

Show HN: TidyFinder - brildum
http://tidyfinder.com

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gyardley
Assuming this is to make some actual money, and not just a proof of concept --
sites like this live or die on the strength of their SEO. People need to find
it when they're searching Google for storage products.

You need an individual product page with its own URL for every item, and you
need a strategy for getting inbound links, including to those deep product
pages. You need content on those pages - reviews and ratings (scrape Amazon,
maybe, or product catalogues).

In other words, to make some cash out of this (and the five gajillion other
sites you could set up in other niche verticals), you have to content spam the
holy hell out of the Internet. Not something friendly to the HN crowd, but
that's what works.

Once you've done that, and you have some traffic, you can sell CPC traffic to
online stores in exchange for favorable placement. And once you've done _that_
, you're probably making enough money to start measuring the expected value of
a user for each inbound search term and buying more, paid traffic - especially
when your SEO doesn't have you in position #1.

And then you'll have a comparison shopping site, which can print money - until
Google updates its search engine and pulls the rug out from under you. Print
the money, but put it in your pocket.

Immediate steps for expanding your product selection / hopefully making more
cash - most of the major comparison shopping sites today have affiliate
product feeds.

~~~
palish
Thank you very much!

 _"content spam the holy hell out of the Internet"_

How? (In what way would you go about doing that?)

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gyardley
Well, back in the day, it was stuff like setting up blogs that linked back to
your site, making somewhat-relevant blog comments elsewhere, submissions to
directories, issuing 'press releases', making forum posts (especially with
signature links), making somewhat-relevant contributions to wikis,
'contributing' to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, providing somewhat-
relevant answers on Yahoo! Answers, you get the idea. If you could stick a
link in it, you stuck a link in it.

For all I know any or all of these tactics could _currently_ be the search
engine kiss of death - so don't do any of them without doing your research
first. Search engines have probably gotten a wee bit smarter.

The other, more ethical way to do it is to produce great content (reviews,
tutorials, photo shoots, etc.) that people might actually want to link to of
their own free will, but this is time-consuming and hard to scale up.

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Terretta
This thread is useless without Ikea.

But seriously, Ikea's EXPEDIT series should be in here, at the very least, and
considering they have a whole "Storage Furniture" section, is a better target
than Target.

    
    
        Storage furniture:
    
        Pantry
        Wardrobes
        Bed storage
        Headboards
        Nightstands
        Dressing tables
        Bookcases
        Cabinets & sideboards
        Chests of drawers
        Clothes storage systems
        Drawer units
        DVD & CD furniture
        Filing cabinets
        Heavy duty storage systems
        Shelving units
        TV stands & media solutions
        Wall shelves
    

I was planning to drive to Ikea tomorrow and was thinking about a search that
would show me the options that fit the wall space in question.

Your app is great -- just needs the goods.

~~~
brildum
Many retailers aren't on the site. Target and Amazon are the first I added,
but I felt it was good enough to release and get some feedback.

~~~
Terretta
This is feedback.

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philfreo
Many times I go shopping for something relatively expensive where I don't know
exactly what I want. In almost every case I am disappointed with the typical
online research/purchasing decision and wish there were way more intelligent
vertical shopping engines.

Recently I can think of this happening to me for video cameras, regular
camera, honeymoon spots, projectors, health insurance, apartments, outdoor
camping gear, etc. Flight & hotel search has made real progress in the last
couple years here but there's still tons of opportunity.

I can't say this category of items is super important to me, but I certainly
welcome the idea of making purchasing anything online smarter/easier. With so
many affiliate programs out there they should also lead to decent/good
businesses.

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brildum
I've worked on elaborate projects with the goal of world domination over the
past few years, and all have failed. Now, I'm working on building a portfolio
of smaller apps to slowly build passive income (with the potential for a big
win).

TidyFinder is the first step towards that goal. I'd appreciate any
feedback/criticism/suggestions that you can offer. I value the HN community's
thoughts. Thanks.

~~~
philfreo
Would love to hear some details on how you built it / got your data

~~~
brildum
Some basic details below, maybe I'll write a blog post with more thorough
descriptions...

App and scrapers are written in Python with MongoDB storage. I was pleasantly
surprised with MongoDB's query speed given I only index keywords. There are a
small number of products in the database, but its still very fast.

To get the data I've created scrapers for each site. Currently, only Target
and Amazon are implemented (with Container Store soon to come). Target and
Container Store provide a product feed when you sign up as an affiliate. They
FTP their product info to your site and I use that to parse the links. Using
each link, I then scrape the page to store the relevant information for
various products in the database. Amazon provides a nice API and there is a
Python wrapper which makes it easy to query (python-amazon-product-api).

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johnrob
Is storage furniture the best niche for this? I wouldn't know, since I'm not
in the market for that, but I don't think the pain of comparison shopping in
that subset is particularly high (I could be wrong of course). Another slight
foible - how often does someone buy a dresser? You only have a brief window to
acquire a user between the time they decide to buy but before they make the
purchase. The polar opposite would be something like diapers where parents
purchase on a regular basis. Are there any niches more like that?

~~~
brildum
These are all good questions, of which I don't have answers for (yet). I
created this in response to my cousin (a professional organizer) complaining
about finding products within certain dimensions. If she had this problem, I
figured others might to. Only time will tell if this will actually provide
value, but its certainly not all dressers.

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andrewflnr
Is this just furniture? I searched 3-6 x 7-9 x .5-1.5, which is about the size
of art supply box I was looking for a while back, and it couldn't find
anything.

~~~
brildum
No, this is not just furniture. It is everything in Storage & Organization
categories from Target and Amazon. I'm not sure whether the art supply box
fits that category, but I'd hope so. I do not have the dimensions for all
products as they are not always formatted identically on product pages, and my
parser is fairly dumb at the moment.

As people may notice, there are some issues with the dimensions search. For
instance: how do you differentiate between width/height/depth when there is no
real "front" of the product. The dimensions depend on the orientation the user
expects, not necessarily what is stored in the DB.

These are both issues I hope to fix, but at the moment I still think it
performs fairly well. (and will improve)

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fishtoaster
Kinda cool- it's clean and very focused. Reminds me of <http://milo.com/>, but
more specific.

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devth
Pretty cool.

Make the price adjuster control move in increments of at least $10 (maybe
$100).

