The day a robot sold my Mazda

I had a 2009 Mazda 2 to sell. A good little car, nothing wrong with it. I listed it on Yad2 and on Facebook Marketplace, priced it fairly, wrote a decent description, and waited.

Nobody called. Not once, for a month.

a whole month. not even a lowball.

The problem wasn't the car

A 2009 Mazda 2 is one of a thousand identical listings. Same silver hatchback, same parking lot photo, same "well maintained, one owner". People scroll past it without seeing it. The car was fine; the listing was invisible.

So the question stopped being "how do I sell a car" and became "how do I get someone to stop scrolling".

The hack

I used AI to edit the main photo: same car, same angle, with a woman in a red dress leaning on it. Old-school car-show advertising, a little ridiculous, completely on purpose.

It worked better than I expected. Within a day I had around 50 messages on Messenger. That's a different problem: I can't hold 50 conversations, and most of them start with "last price?".

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Hiring a bot

So I let GrokBot answer for me, with three rules:

The third rule was the important one. It turned 50 chats into a short list of people who actually wanted the car, and they were the only ones who got to talk to me.

Hi, last price?

The price is firm. It's a 2009 in good condition, and I'm happy to tell you anything you'd like to know about it.

ok what about the condition?

Sold the next day

What I took from it

• Attention comes first. A fair price doesn't matter if nobody sees the listing.
• Let a bot do the sorting. It didn't negotiate for me. It filtered, so I only spent time on serious buyers.
• Give it hard rules. "Never cut the price" is easy for a bot to follow and hard for me to stick to at the 30th message.

Next time I'm selling something, I'm starting with the photo.