

 Daily Deals for Hackers - Interested? - DealsForHackers
http://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/429695/Deals-for-Hackers

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paulgerhardt
This strikes me more as a Woot for entrepreneurs instead of hackers.

What would be cool, personally, is have the site feature products which for
one reason or another are known to be hackable.

Things such as the Girltech IM-Me which can be flashed into a spectrum
analyzer, Open-WRT compatible routers, KisMac compatible wifi cards, the
Breville BKE820XL hot water kettle which has a non-mechanical switch so it can
be hacked to be controlled from your phone and send you push notifications
when the water is boiled, remote control power outlets from AliBaba, Hot Air
reflow stations, Emotiv's EEG, Quadrocopter kits to deploy some of the UPenn
GRASP code, and so on.

++EDIT++

What I realize now, thinking about it some more, is a site like this might
actually be ideal for hacker ore. Apple would never think to let their
merchandise go on Woot, but something like a Samsung TS-H943 as shipped is in
every sense of the word, mediocre - the one special thing about it is it let's
one install custom firmware to read non-standard DVD's - it's only a matter of
selection for digging up more deals like this that manufacturers would be
happy to let go on bantler.com like sites...

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zach
What would really be valuable and popular would be if you could find a way for
us to get a group discount on these $80-$100 books that are priced as
textbooks.

There is a huge amount of pent-up demand there.

Take the extreme but famous example of when one of those books, Lisp in Small
Pieces, was mispriced for $13 including shipping at amazon.ca in 2007 -- it
became the #1 seller, on a book that I imagine sells maybe a thousand copies
in a year.

Nobody actually got their book (the publisher probably didn't have that many)
and $13 is ridiculously cheap, but it's a fascinating story. Clearly, a lot of
people had that book on their "someday wishlist" (a fantastic market for deal
sites) or just appreciate a seemingly one-time deal on that kind of item.

If you can package books together, app-bundle style, or sell them out of
season with the academic calendar, it would offer a good opportunity for price
discrimination.

Also, although academic publishers are super-wary about the used book market,
they also know that their textbooks are being torrented left and right. Maybe
this would be a channel they could have more control in.

~~~
DealsForHackers
What about "International Edition" textbooks? For example, the site could
offer an international edition of a textbook for 1/10 the cost of the US
edition. The International Edition textbooks are paperback, and of lower
quality, but contain the same information, and are MUCH cheaper.

What do you think?

~~~
abyssknight
My understanding is that these are meant for developing nations, and the lower
cost is an incentive for inducing education over there. Although it may be
cheaper in the short term, in the long term you may be jeopardizing the
business model and thus reducing developing nations' ability to obtain
textbooks. Just throwing that out there.

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yeojw
This is definitely an awesome concept, which has been tested by AppSumo.
However, there are more aspects of "hacking" that you can explore - books,
conference tickets, software discounts and membership discounts (can only
think of <http://tutsplus.com>). I would be interested if you are able to
offer deals on tickets for technology conferences.

A technology-focused Groupon is something that I would love to see.

~~~
DealsForHackers
Discounts on technology conferences would be huge. Great idea - thanks!

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fixie
Kudos for doing research before diving in. If it sounds like there is enough
interest, one option could be to use a whitelabel daily deals service like
Tippr.com. Although it is tempting to hack together a groupon-clone, in the
end the software on the consumer end is generally the easy part when building
a basic daily deal site. The time consuming part is everything that goes on
behind the scenes. The support, writing, deal scheduling, deal sourcing,
affiliate marketing, reporting tools, etc. This stuff often gets overlooked
when creating a deal site. Tippr can handle as much of this overhead as you
need which allows you to focus on marketing and helping source deals for your
niche. If you are curious how the end white-label product looks, we've
recently launched a white-label with BusinessInsider that they call Pipeline
Deals (<http://pipeline.businessinsider.com>). This site runs similar types of
deals - except targeted for business folk instead of hackers.

Disclosure: I'm a designer at Tippr. If you want to learn more, I can get you
in touch with one of the business people.

~~~
DealsForHackers
Thanks, I appreciate the offer. Email me at dealsforhackers@gmail.com to talk
further.

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solost
I took the survey but I wanted to share this thought here for some additional
feedback. I work with some of the larger deals sites and having learned a lot
about how they operate I cannot stress enough that if you are going to move
into a niche market focus on value. This means potentially less deals and less
often but in the case of your audience being focused on hackers, quality will
win.

In the survey you offered time with Investors. This is something that I am
sure would be in massive demand because this isn't something readily available
to most people and could add tremendous value to any start up.

Other things to consider along the same lines would be a service less focused
on regular deals but more on opportunities. We have access to Consultants who
do x,y, or z. They could be investors, marketers, hackers, business develop
folks or any other high value service. You would make those people available
to a business for say 1 hour to discuss anything you care to. Now that would
exciting!

~~~
DealsForHackers
Great idea regarding the consultants. I'm sure there are a ton of consultants
who would be happy to work with startups for cheap, in order to build long-
term relationships.

Fantastic idea!

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seanMeverett
Hey guys, we actually built this concept the week of Thanksgiving, Black
Friday, Cyber Monday.

We built The Evolyte Store in 14 days, spent 1 day marketing, and received
nearly 18,000 pageviews and $30,000 in reserved sales.

We were selling a 32GB Wi-Fi iPad at up to $100 off and the business model was
like Groupon + Woot had a superhero baby (a little corny, we know :)

You can read our case studies detailing every aspect of the design,
development, and marketing process (what my firm specializes in) here:

[http://evolyte.posterous.com/pages/the-evolyte-store-case-
st...](http://evolyte.posterous.com/pages/the-evolyte-store-case-study)

We're currently trying to figure out what we're going to do with this Store
going forward as we only built it to market our professional services, and not
to be an eCommerce competitor.

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babyshake
Deals for hackers seems like it could be a good way to start off with a narrow
scope and a targetted audience, but by calling your site DealsForHackers you
are essentially limiting yourself from ever growing beyond this relatively
small audience.

Personally, I think there's a more interesting market opportunity in helping
developers monetize from the daily deals space, rather than making a daily
deals product meant for developers as end-users.

That having been said, I'm still a hacker and I'm still interested in good
deals. Too bad you don't have a field for survey takers to provide our e-mails
so you can inform us of when we can use your service.

~~~
gaustin
> Personally, I think there's a more interesting market opportunity in helping
> developers monetize from the daily deals space, rather than making a daily
> deals product meant for developers as end-users.

Things like a marketplace for matching deals to sites or a "Shopify" for
coupon sites?

~~~
babyshake
Maybe something like a Shopify, although those are unsurprisingly starting to
spring up left and right. I'm thinking more of something like building a nice,
consistent cross-platform API for deals.

Unfortunately, sites like Groupon have draconian developer terms of service
(<http://www.groupon.com/pages/api-terms-of-use>). Basically, what they're
saying is that you can show Groupon deals to end-users, but you can't do
_anything_ else.

~~~
gaustin
Holy smokes, that's worse than my employment agreement (but not by much).

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nihaar
What about a Groupon like site for freelancers and designers? Flash sale for a
small quanta of work such as a mockup or design or protoype that would
eventually help spread the freelancers/designers business as well (by building
up a portfolio and referrals). There would obviously have to be a small limit
on the number but each day a freelancer/hacker/designer could be featured and
any number of "units" could be put on sale.

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abyssknight
I said this on the survey, and it seems that several others agree, but I would
love to see more physical things on a daily deals site for hackers. AppSumo is
too much SaaS for me, and I have a day job where I don't get to make those
purchasing decisions. However, hackable things, books, software -- that I can
really get into.

~~~
DealsForHackers
Totally agreed - I think that books will be a big part of the service.
Wholesale books aren't too expensive when bought in bulk, and the savings can
be passed on to users / customers.

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will_lam
Hmm. I left a comment in the survey but I figure I'd chime in here as well.

AppSumo can definitely move into this space as it's related.

There should be plenty of room in this niche as they seem to be the only
player.

Would love to see what you can do in terms of defensibility and innovation.

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tonystubblebine
How would this be different than AppSumo?

~~~
DealsForHackers
AppSumo is great, and there would certainly be some crossover between the two
services.

However, DealsForHackers would focus on a wider range of offerings, beyond
just software. Think discounted conference tickets, hardware discounts, hacker
food (whatever that means), etc.

~~~
tonystubblebine
The current AppSumo deal* includes fresh underwear delivered monthly. A wider
range than that?

* manpacks.com

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nhangen
Groupon doesn't seem all that interesting to me...I've never really sought
deals in that manner.

However, if you could pull off something like they do here at Bonktown:
<http://www.bonktown.com/>

I might pay attention from time to time.

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aresant
AppSumo has shown that there's definitely interest in this area.

This is so flippin' easy to build that it comes down to this - are you
passionate about it?

If you are, and you can dedicate a year to seeing it through, you will build a
nice business out of it.

If you expand your "hacker" definition to include the audience that buys gifts
@ ThinkGeek.com you could be on to something big.

When I say this is easy here's what I mean:

a) The tech is a piece of cake.

b) The design is linear and lots of examples for inspiration in this space.

c) You will make it or break it based on the strength of the deals, just like
everybody else competing in this space.

For instance if you found a way to convince ThinkGeek to provide you with a 5%
off or something from them (plus a comission to you) in exchange for long-term
featured advertising you would essentially be in front of every major "geek"
audience from slashdot to reddit to etc in no time.

Plus the company that owns ThinkGeek owns Slashdot and you'd be a perfect
aquisition if you expanded your market, aggregated an incredible list of geeks
with credit cards.

So go out there and get it done! I want my 5% off ThinkGeek by Christmas.

~~~
noahkagan
Hey guys

Noah from <http://appsumo.com> here.

Super interesting comments and a bit surprised / flattered so many of you guys
know about us.

We're focused mostly on web software, generally web apps / content that help
startups succeed.

What kind of specific stuff is it for hackers that we aren't providing today?

Ps. We have an HN Special - free Thinkgeek.com coupon ($10 off $40)

Email me: hn at appsumo dot com

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stevenj
If you don't want to build the daily deals software, you may want to check out
<http://cajoots.com> (a project of mine).

Let me know if you have any questions: stevenj134@gmail.com

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jeffreyk
I own the domain Nerdeals.com (and have the Twitter name) because I had a very
similar idea as this. Whoever does this should get in touch with me :)

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DealsForHackers
HIGH LEVEL PITCH: DealsForHackers.com is a daily deals site for the hacker /
startup crowd. (Groupon meets TechCrunch).

This is a concept I'm taking a pure Customer Development approach with - if I
get enough people to say that they'd be interested in the concept, I'll move
forward to the prototyping / initial deal gathering phase.

Why the new / anonymous account? My boss and co-workers read HackerNews
constantly, and I'd prefer that they don't know I'm thinking about starting my
own thing.

I'd love to know what the community thinks about this!

~~~
thaumaturgy
I like the idea, but ...

When did "hacker" come to mean, "someone who wants dinner with moneymen and
books on success"?

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dougludlow
Very cool concept - count me in!

