Ask HN: Emergency Preparedness as a Service | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Emergency Preparedness as a Service

1 pointedgefield07 comments

With global warming, the environment is becoming much more volatile. Proper emergency preparedness is difficult. First you need to know what supplies to purchase based on your family composition and size. Second, items, such as OTC medicine, water purification, batteries and food, expire at different times creating a maintenance headache.

Would you pay $20/month as an individual or $50/month for a family of four to build and maintain an emergency preparedness kit?

View on HN

No. I'm very familiar with the preparedness community and while your proposal has value it's going to be tricky to market to a a demographic of self-starters. I think you'd have better luck selling curated 'go bags' for different use cases than with a subscription model.

Thanks for the feedback. Is anyone providing curated go bags? How does a go bag fit within the context of hunkering down at home in an emergency without power, water, etc? This is more the scenario I was envisioning.

> "Is anyone providing curated go bags?"

Far more than anyone could ever hope to differentiate themselves from: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=emergency+preparedness+kit Granted, most of them are of dubious quality but anyone without the interest or foresight to hand-build their own is only going to care about price anyway.

Thanks. There seems be endless selection of kits, but not easy to judge quality or completeness (except if you trust the user ratings). Do you see any gaps in the emergency preparedness market?

Off the top of my head, I'd say that the generic emergency preparedness kits don't account for cold climates or for age (young or elderly). It seems unlikely to be enough differentiation to make a viable business though.

Could the same goal be achieved by offering a curated "shopping list" on Amazon, with all of the various items that you recommend purchasing? It seems like this doesn't need to be a subscription service. Perhaps just rely on affiliate fees and link to the products that you recommend, with an option to add all of them to the cart? (Not sure if that last part is possible, but maybe!)

$600/year for what is essentially a once per year maintenance task doesn't seem reasonable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com