Ask HN: Review my side project - DealBabyDeal | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Review my side project - DealBabyDeal

2 pointsdabent4 comments

This is a mix between the Twitter API and the (closed beta) API for cash back site BigCrumbs.com.

Tweet @dealbabydeal on Twitter and the "Deal Baby" will send back matching deals on what you're looking for. Follow dealbabydeal and you can get a feed of the latest deals (updated hourly). What I think is most interesting is that one can see what other people are looking for. It's kind of like Blippy, only before people buy.

This took very little time to develop, but I'd love it if some of the smart folks here took a look. I'm debating if the constant update of deals is needed or appropriate and the search is very simple at this point. Usually one word searches work best.

http://twitter.com/dealbabydeal

I posted this before, but it was later at night, so I thought I'd try it again here.

View on HN

http://twitter.com/dealbabydeal

So. There's NO interest in this? Ouch.

Some thoughts:

1. There's no clickable link in your post (HN doesn't auto-link URLs in posts). Generally, people will post a "clickable: http://address.com link in a follow-up comment when they post a "check out my site" request.

2. You only gave 20 minutes between your initial post and this follow-up. It is only 7:43 in the morning on the West Coast. People might not have seen it.

3. HackerNews readers might not be the best group for market testing your app. Personally, I'm not interested in either A) noise in my Twitter stream or B) notices of deals I can get. That doesn't mean that there isn't someone out there who would find it useful.

4. "Check out my app" requests are hit-or-miss on HN. Sometimes they get a lot of comments, feedback, and traffic. Sometimes they don't. I haven't pattern-matched the successful requests, so I'm not sure what advice to give on that front. Maybe someone else has some input on that.

5. If there really isn't anyone who's interested in this, it's much better to find out now so you can pivot the app or move on to a different app where you can find a solid userbase.

Thanks for your feedback. The silence was honestly worse than harsh feedback.

I'll add a "clickable" next time and time my posts better.

"Noise in my Twitter stream" - I'm very interested in avoiding that and worried this app won't help if one follows with it doing unsolicited deal updates right now.

I really liked the concept of capturing a user's intent and using that to help them keep an eye on deals as they become available. People don't always buy things the moment they are looking for them. When something is looking for something big like an HDTV or computer, they can afford to wait days to see a big discount come across. That's the idea anyway.

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