in any market to buy items on online marketplaces before they sell out. The startup is a part of the 2023-2024 cohort of the Melissa & Doug Entrepreneur Accelerator, a year-long intensive program designed for Duke students who are committed to launching and growing their startups. (We also wrote today about fellow cohort member Alleviate Health.)
Mapitigama got the idea for Hayha Bots after his friend couldn’t get a T-shirt from Supreme, a popular streetwear company that sold limited edition items. Once the items were sold out, people would be looking at aftermarket prices upwards of $1,000.
Because of how quickly such items sell out, people often look toward using automated bots that would “sit” on the retail website and immediately buy whatever the reseller wanted. But the problem with these bots, according to Mapitigama, was that they were just as expensive as paying the aftermarket price.
So, even with little background in tech, he decided to create a solution that would automate purchases faster for users looking to buy more in bulk. And he expanded the software to purchase from more retailers beyond sneakers, such as on sites like Walmart, Lululemon and Home Depot. They serve resellers who range from selling shoes to gaming consoles and collectible cards. Some are even looking to buy in bulk for themselves, as opposed to reselling the goods.
“A lot of customers are actually not buying what you’d expect from a reseller,” Mapitigama said. “Most of the time, it’s things that are in stock that they don’t want to buy manually. We have customers buy 100 things at Home Depot because they don’t want to manually check out 100 times.”
Most of Hayha’s bot competitors focus on one or two sites, so that they can automate their focus on getting limited items from their main popular companies. But since Hayha Bots supports over 20 sites/brands, they provide many opportunities for their large and diverse user base to succeed. If Nike’s not working out, they can turn toward Adidas and if that doesn’t work, they can use Finish Line.
Hayha Bots’ wide reach of different stores and products compared to its competitors is why its bots have already purchased more than $5M worth of goods on behalf of its customers. The software is sold as a monthly subscription for $50/month.
Hayha’s software reverse-engineers the sites to cut out all the steps that aren’t needed, such as looking at the product title and descriptions. It essentially allows users to click one button to automate the checkout process instantly.
“It’s really cool as a founder being able to interact with all these different kinds of people,” Mapitigama said. “I’ve even seen lots of people reselling heaters and pool filters, which I never thought would be a thing.”
Mapitigama coined the company’s name when he was inspired by a friend’s reseller group called Sniper Ground, where they would “snipe” shoes from the sites. Using this “sniping” metaphor, Mapitigama decided to name the company after Simo Häyhä, a Finnish World War II sniper who was the most deadly and most accurate sniper in history.
Brands typically frown on resellers—they prefer to sell to the “regular consumer” rather than a third party that intends to resell their products and pocket the markup—and often try to thwart purchasing bots so that they can’t hoover up inventory as quickly. It’s a moral question that Mapitigama has struggled with. But resellers will still use bots anyway, even if not with Hayha.
“It is all totally legal and we’re technically not doing a real disservice to these sites,” Mapitigama said. “There’s actually some interesting cases where sites bought extremely expensive protections to stop bots and as a result, they were unable to sell their products fast enough or they were unable to sell out of most of their items.”
Indeed, brands who try to thwart resellers (and their bots) do so at their own risk. After Supreme was acquired by a private equity firm, for instance, the company tried to make its products more appealing to the masses by producing higher volumes and more “normal” designs. The changes actually made negative impacts on their brand as the demand for Supreme dropped considerably, with a recent $38M decrease in revenue in 2023.
That’s why Mapitigama loosely compared resellers’ relationships with companies as barnacles to the bottom of a whale, where it’s not a perfect relationship but the parties benefit from each other to survive. With this “partnership” never going away, Hayha Bots could offer the next quick solution for any reseller in the market.
“We’re going to continue to adapt as quickly as possible to the changing landscape of retail and reselling,” he said. “There’s definitely a ton of changes so we’re focusing as much as possible on being able to automate anything and being able to make checking out easy on any site.”
