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Thank you for the encouragement :) I tried using Amazon's builtin wishlist feature, but never recieved a notification (I had the items in my Rankique wishlist

by ComNik 14y ago

Thank you for the encouragement :) I tried using Amazon's builtin wishlist feature, but never recieved a notification (I had the items in my Rankique wishlist at the same time and got one). Jep, this is exclusive to Amazon, but I planned to implement BestBuy and whatnot if the concept seems to work (the backend is designed to manage multiple data sources). What makes this system unique is, that I have no interest in squeezing everything out of a customer (that may be because I don't need to make any money from this). I try to minimize the time you spend shopping and I wan't you to pay the lowest price. The replies here got me thinking, this is the first time I'm doing something like this, and I think I overinterpreted what Eric Ries has thought me about pivoting... I'm increasingly feeling naive here... (which may very well be)

tlianza 14y ago
FWIW, I wrote that same feature for Wishpot (price alerts) including the infrastructure for scraping thousands of stores that don't have APIs. It's a pretty interesting problem, but to be honest I never could see it as a product in and of itself. A lot of people have tried. Some spun it as a way to track things you've already bought in case you might be able to get a refund/rebate when the price dropped, which was a nice spin on the idea. But, to my knowledge none of these services have taken off. Fundamental to all of this is that if you want to launch a consumer service and have it "take off" you need to figure out distribution first. If the idea doesn't have "social built in" and if you don't have lots of money to spend on advertising and marketing (which, in the consumer space is considerably more than if you're in the b2b space) it's Really Difficult to get attention. That's the biggest thing I'd recommend to anyone in the consumer space... before you build it, figure out how people are going to hear about it. Most of the consumer business models require millions of users to pay off (ads, freemium, affiliate, etc). So, no million users, no business. Andrew Chen wrote a great article about how programmers can (and should) mitigate that problem these days: http://andrewchenblog.com/2012/04/27/how-to-be-a-growth-hacker-an-airbnbcraigslist-case-study/ http://andrewchenblog.com/2012/04/27/how-to-be-a-growth-hack...

by ComNik 14y ago

tlianza 14y ago

FWIW, I wrote that same feature for Wishpot (price alerts) including the infrastructure for scraping thousands of stores that don't have APIs. It's a pretty interesting problem, but to be honest I never could see it as a product in and of itself. A lot of people have tried. Some spun it as a way to track things you've already bought in case you might be able to get a refund/rebate when the price dropped, which was a nice spin on the idea. But, to my knowledge none of these services have taken off. Fundamental to all of this is that if you want to launch a consumer service and have it "take off" you need to figure out distribution first. If the idea doesn't have "social built in" and if you don't have lots of money to spend on advertising and marketing (which, in the consumer space is considerably more than if you're in the b2b space) it's Really Difficult to get attention. That's the biggest thing I'd recommend to anyone in the consumer space... before you build it, figure out how people are going to hear about it. Most of the consumer business models require millions of users to pay off (ads, freemium, affiliate, etc). So, no million users, no business. Andrew Chen wrote a great article about how programmers can (and should) mitigate that problem these days: http://andrewchenblog.com/2012/04/27/how-to-be-a-growth-hacker-an-airbnbcraigslist-case-study/ http://andrewchenblog.com/2012/04/27/how-to-be-a-growth-hack...