Venturu
Zillow for the market of local businesses
Details
- External ID
- 45887007
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Venturu
- Website domain
- venturu.com
- Launched
- Nov. 11, 2025
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 36
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.7794759825327511
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
Hey HN, Joel here, co-founder of Venturu.Imagine trying to buy a house before Zillow. That’s what buying a local business is like today. It's a massive market, but it's completely fragmented and stuck in the 90s.My co-founder, Luis, discovered this firsthand by knocking on doors to buy six of his own businesses. I saw it at industry conferences, where at 29, I’m usually the youngest person in the room. The system is built on gatekept information and a wall of fees designed to keep people out.For a small business owner, it starts with a gut punch: you have to pay thousands of dollars just to get an idea of what your life's work is worth. Then, you face thousands more in listing fees just to get it seen on an outdated platform.This broken model forces brokers to be gatekeepers. The high costs mean they can only list a fraction of their clients' businesses, hiding the rest on thousands of separate, clunky websites.We’re trying to fix this by building the single, open, and free platform this market needs. We got rid of the scary upfront fees by offering free, instant valuations, and unlocked the hidden market by making all listings free.It’s one place for owners, buyers, and brokers to finally connect efficiently.It seems to be working. We’ve welcomed over 1,300 brokers who have listed 3,800+ businesses across all 50 states.It's still early days, but our goal is to build this into the definitive marketplace for local businesses, creating the first real source of truth for valuations and making the entire process, from discovery to closing, more straightforward.We’re building in the open and would love your feedback. Ask us anything.
Enrichment
- Theme
- Vertical
- Real estate
- Function
- Marketplace
- Audience
- B2B
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- marketplace for buying and selling local businesses
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial The web directory and marketplace UI are straightforward to vibe-code, but establishing a 5,000+ verified business pipeline, scraping fragmented broker networks, and handling financial verification require heavy data aggregation infrastructure.
What it would actually take: The architecture combines a Next.js/Tailwind frontend, a PostgreSQL/Elasticsearch backend for faceted search across industries and geographic bounds, and an extensive pipeline of headless scrapers and data ingestion workers (Playwright/Celery) targeting disparate broker websites and public business registries. The hard part is deduplication, entity resolution, financial metric parsing (SDE, EBITDA), and automated/human-in-the-loop broker listing verification.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: DealStream, Venturu, Zillow, Franchise portals (Anytime Fitness), Realtors/lease takeover listings
Concerns raised: Site bugs and deployment issues affecting search results, Geographic coverage gaps (Seattle/King County not showing listings), Data verification and accuracy for financial information, Whether passive businesses actually deliver promised returns, Two distinct business models (real estate + operating business) hard to solve simultaneously
Feature requests: Handle business transfer/transaction processing on platform, Automate financial data integration from accounting/tax/HR software, Include commercial real estate listings alongside operating businesses, Expand to include both occupied and vacant commercial properties
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 129 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #23 of 130 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 8 days after the earliest competitor.
- TryNearby: Every local business needs to be discoverable. That $150B market is moving toward local creators. · yc · 2026-08-17 · 50 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- outbid.nz · ph · 2026-09-25 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- I was laid off, so I built a NerdWallet for startup equity liquidity · hn · 2026-03-16 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- Trusted Real Estate Agent for Buying · ph · 2026-09-14 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- DealRaw · ph · 2026-09-26 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- bizmela.in · ph · 2026-09-09 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- I made a simple, 100% free marketplace to buy or sell micro-startups · hn · 2025-12-04 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- Before You Build · ph · 2026-09-21 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.41
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a marketplace tool for Horizontal yet.