

Ask HN: Review my side project - DealBabyDeal - dabent

This is a mix between the Twitter API and the (closed beta) API for cash back site BigCrumbs.com.<p>Tweet @dealbabydeal on Twitter and the "Deal Baby" will send back matching deals on what you're looking for. Follow dealbabydeal and you can get a feed of the latest deals (updated hourly). What I think is most interesting is that one can see what other people are looking for. It's kind of like Blippy, only before people buy.<p>This took very little time to develop, but I'd love it if some of the smart folks here took a look. I'm debating if the constant update of deals is needed or appropriate and the search is very simple at this point.  Usually one word searches work best.<p>http://twitter.com/dealbabydeal<p>I posted this before, but it was later at night, so I thought I'd try it again here.
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friendlyhacker
<http://twitter.com/dealbabydeal>

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dabent
So. There's NO interest in this? Ouch.

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charliepark
Some thoughts:

1\. There's no clickable link in your post (HN doesn't auto-link URLs in
posts). Generally, people will post a "clickable: <http://address.com> link in
a follow-up comment when they post a "check out my site" request.

2\. You only gave 20 minutes between your initial post and this follow-up. It
_is_ only 7:43 in the morning on the West Coast. People might not have seen
it.

3\. HackerNews readers might not be the best group for market testing your
app. Personally, I'm not interested in either A) noise in my Twitter stream or
B) notices of deals I can get. That doesn't mean that there isn't someone out
there who would find it useful.

4\. "Check out my app" requests are hit-or-miss on HN. Sometimes they get a
lot of comments, feedback, and traffic. Sometimes they don't. I haven't
pattern-matched the successful requests, so I'm not sure what advice to give
on that front. Maybe someone else has some input on that.

5\. If there really _isn't_ anyone who's interested in this, it's much better
to find out now so you can pivot the app or move on to a different app where
you can find a solid userbase.

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dabent
Thanks for your feedback. The silence was honestly worse than harsh feedback.

I'll add a "clickable" next time and time my posts better.

"Noise in my Twitter stream" - I'm very interested in avoiding that and
worried this app won't help if one follows with it doing unsolicited deal
updates right now.

I really liked the concept of capturing a user's intent and using that to help
them keep an eye on deals as they become available. People don't always buy
things the moment they are looking for them. When something is looking for
something big like an HDTV or computer, they can afford to wait days to see a
big discount come across. That's the idea anyway.

