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I mean, affiliate marketing is the basic business model behind sites like Wirecutter, AlternativeTo.net, RTINGS, right? It's not a new idea, but it's hard to bu

I mean, affiliate marketing is the basic business model behind sites like Wirecutter, AlternativeTo.net, RTINGS, right? It's not a new idea, but it's hard to build up enough user trust because there ARE so many of these sites and a lot of them are SEO spam. For the users it's hard to tell which ones are trustworthy and which ones just regurgitate, well, reddit, but add a bunch of ads and paid rankings. If you do this, I hope you can maintain a clear editorial separation and not be tempted to alter the listings if a manufacturer offers you $10k to move their product up the rankings, for example.

lilouartz 3y ago
I am giving this a shot. I have been hacking together the initial prototype. I am going to start by just aggregating the data and at first distributing it as Google Sheets document. I figured, this will be good enough experiment to understand whether people even want this as a service.
- solardev 3y ago
  Cool, good luck! I run a similar (in concept, not topic) "awesome list" that I'm also in the process of turning into searchable/filterable website... very slowly. In my case I'm not sure about monetization (it's important to me that it remain a good and fair community resource, but if it can buy a beer or two a month, that'd be cool). Anyway, if you're thinking of going the easy-to-make route for this initial pass, might I suggest giving Airtable a look? It creates better UIs than GSheets does, while being almost as easy (and in some cases easier) to use. Some examples: https://www.airtable.com/templates/restaurant-field-guide/expt4dCCpeInMwc4J https://www.airtable.com/templates/restaurant-field-guide/ex... https://www.airtable.com/templates/apartment-hunting/expPfTzGnfpwjgWlS https://www.airtable.com/templates/apartment-hunting/expPfTz... https://www.airtable.com/templates/hiking-trip-bucket-list/exppbdYWBVZyk2wA0 https://www.airtable.com/templates/hiking-trip-bucket-list/e...
  - lilouartz 3y ago
    Thanks so much for the tip! Do you happen to know if Airtable documents rank on Google? One of the reasons for preferring Google Sheets is because I know from experience that I come across many public Google Sheets through Google. I don't recall coming across Airtable documents, but it might be just because there are fewer of them.
    - solardev 3y ago
      I'm actually not sure about that (never thought about it, good question!). I suppose you could embed it on a page (https://support.airtable.com/docs/creating-airtable-base-share-links#embedding-bases https://support.airtable.com/docs/creating-airtable-base-sha...) or use a third-party "portal" builder like Pory, Noloco, Softr, Bubble, etc. (can't recommend any, never used any of those, sorry). Airtable also provides JSON outputs if you want to hook it up to a custom web app: https://airtable.com/developers/web/api/introduction https://airtable.com/developers/web/api/introduction (FYI, GSheets does this too https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/cjn-google-sheets-as-json-endpoint/ https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/cjn-google-sheets-as-json-...) If I were doing this myself, I'd probably just put the data in any spreadsheet or DB I like (including Airtable), get the JSON out, and then use something like MUI Datagrid to render it into a nice and simple frontend that I fully control: https://mui.com/x/react-data-grid/ https://mui.com/x/react-data-grid/ But yeah, gsheets might be simpler then if there's an SEO benefit :)
      - lilouartz 3y ago
        Ended up dumping it all into a database schema. I realized that in order to do comparison, there is quite a bit processing that needs to be done to normalize data. Things like identifying chemical compounds, nutrients, etc. This def turned out to be a lot more cost/time consuming than I expected, but I do enjoy the learning process. Since the data will be in PostgreSQL db, I will be able to slice and dice it however I want to export it later to Airtable or other formats. Thanks for all the recommendations!

lilouartz 3y ago

I am giving this a shot. I have been hacking together the initial prototype. I am going to start by just aggregating the data and at first distributing it as Google Sheets document. I figured, this will be good enough experiment to understand whether people even want this as a service.

solardev 3y ago
Cool, good luck! I run a similar (in concept, not topic) "awesome list" that I'm also in the process of turning into searchable/filterable website... very slowly. In my case I'm not sure about monetization (it's important to me that it remain a good and fair community resource, but if it can buy a beer or two a month, that'd be cool). Anyway, if you're thinking of going the easy-to-make route for this initial pass, might I suggest giving Airtable a look? It creates better UIs than GSheets does, while being almost as easy (and in some cases easier) to use. Some examples: https://www.airtable.com/templates/restaurant-field-guide/expt4dCCpeInMwc4J https://www.airtable.com/templates/restaurant-field-guide/ex... https://www.airtable.com/templates/apartment-hunting/expPfTzGnfpwjgWlS https://www.airtable.com/templates/apartment-hunting/expPfTz... https://www.airtable.com/templates/hiking-trip-bucket-list/exppbdYWBVZyk2wA0 https://www.airtable.com/templates/hiking-trip-bucket-list/e...
- lilouartz 3y ago
  Thanks so much for the tip! Do you happen to know if Airtable documents rank on Google? One of the reasons for preferring Google Sheets is because I know from experience that I come across many public Google Sheets through Google. I don't recall coming across Airtable documents, but it might be just because there are fewer of them.
  - solardev 3y ago
    I'm actually not sure about that (never thought about it, good question!). I suppose you could embed it on a page (https://support.airtable.com/docs/creating-airtable-base-share-links#embedding-bases https://support.airtable.com/docs/creating-airtable-base-sha...) or use a third-party "portal" builder like Pory, Noloco, Softr, Bubble, etc. (can't recommend any, never used any of those, sorry). Airtable also provides JSON outputs if you want to hook it up to a custom web app: https://airtable.com/developers/web/api/introduction https://airtable.com/developers/web/api/introduction (FYI, GSheets does this too https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/cjn-google-sheets-as-json-endpoint/ https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/cjn-google-sheets-as-json-...) If I were doing this myself, I'd probably just put the data in any spreadsheet or DB I like (including Airtable), get the JSON out, and then use something like MUI Datagrid to render it into a nice and simple frontend that I fully control: https://mui.com/x/react-data-grid/ https://mui.com/x/react-data-grid/ But yeah, gsheets might be simpler then if there's an SEO benefit :)
    - lilouartz 3y ago
      Ended up dumping it all into a database schema. I realized that in order to do comparison, there is quite a bit processing that needs to be done to normalize data. Things like identifying chemical compounds, nutrients, etc. This def turned out to be a lot more cost/time consuming than I expected, but I do enjoy the learning process. Since the data will be in PostgreSQL db, I will be able to slice and dice it however I want to export it later to Airtable or other formats. Thanks for all the recommendations!