
Ask HN: My side project is ramen-profitable. What do I do now? - onli
For context: The project is a PC-hardware recommender (https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pc-kombo.de). It looks at benchmarks and tries to find the best combination for the budget, for the parts where there are no benchmarks (hdds, case, …) it relies on reviews and finally coded heuristics (=my judgement). It&#x27;s a side-project, I have a job (salaried PhD-student, finishing this year).<p>The jump from 0 to some monthly income was a really big thing and took a long time. Then everything moved fast for a moment, but now it did not evolve much in a while, and I&#x27;m not sure what to do. I see some options, but they also seem blocked.<p>For example, I&#x27;d love to extend the version for the US by adding newegg as a vendor. But the Usage Terms of its referral program are batshit crazy. The consequence by signing it were for me to have to pay them $20k dollars whenever they want, they&#x27;d just have to claim a problem with following their terms. I&#x27;d have no defense, nor the money.<p>I could also expand to other EU-countries. But I think the monthly work required to keep the database up to date would go over the time budget I have for this project. Maybe if I built that in a very robust way – but my tries to do that for Germany all only improved the situation, there is naturally always still manual work to do… Maybe that should be done anyway, I&#x27;m leaning towards it.<p>Maybe I could just make it more known in Germany somehow? Or maybe the site just needs to be improved gradually and would then grow by itself? Maybe (probably) there are other options I miss?<p>I&#x27;d love to hear some advice.
======
bflesch
Some suggestions for you:

\- Style it up a bit using twitter bootstrap. The main button looks awkward.

\- Found a small company (UG) with 500EUR capital to hold rights on the site
if you want to further professionalize this project.

\- Add caching for search queries (it took ~ 10sec to calculate 800€ and 100€
which might be some of the most requested price points)

\- Add large buttons at the top which show the most sensible price points

\- As the others have said, this is easily expandible to other european
countries. Add a French / Italian / Swedish version.

\- Add some social stuff so people can comment etc

\- Take some inspiration from PC parts picker

If you want to talk feel free to shoot me an email.

~~~
cruppstahl
"Found a small company (UG) with 500EUR capital to hold rights on the site if
you want to further professionalize this project."

Can you elaborate a bit? I have the same problem as the original poster. But
founding a company requires IHK membership fees and tax consultant fees. From
what I hear this amounts to ~ 1500 €/year.

~~~
bflesch
If you create a legal entitiy you will have to pay taxes / IHK (depending on
your annual profit) and some tax consultant fees.

But in my eyes the benefit overweights:

\- all your business expenses are kept in a professional setting and don't
screw with your personal finances

\- you will have a separate bank account

\- you have a legal entity you can later sell to a real business

\- you can use leftover money to (re-)invest into nearby business areas

\- you have limited liability (and you can buy proper insurances for your
risky business activities!!)

Your local IHK will be happy to guide you through this process.

I also started off as a sole proprietor and moved up the food chain through UG
to GmbH(s), and there is so much you will learn during this process. I think
every entrepreneur should have experience with local trade laws and taxes, so
in my eyes you can't start early enough.

If you have any questions feel free to ping me.

~~~
onli
I was thinking in the direction of a limited in the UK, having read that this
is the easiest way. Do you have an opinion on that?

I'm a german living in France, the tax situation is already difficult enough,
but yeah – I also think it is a good idea to separate any project income and
costs from my personal finances

~~~
bflesch
I strongly advise you against forming a limited in the UK. The setup cost
might be low but if _something_ unusual happens the fees for expert advice
will eat you alive. Furthermore UK Ltd has a very bad reputation in mainland
EU because they are used by many people who aren't allowed to form companies
in they home countries (e.g. Germany) any more due to previous bancruptcies.

If you do it out of tax reasons and you are willing to take the risk of not
being able to do any administrative "things" by going to a local government
agency in the town where you live, then form an entity outside of EU for
example in singapore.

Again, I'd suggest you start your first steps in business locally where you
can talk to actual people. There are a lot of services available that can help
you out in person.

~~~
junto
Also, the German tax office will look at your UK registered company and your
dividend payments and artificially lowered salary, and your German tax
domicile, then tax you after the fact directly as if no company existed.
Single ownership UK Ltd companies are a black flag to the Finanzamt.

My best advice is to walk into the local Finanzamt and speak to someone. I've
always found them to be knowledgeable, courteous and genuinely interested in
helping. Explain to them your goals (minimising tax liability / indemnity /
etc) and they will advise you where they can (for free).

------
edent
My personal opinion...

* It's pretty bare bones at the moment. Work on making it visually appealing, letting people know what the site does, language detection, mobile friendly etc.

* Concentrate on your home market - for now. Do coffee-shop testing with new users to understand how they expect the site to work.

* Expand into other Amazon countries. You have .com - so why not .co.uk, .it, etc? Should be a simple way to test the markets.

* Perhaps look at recommend accessories / peripherals / laptops. Might be a useful way to drive revenue upwards.

* Talk to an accountant to make sure you're paying the right amount of tax :-)

Best of luck.

~~~
onli
Thanks for the remarks!

> _Expand into other Amazon countries. You have .com - so why not .co.uk, .it,
> etc? Should be a simple way to test the markets._

I'll give the other points more time to think through before reacting, but
this got repeated below – I don't want to seem lazy, but it is actually not
that easy. Amazon does not share its products api between countries. Every new
country means putting work in a totally new product database, with its own
serials and prices, meaning other products should be picked. Still something
that can be done, but something that amounts in expanding to a new country.

~~~
guruz
Might not help you directly, but I've implemented a GeoIP-based redirector for
the different Amazon countries -> [http://a-fwd.com](http://a-fwd.com)

In general I agree, it's a bit annoying that the same product might have
different ASINs in different Amazon countries. Or even a different ASIN in the
same Amazon :)

Otherwise (in addition to what others mentioned):

* You should also show the price split in VAT and price (for business users).

* Change the display to make it more "intuitive" by showing the casing in the middle and the components around it?

* If I pick 300 EUR I get a casing "Sharkoon VS4-V" without link?

~~~
onli
Thanks. Yes, your GeoIP based redirector does not help me directly, as the
problem is less that the ASIN is different and more that the prices vary. A
800€ pc won't have the same components in the US as in Germany.

> If I pick 300 EUR I get a casing "Sharkoon VS4-V" without link?

That's the maintenance work I mentioned, sometimes amazon's api search just
stops finding stuff. I fixed this one, thanks for the hint.

~~~
purerandomness
Have you tried to outsource this kind of work through crowdworking sites like
Amazon's Mechanical Turk, or Fiverr.com?

~~~
onli
No. Didn't even think of that option. The last time I wanted to automate via a
service like that I found it to be quite difficult, because for example
Mechanical Turk was blocked for european users. And there are pretty much
always decisions to be made that are not easy to outsource. Still, the idea to
consider it is good, thank you.

------
WA
Here's what I'd do:

\- I'd stay in the German market, because adding additional providers and
keeping up with their terms, API etc. sounds pretty annoying.

\- Make it more accessible through small design improvements

\- Try to find new audiences who'd benefit from this tool. Say right now, it's
gamers. But what about bitcoin miners maybe? Or small businesses that need a
calculator like that? The next step is to find where those audiences are and
tap into these traffic sources.

\- Show your tool to "influencers" (meaning: people with a small audience of
100 or more). Maybe gamers on Twitch, in hardware forums, games magazine
forums, in Steam guides (or write a Steam guide)

\- Maybe write more blog posts. Could even be semi-automatically. Say: Picks
of the month under 100€ / under 500€ etc. Try to distribute your blog posts
(see points above)

\- Keep a sane mindset. Enjoy the fruits of your labor, but only do the stuff
that you enjoy doing. No point in wasting time with integration some US
service, if you hate that idea.

\- Use it to position yourself in a specific way. Maybe it's good for your
resume (creator of the popular tool pc-kombo.de + proof of popularity -> shows
you know how to execute and "finish" side projects and think about customer
outcomes).

------
akavel
I see this is now getting off the front page without input from some of the
most notorious HNers, but some of them have explicitly stated they like to be
contacted by email and to give free advice. I'd suggest you try emailing some
of them. Unfortunately I don't remember now who else advertised as such, but
I'm certain at least about patio11:

[http://www.kalzumeus.com/standing-
invitation/](http://www.kalzumeus.com/standing-invitation/)

~~~
onli
I think that's great advice. Thanks. I have enough to think about and act upon
for a day (that thread here worked so much better than I hoped!), but that is
still a good thing to do.

------
greenspot
Great site and even better idea but looking at your public traffic data I am
wondering what you mean by 'ramen-profitable',
[https://www.similarweb.com/website/pc-
kombo.de](https://www.similarweb.com/website/pc-kombo.de)

However, let's not look into how much you make now but instead how much growth
potential this idea has:

\+ One opportunity is to further internationalize the product with more
languages and vendors to other countries. Then you should be able to 5x to 10x
your revs (but quite some work is involved)

I rather see some limitations in the chosen business model (if we talk about
making this thing really huge):

\- Strong dependency to Google and hard to buy traffic since the CAC will be
always higher than the affiliate revs

\- Most affiliate merchants fool you on the affiliate commission (except
Amazon and ebay), so prepare for tough negotiations without any possibility to
prove generated sales

\- Low LTV and customer loyalty if any because people configure a PC once
every one or two years and in that time they might forget about your site and
not using it the next time

\- In general the market is limited, 10-20yrs ago everybody did configure a
desktop/tower, now with all the notebooks, ultrabooks and iPad the demand is
way smaller

\- Content generation and maintenance should be small but it's still there
(costs for one content manager should be considered)

\- And do not forget: this browsing and choosing of the best components is an
important piece when building a PC yourself, it's fun, don't know if people
would give this away

=> I would keep it as a pet project which brings some revenue but look for new
business models where you can adapt what you learned in this process and
improve on mentioned points

~~~
onli
I see no real traffic data on that page ;) But yes, this is very far from a
high traffic website, and the main profit comes from using it as a tool to
build recommendations for user asking for them on other sites, like reddit.

I agree with all your limitations, even the potential problem with affiliate
programs – while the one I work with is generally trustworthy, I indeed
observed sales that they never registered.

I learned a lot from the site and it was worth it even if that were the end
now, lessons I'd take to the next project, but I feel there is still a lot
that can be done without going all in and counting on it getting huge.

~~~
noauth
I was development lead for an affiliate program that never launched. One of
the requirements was a percentage and threshold to basically hide actions that
should have generated revenue for the affiliate. I refused initially but then
the customer insisted that this was industry standard. I don't know if my
experience is an outlier but it definately happens.

------
sokoloff
I wouldn't sweat the Newegg terms if you're playing the game "straight". Those
terms are for things like browser-hijackers and other underhanded means of
generating false affiliate referrals.

(Yes, it's great that you're reading the full terms of agreements. Too many
people don't. But at the same time, you can't let ambiguous worst-case what-
ifs paralyze you in business, or you'll never get anywhere. You can't steal
second base while keeping your foot safely on first and all that.)

~~~
onli
It's too easy to be in non-compliance with those terms by accident. I
absolutely intend to use them in a honest way, but just think of terms like
having prices up to date, which can collide with caching, and easy stuff like
that. Or a wrong formulated notice in the impressum that is than counted as
wrong representation. I'm not willing to risk my personal existence by
accepting draconian terms that would be illegal in europe.

But I'll reconsider if I manage to get a proper barrier between the finances
of the site and my own.

~~~
beachstartup
first of all, to echo the gp, companies don't go after their own biz dev
partners unless something has seriously gone wrong, most likely some kind of
theft.

second, call them up and talk to someone. it's called 'business development'.
you can negotiate anything. just say this part really scares you, and that you
want to edit it, and that it may even be illegal in europe.

business protip: send them a european-legal version of their own contract that
you feel comfortable signing. they might just say "sure, let's use this." \--
it really can be that simple. you might find out they're planning an expansion
into europe and you're their first partner.

and yes, form a limited liability company or a corporation, don't put your own
money at risk. there's way, way scarier things in the world than newegg's
marketing department, i assure you.

------
za_creature
Hello brother from another mother. I did a similar thing for my bachelor
thesis ( source available at [https://github.com/za-
creature/puls](https://github.com/za-creature/puls) ). Mind going into the
details of how you designed yours?

Mine is extracting equations from benchmarks of the form ax = b where a and b
are components, picking a random "unit" component and fixing it to 1, and then
solving the overdetermined system in a least-squares sense. I designed it that
way to take all equations into account (e.g. multiple benchmarks can and
should include the same components with a potential different "factor") and to
handle like a graph (as long as there's a benchmark-path between any two
components, they are directly comparable)

Edit: to ensure the graph is always connected, an additional low-weight
"metadata" benchmark is generated from the technical specs (e.g. amount of
ram, cpu speed) and the total score of a computer is calculated as the
weighted sum of all components, using target-specific weight factors (e.g. a
gaming pc will want a fast cpu / gpu whereas a multimedia pc will want more
capacity)

~~~
onli
Sure. I can give you a high level overview, but I fear that will be
disappointing for you. It is not solving equations directly, thinking in
graphs or doing anything fancy, but iteratively goes through the options and
compares them. O(n²) and all.

First the benchmarks. I also added had to add a factor, because a benchmark
where the fastest processor (in the following, all that is said about
processors also counts for gpus) is not the fastest processor the recommender
knows (that happens often, as not many benchmarks include Intels 5960X) would
otherwise move its processors too much to the top. That happens by using the
one benchmark that contains all existing processors as a reference point in
that case. There is still the problem that many benchmarks are sparse, to
counteract that there is logic in there to prevent illogical results (stuff
like: assert that the 4690 is faster than the 4590). The benchmarks then
compute a normalized result from 0 to 10.

When a recommendation is requested, he first picks the peripherals based on
the budget. With the remaining money he then goes through all gpus and
mainboard and picks the best possible combinations, with a factor favoring the
gpu, and minimizing the difference between them.

The value in doing it like that is how the results are tuneable by code, and
that it is possible to pretty exactly say which configurations to build for
which price point.

~~~
za_creature
Not disappointing at all; solving the system in a least-squares sense is
O(n^3) and choosing the optimal setup is NP-complete (didn't prove it, but I'm
_pretty_ sure it involves backtracking, especially when you consider stuff
like adding a PCIe SATA controller to maximize the total amount of storage
available).

I originally wanted to monetize the idea as well, but gave up and open sourced
my solution due to the labor-intensiveness of adding and maintaining
components and benchmarks.

I can't really help you business-wise, but from a technical standpoint, my
suggestion would be to split up the problem in two (sorry for the formal
definitions, this is mostly translated from my paper):

1\. Given n benchmarks each containing n[i] components each, assign a score to
each component so as to obtain a total ordering that minimizes the error (as
you mentioned above, one processor may be _way_ faster than another in one
benchmark, but be completely outclassed in 50 others).

2\. Given n desired component classes, each containing n[i] components as well
as their bus requirements or offerings (I stretched the 'bus' definition to
also include stuff like S-ATA, 3.5'' slots, ATX power cables, etc), their
performance relative to components of the same class (obtained at step 1) and
their price, obtain a compatible component subset that:

i) satisfies sum(Price[i]) < max_price

ii) satisfies sum(Power[i]) > 0 (assuming PSUs provide positive power and
everything else negative power; I used watts here but if you're feeling
badass, you can extend this to amps on the 3.3 / 5 / 12V rails)

iii) maximizes weighted-sum(Performance[i]), given a certain target (this is
how I implemented the "I don't want to play games" feature requested by
another HN poster; in this case, each target would define a weight for each
component class)

Since 2. is most likely NP-complete (again, didn't prove it), my approximate
solution was a greedy PTAS knapsack (
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knapsack_problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knapsack_problem)
) that stored partial systems in one of 3 heaps of about 10k items each: one
sorted by cost (to ensure the cheapest system is displayed in the event of a
low budget), one sorted by performance (to ensure the best system is
displayed, in the event of a high budget) and one sorted by performance/cost
ratio (to hopefully obtain the best-bang-for-your-buck system).

Anyway, best of luck! Throw me a tweet (same username as HN) if you make it
big :)

------
nitrogen
From experience: do not under any circumstances start living on ramen.

~~~
onli
Hey, a joke on HN ;)

Of course not. It's a nod to the discussion in
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11615639](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11615639),
from their reference to the idea to get a startup to ramen-profatibility fast
I got the idea to ask here.

------
jakobegger
Here's my advise:

* Don't worry too much about crazy contracts / terms of service. If you run a business you will end up signing all kinds of ridiculous contracts. If you are worried about the consequences, get a normal job instead.

* Don't expand to other markets before you've managed to crack one market. Right now you can experiment easily with the site, if you expand to many countries making changes will get a lot harder.

* Who are your customers? Who is using your website? This is the most important question, and further development of your website should start from here. Are you targeting hard core gamers who want to get the highest frame rate for a budget? Or are you targeting parents who want to find out how much they have to spend on a PC that runs Minecraft for their kids?

* What are you doing to promote your website? How do people find out about your website? I see you have this bbcode widget, so I assume you are hoping that forum users use your site to share configurations. Are you doing anything so people can share configurations on Facebook / WhatsApp / whatever people use to communicate today?

~~~
lgieron
> * Don't worry too much about crazy contracts / terms of service. If you run
> a business you will end up signing all kinds of ridiculous contracts. If you
> are worried about the consequences, get a normal job instead.

Anyone here's been doing that, and is still running a business after 10 years?

~~~
codingdave
No, that is terrible advice. People will try to throw ridiculous things in
contracts, but as a business owner, it is your responsibility to read them,
and negotiate adjustments. It is also your responsibility to know what is/is
not acceptable for your business, and know when to walk away from a
negotiation.

~~~
Kiro
Sure, but sometimes it's worth the risk to sign these contracts to land a big
customer, even if they are unfavorable and may ruin your business. Especially
if the alternative is no viable business at all (which would be the case for
me).

------
asimuvPR
What are your plans for the next five years?

Do you:

\- Want to keep this as a side-project and hope to make enough to pay the
rent?

\- Want to turn it into something bigger that will bring in an equal amount of
money as your job?

\- Want to turn it into a business that is your sole income source?

\- Want to turn it into a business and then keep a part-time job?

The answer to this question will point you in the right direction. Think in
terms of five years and work back from there.

------
tamersalama
Also worth investigation the Intellectual Property rights of your work. I
remember that some universities own the right to work produced by their PhD
candidates, be it on or off premises.

------
yompers888
As a small thing, the site returns a server error if you enter >=$1350. It may
be that there are very few people searching in that range, and you're not
really worried about it. If it were me, I'd link to your most expensive build
(the one for $1350) and then give a small message suggesting where extra money
can be spend (SLI, crazy case, more HDD, RAM disk, etc.)

Edit: Now that I see the 'improve' and 'cheaper' buttons, and that they let
you exceed $1340 if you manually 'improve' components, I'd be more concerned
about the server error. Also, to make the 'improve' and 'cheaper' buttons more
obvious, I'd put a prominent banner right above the build you return, where
you point that function out to the user.

~~~
onli
That's a bug. I have a limit at 4000€, the german site is working fine. I
wonder what is breaking there… thanks for reporting it :)

------
aharonovich
I'm an affiliate marketer. I would recommend that you either partner with an
expert, or do the following yourself (that's what I would do if I was hired to
monetize you) 1\. Germany is a lean poc. You made your point. Move on to the
real market- u.s. 2\. Hire a cheap designer from fiverr/similar service. 3\.
Apply to all major related affiliate programs (eg amazon, cj etc) 4\. Start
making money. 5\. Use profits to: 5.1 improve design 5.2 improve conversion
5.3 improve user value using a/b testing with different programs. 5.4 retarget
your visitors with all said programs. If you wish to speak to me further about
this I'm at aharonovich@gmail Best of luck

------
tedmiston
First off, this is a neat project. I don't buy hardware often, but I think
your idea creates value here (and could be applied to other industries too).

I think sharing some of your metrics with us should influence the advice.
There is a lot of advice in this thread, but I don't know that it's _good_
advice.

\- How long are your users staying on the site for a typical session?

\- How many (monthly) actively users do you have? Do users return or really
just come once?

\- Where do your users come from? (traffic source)

\- What are the typical price ranges your users search for?

\- What kind of parts bring in the most revenue?

\- etc.

Essentially I think you should put together the answers to the most common
questions an investor would ask for a seed stage pitch deck.

------
aavotins
First of all - kudos for starting a pet project that's actually ramen
profitable! At least it's not collecting dust and slowly syphoning out your
money, which is the case with many "toys" that we all love to create.

I also think that you should make the site more visually appealing, it looks
like what it is - a tool, but what you need is to create a product. Give users
some eye candy and maybe decide what's best for them if they can't do it
themselves. They came for advice after all, right?

~~~
onli
I note the suggestion to get a nicer design, and that this gets repeated. You
should've seen it in the beginning ;)

> They came for advice after all, right?

Exactly. And that's the idea of the site, the recommendation for a giving
budget is that advice. You'd expand on that?

------
kodfodrasz
Really nice!

There are many good suggestions in the comments. I'd actually put out some
roadmap to the site, and suggest that it is "beta" and is under development,
and maybe create an uservoice page and link that from the roadmap, noting that
new ideas are welcome, and can be voted on.

People like to feel involved in something they like. If they stayed for this
long, they may like this, and you may get a hang of what people are missing
from the site. (but don't implement every suggestion, just read them)

------
tmaly
I would improve the look a little more and try to find ways to get more
visitors to the site.

Perhaps making the social buttons a little bit more prominent?

I was going to suggest using Google tag manager if you were using Google
analytics to get an idea of how well visitors are performing certain goals,
but I see you are using piwik. I am not sure if piwik has these same types of
features.

I do not speak German, but I did like I could switch to English. However, I
noticed the hover menus still display in German.

------
ape-box
I would go with adding a bit of diversification:

from simple peripherals suggestions (keyboards with different switches,
mouses, headphones, etc) to a more complex configurator based on games genre,
and an "upgrade" picker based on your current setup ... this way you keep your
current maintenance efforts but amplify you marketable value.

~~~
onli
Sounds good to me. Thanks. I'll have to see how I can add this into to Ui
without just making it bigger and bigger.

------
amelius
I'm wondering how your site can come up with good deals when the cheapest
combinations provided by the hardware stores are often fixed. I.e., the stores
determine the discount on combinations, so picking your own combinations will
only make everything more expensive (?)

(Yes, combinations often include software, but certainly not always).

~~~
onli
Thankfully those deals are a US-specific things. They exist in germany but are
very rare. In 99% of all cases to ignore that does not harm the result.

For the US, pcpartpicker uses them, which means they are either coding that
manually (they have a staff of several people) or are using API capabilities
to get that info.

------
hutzlibu
I also would improve your site, first, before expanding.

Also, if I search for a PC at 460 € ... I get a CPU recommendation for 120,90
€ But when I inrease the limit to 660, I get a worse CPU for EUR 58,32 ... but
with a much better GPU. But I think the great GPU won't be of much use with
that slow CPU ..

~~~
onli
Thanks. Working further on the core of the site is a valid option.

To balance those properly, that's the hard problem. The first was a FX-8320E
with a R7 370, the second a Pentium G4400 with a GTX 970. The first is okay in
my eyes. The second would be better with an i3-6100 instead of the Pentium.

~~~
ivl
Just as a suggestions for the balance there, why not set a price ratio between
the two? It would be a little odd to have a CPU that's 20% the cost of the
GPU, so why not target something above that point?

~~~
onli
I just implemented that, as an additional small factor to find the
recommendation. It seems to work very well. Thanks!

~~~
ivl
Awesome! Glad to hear it helped.

------
3eto
Hey dude, nice project, congrats. ended up messing about quickly with it,
probably not the direction you want to take it, but have a look anyways. best
of luck.

[http://imgur.com/vEI6OED](http://imgur.com/vEI6OED)

~~~
onli
Thanks man :) It's not the visual style I want to have, but I like the idea
for the modified structure

~~~
3eto
cool, it's fun to play with the arrows, might be something in there...this one
is a bit convoluted but gives you another idea.

[http://imgur.com/O2JnMUH](http://imgur.com/O2JnMUH)

------
eps
What you have a little more than a proof of concept and it's a long way to
being able to stack up to established sites like
[https://pcpartpicker.com](https://pcpartpicker.com).

If you do something that they don't, then either they may just copy the idea
or they might've already done and discarded it. That is, you must understand
your competitive edge and what it would cost to obtain and maintain it.

And if you don't have anything unique to offer, then you must know how it is
that you are planning to grow, because once you think it through there's a
good chance it either won't be viable, interesting or both.

------
gramakri
I don't have specific advice but if you are considering incorporating as in
germany, I am happy to talk with you about our experience. We recently
incorporated as a UG (cloudron.io). Feel free to send me an email!

~~~
onli
Thank you. Ill try to find out whether UG is the right thing to do, or whether
I should for example take a french alternative. If I try to go with the UG
I'll ask if anything comes up. Thanks for the offer!

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fdghnbkxzf
I'd like to see a "I don't play computer games" button, as I need a beefy CPU,
but have no need for anything faster than a R7 250. Good luck with your
project!

~~~
onli
Thanks!

My current response for that feature request (you are not alone with that
wish) is to customise a recommendation with the arrow buttons at the side of
each component box. It's mainly an UI problem – I don't see how to do it
properly.

~~~
guda
You could have the user to make a choice at start with buttons like office and
gaming.

~~~
onli
You mean a bit like [https://choosemypc.net/](https://choosemypc.net/) does?
I'll be frank, I don't see it fitting in. For one, every complication of the
UI of the site makes it more difficult to use (and I'm a big fan of keeping it
as simple as possible). Second, I'm not sure you can reliably recommend a good
office PC. Does that mean only going with an integrated gpu? Or do you even
just need a slow cpu? A SSD certainly is not needed, is it, and what about a
big HDD?

My impression is that while the initial reflex is to say yes to all of the
above, in many cases at least one of the responses is no. When there is a lots
of space needed, or when browsing needs a real fast processor (it indeed does
for many pages and current browsers), or the R7 250 requested before (which is
still a lot more than the integrated graphics of an haswell i3), and so on.

I still appreciate the suggestion, and if I see a way to built it in I'll
certainly do it.

~~~
jsmith0295
It might be nice to just have sliders to add a 'weight' to different
components, maybe hidden behind an 'advanced' option .

~~~
onli
That would be possible, as there is already a weight for the gpu. Thanks, I'll
try it out.

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bert2002
What would be nice is when you ramp up one component that it reduces another
one to stay in the price range.

~~~
onli
I played with that in the beginning, it does not feel good in practice. You
have not enough control what he should reduce next.

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alixaxel
Do you know about [https://pangoly.com/en/](https://pangoly.com/en/)?

~~~
onli
No, I did not know that site. Thanks!

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bitJericho
You could use amazon associates to sell parts. Anybody who's anybody in
America uses Amazon.

