

Ask HN: Review my Startup, Entitea - pfx
http://entitea.com/

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answerly
The site seems easy enough to navigate and the messaging is straight forward.
I don't know enough about the tea market to know how big the niche is
(although there is a ton of search volume on Google Trends for tea related
keywords, which is a good indicator).

Regarding monetization- I noticed you are using adsense. Your content is so
ultra targeted that you would probably make a lot more money with affiliate or
revshare deals than with adsense. Here is a list of tea related affiliate
programs (I have never used any of these and am not affiliated with them in
any way, just thought it would be a good starting point).

[http://www.associateprograms.com/directory/food-and-
drink/te...](http://www.associateprograms.com/directory/food-and-drink/tea/)

~~~
pfx
Thanks for the input, and for the link to the tea related affiliates. I
definitely think that is a better way to go for monetizing the site, I'll be
looking over those affiliate links.

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dmharrison
I liked it, here I was slurping my Irish breakfast tea and it struck an
immediate cord ;)

I second the affiliate wisdom.

All teas are not created equally, so one of things that is important to me as
a tea drinker is sourcing good teas, as part of the recipe's would be great if
I could identify and get high quality components or teas based on
recommendations.

To me at least, bags of tea doesn't really sound appealing and isn't specific
enough to make these, eg do I use earl grey, irish breakfast, scottish
breakfast, ... I would characterise these as flavoured teas, but there's also
tea recipe's using components, eg 1 part assam to 2 parts kenyan (or a strong
black) with lemon rind for example which is kind of the level of detail I'd be
looking for.

Searching for ingredients with assam currently doesn't find anything, so could
be a tad smarter maybe, eg find all recipes with black tea in this case. Also
brewing etc is really important so I'd be interested in things like brewing
techniques as well as recipe's etc.

~~~
pfx
Thanks for the specific feedback.

If you wouldn't mind being a little more specific about about the tea bags vs
raw ingredients, I'd like to incooperate this in some way but I'd like to get
a little more detail on what exactly your view is here. just drop me a line at
justin@entitea.com

As for the searching, I plan to add a smarter search very soon, so that it can
recommend other keyword searches based on what your original search was for
(ie searching for assam will suggest searching for 'black tea', and so on)

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chandler
I do like the idea; however, the site has aesthetic flaws that need to be
addressed.

Notice a site like adagio.com (which sells loose teas): earthy colors combined
with attractive closeups of leaves & herbs.

As a tea drinker, the design & color scheme you've chosen really does put me
off. Remembering that tea is typically made by steeping leaves, buds, and
flowers from nature itself, the abstract graphics and pale blue/white motif
feels wrong.

Also, the example recipe on the front page (in addition to many of the
contributed recipes) remind me of noncarbonated sodas (or nonalcoholic
cocktails), not teas; very sugary, and reliant on extracts and juices (whipped
cream?) for flavor. Perhaps you could seed the "teas" section with actual tea
blends?

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rkowalick
The website is gorgeous and the interface is fantastic.

Honestly, the main problem with this website is that gourmet tea lovers don't
use recipes. They buy rare and expensive teas and use time-tested ancient
brewing methods to get the most out of their treasures.

If you want to cash in on a niche connoseuir [sp?] market, you need to cater
to the people who are willing to spend the big bucks to get quality teas.
People looking for cranberry chai tea will produce a lot less revenue than
those looking for a rare cake of pu-erh tea that is over 80 dollars.

I would say to angle it more towards quality tea and reviews of such tea, not
a search engine for recipes.

Check out teaforum.com to learn more, and if you have any questions, ask.

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davidw
Is that a big enough niche to make any money from?

~~~
patio11
Quick question: how big a niche do you think "software for elementary
schoolteachers who want to use bingo as an instructional tool" is? Got a
mental image? OK.

Did you think that there was enough of a market for one firm to make $30,000
in sales? Yeah, really. <http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats/sales-by-month>

Now what if I told you I'm probably only the, oh, call it fifth largest player
in the space?

I look at "tea" and think "Aww heck how would I ever compete in a market that
big?!" Seriously, tea is a multi-billion dollar industry. Of course its going
to be big enough to support an extra person or three. The surprising bit is
that, at Internet scales, businesses you would _never_ have expected to be
viable are big enough, too.

My personal favorite Internet anecdote, from the Dot Com days: there exists a
farm which sells tumbleweed. Because if you need tumbleweed, and who doesn't,
where are you going to get it? A tumbleweed farm, of course. Most of the Dot
Coms have since Dot Bombed, but the Prairie Tumbleweed Farm is still going
strong. The address is, naturally, <http://www.prairietumbleweedfarm.com/> .

My favorite Japanese Tex-Mex place is a little shop in Gifu City called El
Paso. They have tumbleweed, for the authentic Tex Mex feel. Stop laughing, the
owner thought it was important to look the part. And where did they get their
tumbleweed? Well, where would YOU get your tumbleweed -- they went to the
acknowledged Tumbleweed experts at the Prairie Tumbleweed Farm. Which,
helpfully, has pages in Japanese because El Paso is far from the only Japanese
establishment that craves the authentic Western look.

~~~
paraschopra
On Tumbleweed site: "Our Prairie Tumbleweeds are 100% Y2K compliant"

:) -- Now I see why they survived the dot com crash around year 2000

~~~
hopeless
It's also great to know that success does not require a fancy looking website.
My eyes hurt

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djm
Like the idea - tea would appear too be the worlds most popular drink after
water if you believe wikipedia. I've no idea about the size of the specialty
tea market but assume it must be big enough to well in financially.

I'd take a second look at those images on the left side of the page - the
writing in them is a bit too small to read.

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guruz
If you expect a lot of german visitors, you might want to partner up with
<http://allmytea.de/> ... a site that lets people mix and then order their own
tea.

I showed this HN posting to a friend of mine. His reaction was basically "OMFG
THAT WAS MY IDEA!"

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prakash
When I looked at your domain name, prior to clicking on the link, I thought,
that's a pretty cool domain name -- must be doing something with regard to the
semantic web -- silly me!

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anthonyrubin
I would consider adding top-rated recipes to the front page.

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bandris
Left after 5 secs because I didn't like the colors.

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mattmaroon
I drink a lot of tea, but mostly just buy varieties off of Adagio. Don't
really mix and match. Perhaps I should.

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minalecs
agree with the first two.. overall i think a tea site could be aesthetically a
little nicer because I imagine the audience your targeting are not for example
twitter users, but still very niche. best of luck

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shaunxcode
when I clicked on an ingredient it showed me 3 other teas with that ingredient
but it was titled "3 other ingredients" instead of "3 other teas/recipes" as I
would have expected.

~~~
mekazu
I expected to see information about that ingredient when I clicked on the
ingredient - such as what it is, where to buy, how long it could be stored for
etc. If this is where people come to learn about tea they surely need to learn
about the ingredients.

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akronim
is this just straight adsense for revenue? (though I guess you could obviously
sell tea...)

~~~
pfx
As of right now yes, but as answerly mentioned going the affiliate route for
tea-specific things would probably be a much better way to go.

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rokhayakebe
Very nice website. If you could add coffee, you could count me as a lifetime
member. Oh. I would change the color scheme. Maybe adding some brown would not
hurt or making the green more minty.

~~~
pfx
I drink coffee too, but are there really enough different coffee recipes to
have a social network around them? (I'm much more into tea than coffee, and
have just in the past month started on coffee so this is a serious question
for you). I like the idea of having maybe different categories, tea, coffee,
but would there be enough variations of coffee to do that type of thing?

~~~
daveambrose
Coffee can fit nicely here I believe. After I graduated, I started drinking
coffee and fell in love with it. (My GF believes I have an unhealthy
relationship with trying different blends and styles - ie latte, mocha, etc).
However, there's a fairly large market for coffee lovers when it comes to
blends and also coffee machines.

Do a quick search for "coffee machines forum" and you'll see what I mean.

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alexkay
Your layout gets broken when increasing the font size (Ctrl +).

Other than that, a great website!

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drwh0
is it april 1 already? TEA RECIPES????

~~~
paul9290
This is a nice idea and as another mentioned tea trends in Google Trends.

Adding coffee would be good too, as well as others mentioned adding earth
tones to the design.

