

PriceAdvance Beta Launch - rrival
http://www.priceadvance.com/
We submitted our app in October not expecting anything and got asked to come talk to YC. We put together a tight demo, couldn't sleep the night before, waited until late Saturday night after the interview to hear they'd decided to pass (it's ok, we still <i>heart</i> YC), and pressed on. We've been cranking ever since returning from Cambridge to roll out the PriceAdvance FireFox addon for the holidays. <p>We've just launched our beta! And we just landed on the front page of LifeHacker.com (woohoo).   <p>Anyway, we'd love to get some more feedback, comments, suggestions. Thanks!<p><a href="http://www.priceadvance.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.priceadvance.com/</a>
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ALee
So, I put myself in impatient person who just wants a cheaper price on stuff
mode.

I went to your site and quickly downloaded it. Then, I was confused by where
PriceAdvance was installed. Then I noticed it was on the bottom right, but
when I tried to access it, I could only disable it. So, I went back to your
site.

1) Your demo has no sound. I had no idea what was going on. 2) When I went to
Best Buy, like the demo, Price Advance was still loading (understandable
because you just launched and the server calls have got to be pretty high. 3)
I still have no idea what you guys do. Perhaps a short and sweet little phrase
could help out. 4) I think your server just crashed because neither
PriceAdvance or your website are working.

For the brief amount of time, I think you need to spell it out to me what I'm
downloading and how it works.

~~~
copenja
I disagree...

I only glanced at their website for about 10-15 seconds and I understood what
the product was...

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nailer
I only spent one seconds on your site before commenting.

In that time I knew what the product, why it's useful for me, and how it
worked.

Most 'check out my idea' posts on new.yc never get to two seconds. You're
ahead of all of them.

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henning
You're definitely on to something, but let's be realistic here. You're no
Pollground.

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zach
Congrats! That's awesome, although I did get a download error (-228) on the
xpi when I tried to install it just now.

Obviously, there's substantial overlap between you and Bountii, although that
may have nothing to do with why you were not funded. I do tend to wonder how
quickly these sort of strategic interference issues are increasing for YC,
though. It's a lot easier to turn someone down than to risk an insult (or
worse) to an previous company.

~~~
rrival
Definitely something we'd wondered about (re: bountii =) ). Even more
entertaining was that one of the guys from Bountii was at YC prior to our
interview answering questions for pre-interviewees =)

What OS / FireFox version are you getting an error on?

~~~
zach
Heh. Awkward!

Here's my version string from the About box:

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8.1.11)
Gecko/20071127 Firefox/2.0.0.11

Running on Tiger. No proxy server.

I can wget/curl it just fine, and it works just fine on my Intel/Leopard
MacBook, so no emergency.

~~~
zach
P.S. Works today (one day later). Well done.

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rrival
Apparently we've upset ze censors - would love to know what's off limits wrt
mentioning that this was an idea we interviewed with for YC this fall =)

~~~
pg
<http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

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plusbryan
Love the concept. I currently use retailmenot's firefox plugin for finding
coupons for the site I'm already on; I probably am more likely to use
something like that because 1) I almost always order from 3 or 4 main sites
(amazon, newegg, thinkgeek, and grudgingly dell.com), and 2) price comparison
shopping never seems to be as accurate or rewarding as that $10 off coupon you
never knew about

~~~
rrival
Nothing like surprise savings, indeed - I'll put that on the future features
list - thanks for the feedback!

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nreece
Hmmm I thought I saw a Greasemonkey script do just that.

An IE version will help you guys attract a wider user-base. Good luck!

~~~
agotterer
We will definitely be making an IE version in the near future

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nickb
I saw a FF plug for book comparison shopping but you guys did it for
everything... congrats on launching!

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axod
The comparison shopping sector is a madly crowded one. What you have is an
interesting innovation, but it depends how you're going to get users and steal
market share from the other gazillion comparison sites out there.

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emfle
I went like this: Hmm, might be useful as I am looking for a new monitor.
Click. Download plugin? Are you kidding me? I don't have the attention span
for that.

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thomasswift
Pretty badass guys. Big ups on the chicago front!

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blader
This is one I think YC is going to regret passing on. Good job guys.

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henryw
wow that's awesome. keep it up and get to a production version with ie support
fast.

