Show HN: I built a Rotten Tomatoes-style platform for durable products
buyforlifeproducts.com
buyforlifeproducts.com
I want to help people finding the most durable and sustainable products in the world. It should become the Rotten Tomatoes for products, almost like you check the trustworthy rating of a movie before you watch it, people could check a brand or product before they purchase it.
A metric I am working on is the average cost per month of ownership. That feels like a great metric that shifts consumer mindset - the longer you own something, the more you save. I still don't have enough data, so please submit your favourite product.
Let me know what you think!
PS: this project is completely non-commercial and entirely community-driven. It is still a work in progress, but I want to get feedback as early as possible.
But the idea of tracking cost per month is very intriguing (a measure of TCO, which you may want to tackle as well, because for some products that may include electricity usage, upkeep, etc). I think it is something that can truly differentiate, and can appeal to everyone, not just people that are concerned with reducing their environmental footprint.
outdoorgearlab.com looks like a professional review site to me in the context of being an affiliate marketing / review site. IMHO almost all reviews online are affiliate marketing these days, so what I'd really be interested in is a site that hosts reviews and doesn't allow _any_ affiliate marketing or external links. IE: No incentive to game the system with inflated review scores.
And if you pay attention to those affiliate marketing sites that are disguised as review sites, note how they never give anything a bad review. "Poisoned my dog, caused my house to be condemned - 4.0/5.0 stars." Getting you to buy _something_ is the only goal.
They are: https://www.buyforlifeproducts.com/products/9
Wirecutter, Good Housekeeping, GearLab
However, this should not be the core focus. After getting enough product submissions from users, I will focus on the cost per month metric. As you said, this could be the true differentiator.
If I have a 500 shoe, does it last the same as 5 similar shoes in a row?
That went a totally different direction than I was expecting.
first, adding an item is a LOT of labor to enter data that's freely available from amazon's APIs for most products you're going to encounter.
not only would this be _much_ easier if you just allowed me to paste in an amazon link, or name that you searched for on amazon, you could also easily generate affiliate links and make money. I used _my_ affiliate link for the product link because... why wouldn't I? except now that i look at the products i see there aren't any links? Why wouldn't you offer links to go buy these things, doubly so when you could profit from it AND make life easier for users without costing them anything.
obviously there needs to be a fallback mechanism to handle things that aren't sold on amazon.
you ask for a weight in kg or lb, thus suggesting a desire to cater to international audiences but then you don't have a currency for price.
"BIFL Score" is something i can guess but is never actually defined. Don't make users think.
when i submit it asks for an email address, but you already HAVE my email address from when i signed in. You could just make this a checkbox "do you want to be notified when we add this?"
Some products seem to have multiple categories but i could only select one. These seem conceptually like tags so i don't know why it's a pull-down instead of a multi-select or some other multiple choice thing.
OP lets you add an affiliate link to order Graeter's ice cream. There's 20 years of 5-star aggregate reviews and a link to go buy it, so you do. But in year 21, Graeter's changed their all-sugar formula to corn syrup, and now you falsely believe that the aggregated five-star rating is supposed to apply to the corn syrup formula.
If one is designing for a lasting product review, the information needs to be snapshotted at a certain point in time- ie "In 2020, this part number from this company was constructed well." Modern listings may reflect the 2020+ product, rather than the 2020 construction that got the good reviews.
Amazon is the biggest offender in the buy it for now category i think
I am an asshole. I copy&pasted a fake 5 star review from Amazon, using a fake account. Do you have a plan to stop brands from doing this to you?
Just a couple of days ago I needed to buy another iphone USB-lightning cable. If you want to get a sense of just how broken Amazon reviews are, try searching for one of these. It's a nightmare minefield of 4.7+ rated products that have these highly dubious 5 star ratings, but with a telltale sizeable chunk of recent 1 star reviews.[1] So I ended up having to also check various meta-review sites or other product review sites just to to buy a stupid cable. For certain product categories, reviews have become mostly noise.
[1] I tend to discount really effusive, highly detailed 5 star reviews for basically mundane products. "This ethernet cable was both highly attractive and yet lighter than others I've bought in the past. I plugged it in and it immediately started working! I was amazed!"
I think the best thing online stores can do at this point is just nuke all user-submitted ratings and reviews. They're 99% garbage.
I could also imagine picking reviewers by interviewing them initially - someone who owns and uses the product for a while.
I think your idea of cost per month is good for things you use often. One thing I've been thinking about lately as I've undertaken a medium-sized kitchen renovation is the cost of ownership of tools. Since I'm not a professional I can't take a cost per month approach since I may not use the tool for many months at a time.
Instead I've been thinking about two things:
1. How many hours of operation can I get out of this tool? If I amortize those hours over my lifetime, will I ever have to buy the tool again? In this case a mid-range tool may be an A+ for me, but a B- for a professional.
2. What is the lifetime of a battery-powered version of the tool? I'm avoiding battery-powered tools (with a few exceptions, I'm looking at you power drill) because I'm concerned the batteries will fail before the tool does.
My ideal situation is that I buy these items once and never need to replace them. As an amateur, I should be able to do that without buying the most expensive tool. As a professional, I probably already have preferences and a strong opinion anyway.
I started “collecting” tools a year ago and my first batteries are starting to go now. They’re actually still plenty good enough good enough for my impact driver (best tool ever) but they die too quickly in my chainsaw. Couldn’t say how many hours they’ve given me but it’s a lot.
A corded tool, I can leave in a box for 3 years, then pick up, plug in, and run it all day if I need to, then put it away for another few years, and never have to worry about it.
I'd probably also be willing to put up ~$5 dollars to have someone check out the product. I'm not sure if you could turn that into an effective compensation model for reviewers.
That seems to be the fate that has befallen the various other "quality products" forums, subreddits, etc.
I mean, I am a guy who still uses his 8 year old smartphone on a daily basis, so durability is relevant for me, but when I buy something, I want something good. So just because it is made of plastic and can be used for the next 350 years, doesn't mean I would enjoy using it for a single day.
Duration is just one aspect of a high quality product, but so is ease of use or overall functionality. High quality is what I want to buy. Nevertheless, I appreciate the undertaking to develop a platform that is not just about the price and has a higher goal in mind.
Personally, I assign a higher "durability" to a product if it is easily repairable. Parts and schematics/instructions are readily available, at reasonable cost for generations. Ideally seven generations or engineering blueprints released once parts are discontinued. If necessary, I can Ship of Theseus-repair such products over time, which I'm okay with as long as the time between repairs is roughly about the time for less-durable products to break into irreparable junk (without an extensive fabrication shop, which I'm oh-so-ever-slowly building up but could never justify the cost of on that repair capability basis alone).
Most products I select on this durability basis tend to have been in the market for a long time and have a lot of thought refined into their design over that time. I suspect durability raising the cost means the manufacturer has to compete on other axes like usability, functionality, listening and incorporating customer field/operational experience, and overall value by marketing uses it can be put to. Functionality tends to take a hit, especially with commercial-grade gear (compare a commercial restaurant microwave to a consumer model), so I go in with that expectation; sometimes more features is just more fiddly bits to break.
Mostly I do this because I'm utterly fascinated by the shape of design decisions that stand the test of time, and I'm compensated sufficiently to pay for it. Partly I do this because our species faces an energy cliff within an absurdly brief blink of geologic time, and I wish we could keep increasing amounts of stuff out of landfills.
Also don't let pissed off people derail product ratings because they are unhappy.
I'm thinking of a Wirecutter product research methodology and wiki below to list breakdown of materials, where they were sourced, changes in materials by manufacturer in later product updates, etc.
Let the users duke it out in the discussion section.
Basically avoid being Yelp and full of amateur reviews and people gaming the review system.
I would love for this to be an open source 'consumer affairs' product quality watchdog/authority. Too many times do manufacturers do a bait and switch where the first version has durable parts then subsequent versions are tweaked with cost cutting measures and you have inferior pieces that breakdown when they've captured a large market share of customers.
Unlike software, there is no 'what's new in this update' readme overview and you never really know if the manufacturer decided to cut corners by using a factory in Shenzhen that mass produces cheapo materials when they were previously made in a factory in middle America with a higher standard of quality, etc.
Thoughts?
Speaking strictly to that, I cannot agree more. This is exactly how I look at purchases, especially larger ones. I'm sure many others think the same way.
* They will not last forever. Batteries die, wireless specifications change; some day I may buy a phone that uses GreenTooth instead of BlueTooth.
* In the event that I like this new (to me) product category (I had never owned noise-cancelling headphones before), I will always want to own such a thing, that does what this does, and is compatible with my device.
Because it has a limited lifespan, and the product may be something i want to continue to own for the rest of my foreseeable life, I am now signing up to pay a certain amount for life to own such a thing!
Cheap boots are more expensive....
I have trouble finding reliable floor lamp like [this](https://i5.walmartimages.com/asr/c38e8535-2ee2-477d-9e9a-836...). The base is almost always coming off after using for a few years so the whole thing is unstable.
> the longer you own something, the longer you own
> something, the more you save
List of more durable items:
Stainless steel frying pan instead of nonstick frying pans where the non stick coating wears off. Cast iron even better.
Plain bicycle without electric parts easier to recycle metal.
Durable quality Screens drivers.
Non electric espresso maker. Bailetto.
Corded headphones no batteries that wear out. Changable parts. No wireless protocol that go obsolete.
LifePo4 lithium iron batteries instead of lithium cobalt chemistry. Cobalt is a conflict mineral mining that puts out dangerous pollutants. Lifepo4 can take more recharge cycles than cobalt chemistry and are safer.
Reasoning is if the product last for life it’s more environmentally sustainable.
Cell phones are on the opposite end of the last for life spectrum.
They're called nonstick for a reason; stainless steel does not compare. You'll have more sticking problems cooking eggs on a steel pan drowning in butter than on a (new) nonstick pan with minimal grease.
I do own an 18th-century cast iron pan and it has pretty good seasoning. I use it for many things, almost daily, but I'm still glad I own nonstick pans too.
that's misleading if not outright wrong.
the counterpart to nonstick is not cast iron or stainless steel -- it's carbon steel. carbon steel pans compare well to nonstick when seasoned (good woks are still carbon steel, and you can still find good carbon steel skillet pans, just not by lodge).
Seems like you only take the photo here? So that's a good mitigation of point #1. What about point #2? Curious to know if you have a good plan to deal with that :)
I really appreciate your attempt and wish you the best because I want this.
Do you have plans to monetize this in the future? How do you expect to sustain it?
Would you be open to pressing the content cc-by-sa? That would make me more interested in contributing reviews.
Also, I went looking for your terms of service (to see if they mentioned licensing already), and all I found was a link to some Google page, even when I clicked to sign in "by email".
For example, take the Salomon Quest boots that are listed. I own a pair of them. While they're good boots for the price they do not deserve an A- score. They are not BIFL. The soles are glued making them not resoleable. The sole on one of mine has started coming unglued too.
The same can be said for the Victorinox Fibrox knife that has an A+ rating. I also have one of those. It's a great knife for its low price but it does not deserve an A+ since it isn't full tang and is very thin and easy to damage.
This is a common issue with "BIFL" discussions. People overrate something because they don't understand that parts will wear out from use, something isn't repairable, or they don't have experience with a higher quality item.
Do you have any thoughts for dealing with this issue?
What's needed is to turn it all upside down: rather than reviewing new products, review broken products.
Make a site about how things break -- review broken and worn-out products to teach how to identify cheap products (where are the stress points, what manufacturing techniques exist to alleviate those). Then compare those with used products well past their warranty period that haven't broken, and look at why they haven't.
Repairability also comes to mind. Everything breaks eventually -- can't cheat entropy -- but when it does, can you easily repair it? Right-to-repair movement would get in on the action.
It would be so hard to maintain repair guides with how frequently products update these days. Everything from vacuums to laptops to shoes go through frequent enough revisions that guides might be invalidated often.
I went to repair my vacuum last month and discovered most of the guides out there cover an revision which uses a totally different latching mechanism for the door to my intake filter. The doors look identical, but the internal latch works differently. Overall that would have been fine, but I got blocked on the door part because the procedure didn't work and I assumed I was going to break it if I tried something else, haha. Turned out I just needed to push in and slide down.
So what is a rating system to do when people have very different ideas on BIFL?
For this existential dilemma, it would be helpful if the top DIMENSIONS of quality were explored. In this case with a knife: tang, bolster, handle material, riveting, metal type, hardness, grind angle, etc are all variables that have either a PREFERENCE scale or a DURABILITY scale. I don't think a simple NoSQL-comment-style database is sufficient to define what elements need to be considered to rank a product as high quality vs. low quality.
You must know about AvE's YouTube channel, yes? He's an engineer who deeply understands metallurgy and machining and industrial design, so he can explore these vectors of quality for power tools:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChWv6Pn_zP0rI6lgGt3MyfA
This kind of professional analysis is needed FIRST, to determine what the key metrics are. Then the rating system should grade based on this, rather than 5-stars.
Five star reviews are dead. Long live multiple variables!
> So what is a rating system to do when people have very different ideas on BIFL?
Objective vs subjective is something that's hard to overcome without a complex system like you suggest. I agree it's at the heart of the problem I described and I don't know if there's a practical solution, especially for a side project.
There's a famous story that I believe Henry Ford scavenged junk yards for broken Model T's. Every time he found one, he recorded what was broken. After finding enough of them, he figured out the part that was never broken was something like the front axle assembly. So he went to his axle engineers, told them they built it too strong, and find ways to cut costs.
Your overall point, however, is important. I find reviews of outdoors gear (even professional reviews) especially tilted toward light-use buyers, which is frustrating.
My dad, however, always carries a pocket knife (for fishing purposes), and I've seen them get so much wear, the inside of the blade starts getting worn away from being sharpened so often. What's a "lifetime" for someone who sharpens a knife every other week? That's going to wear out even a "BIFL" pocket knife much sooner than "life" would lead you to believe.
There needs to be a way to incorporate the duty cycle of the thing being reviewed, and length of time owned, but then you're just back to the problem of people gaming a review system, and the commercial internet has ruined everything.
But pretty much anything off-the-shelf I would have to see some extraordinary evidence.
BUT, you're still going to need (probably) multiple resoles, patching, and what not.
Take a look at the shoes Prince Charles is wearing - they're bespoke shoes from the 50s.
But you need to ask yourself - at what point do you just scrap them, and buy a new pair?
Some people love the vintage "relic" look - but every resole and patching is going to cost you money. Purchasing a pair of $1000 shoes, and then spending $1000-$2000 on maintenance the next 50 years will make sense for some, but not for others.
I personally, would much rather just buy a new pair of $500-$1000 shoes every 10-15 years, and discard the old ones when they start to look too shabby.
I live my guitars old and reliced, but shoes ? No thanks. When / if my shoes need patching, I'm throwing them.
Dr Martens also had, at some point, sold a "for life" line that came with an extensive guarantee:
> The guarantee covers the failure of any component, such as upper leather, stitched seams, eyelets, soles, welts, linings and reinforcements which has been subjected to normal wear and tear from non-industrial abuse and not unreasonably abused. The guarantee will be active from the day on which the original owner activates their guarantee, to the end of that person's natural life.
I have had several of these that I still wear after 20 years. They have been refurbished.
The problem is I find BIFL communities often can't distinguish between just more expensive, or rando add on features / durability ... from actual utility / quality.
The ratings could then be weighted by that.
1 upside down - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24710832
2 default reviews - https://gist.github.com/iL3D/59df64947d42828d848ebfc1651a312...
Of course it's much easier to buy this year's model of something hyped & shiny without thinking and then post on a site like this to prop up your ego and mislead everybody else. I'd venture to say that if something hasn't been in production for the length of a lifetime, there's no justification in labeling it as "Buy it for life"
Meanwhile my SO bought some fashionable expensive sneakers that broke in the sole after a few days of wearing. SO took them back to the shop and they just gave SO another pair. That’s just sad.
The carousel is simultaneously too slow and too fast. The visitor has to sit and wait to see a brand they recognize, and then when they do, they only have a second to recognize and click.
Scroll works well on all modern devices and empowers the visitor. There's a reason so many landing pages are tall.
The home page is the product so it should have a big search box, a list of categories, and then some top items. Ideally, all three of these will fit above the fold on mobile and desktop. Don't do infinite scroll. At the bottom, have a bigger category list, another search box, and a site map footer. Later, you can use session recording to see how strangers use your landing page and then make it really good. Make your call-to-action button "Add Review" bold.
Show ownership costs in meaningful units: $/100-washes for clothing, $/100-miles for footwear/socks/cycling gear, $/year for business equipment, $/100-meals for kitchen equipment. Put the ownership cost on the search results page and product page, not the item cost. When receiving a review, ask how many times/miles/washes the person used the item every month, when they bought it, and when did it break. When showing the review to others, show the calculated ownership cost as a single number.
Some products are so good that they take many years to wear out. Reviews for products that haven't broken can be misleading. For these kinds of products, your review submission page can explicitly ask if the product wore out or not.
Another problem to solve later: Companies sometimes change a product without changing its name or version number. Usually they make it cheaper. The cheaper version is a different product. The review site should list it as a different product and separate the ratings & reviews. You could use year numbers, eg. "DrTung's Smart Floss (2006)" and "DrTung's Smart Floss (2019)".
People give wildly different responses when asked for star ratings. So don't do that. Instead, ask a concrete question and use that to calculate a rating. Examples: "Will you buy this again when it wears out?" "Would you recommend that your family/friends buy this?" "Do you use other products that do the same thing as this?"
Most folks can't keep track of their purchases & uses so here's your paid product idea: Make an app that lets me record when I bought something, how often I use it, and how much it's costing me. Give me the option of sharing my anonymized usage data with others. Make it super easy to add an item, for example, let me forward order confirmation emails to your service or copy/paste chunks from an email or a product page. Sell the app super cheap: $5/year, $1/month.
It'll be a crowd-sourced Consumer Reports. I pay for Consumer Reports now because I think they really help society. They just need to modernize. Now is your chance!
I've found a huge problem with products is that their quality changes over time. So, a product may be named the same but the SKU changes or the products from a couple of years back were much better made for whatever reason while the company has gutted them and continues to sell on reputation. I've wondered if there's a way to track product changes (user reported maybe?) between revisions of products on a wide scale. Can you convert the "years owned" to a purchase date somewhere? Are you tracking SKUs?
How will you handle fake reviews?
I dont know if the reason is that site isn't compatible with firefox or some other "measure" but those are the urls that were blocked, if it helps you fixing it.
https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js?id=UA-154925745-1 (blocked by ublock origin)
https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.... (blocked by ublock origin)
https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Montserrat:400,500,6... (blocked by LocalCDN)
https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Open+Sans&display=sw... (blocked by LocalCDN)
https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Cookie (blocked by LocalCDN)
But, how do we deal with product model or component changes?
A couple examples:
"Earthquake" impact wrench from Harbor Freight. Purchased ten years ago, used a lot--for an amateur (maybe a couple thousand high torque automotive bolts, sunk some cement anchors). This product is currently sold by HF, but is much changed.
The site's example of Lodge cast iron. I cook on cast iron 90% of the time and my older lodge pan is much better than a newish one. The newer one has a more coarse surface, is strangely lighter.
The problem with trusting brands is that manufacturers (like whirlpool and frigidaire) intentionally rotate which of their sub brands is garbage every few years to prevent people from avoiding planned obsolescence.
Better then, to go off of manufacturers / holding companies / design houses, but that varies by industry. (In computing, counting all the name brand computer companies as design houses would make sense. But then, what about ikea appliances? They’re mostly rebranded whirlpools...)
The other problem is that internal politics can tear down a reliable brand in less time than it takes their old stuff to fail. Various shoe brands in the late 90’s come to mind. They went from reliably lasting years to lasting 6 months (there was a trend where the hiking or leather tongue bottoms were replaced by tennis shoe style material).
Maybe now I'm yelling at clouds, but it feels like I have to do deep research on everything, now. Everything I read, everything I need to buy, everything. It's tiresome and terrible and is why a site like this could be...really, so helpful.
I like this idea and a lot of similar information sharing sites but I find in today's environment, anything successful will be targeted by misinformation and gamed which makes it difficult to determine if the information was provided in an uninfluenfed manner from the product creator/retailer/etc. who have obvious conflicted goals.
The best efforts seem to be information sites that are successful enough to gather enough data to represent something accurately from a user base but not so successful it becomes a target for corporate advertising and marketing groups. Reddit communities still provides some of this but have become a target for advertising as well and also are more difficult to extract useful information from.
Amazon has "verified purchase" which is still gamed using other techniques. I've found the best model is still Consumer Reports for fair product assessments but they only speculate on durability since it would be incredibly difficult for their product assessment model (new products rolling out frequently, modified/re-released/etc and limited staff/personal time to keep up with).
Out of curiosity, how resistant is that score to being gamed?
I love the idea for your platform, and would probably be willing to pay some amount for access, if there's a good way to verify that it's not being manipulated.
Also, how do you separate people who have a bad experience because they unknowingly bought a counterfeit? It's a tough problem to solve.
So I prefer to pay a premium for high quality durable products. If they can solve the trust problem, I'd be a customer.
I hope for a larger counter movement to the consumerism today. Reward companies for making durable products and punish those who don't.
Great idea!
When I'm looking to purchase something, the concerns are usually something like.
1. Minimizing the shared cost of throwing the thing away.
2. Maximizing durability.
3. Maximizing the actual efficacy of the thing.
4. Maximizing worker benefit - economical and political.
5. Minimizing animal suffering.
Not everyone is going to have the same mix of goals or order of goals and many have just one overriding goal: Minimizing up-front consumer cost.
So, for example, a "smart-fiber" shirt might be far more durable than a 100% cotton shirt, the throw-away cost is much higher so I'll pass. I'm not saying your site should account for this, but things are complicated, especially among conscious consumers which is an increasingly niche market anyway due to both preference and circumstance.
Edit: Oh I should also add somewhere in there
#. Maximizing ease of repair/cleaning.
eg. MacBook vs. Pinebook or Carpet vs. Hardwood etc.
This is probably on your TODO list, but I wanted to make sure you were aware in case it isn't.
Your terms of service and privacy policy are:
a) Not linked to anywhere except the login screen in very small text. Seems to be part of Google sign in?
b) Clicking them goes nowhere. I suspect you setup Google login and didn't provide links to a terms / privacy screen.
If you're going to be collecting logins (maybe all you store is an email address?) you should probably throw something basic together. Kind of surprised Google doesn't require it when using their sign in.
I personally won't login / enter information on any website without knowing their terms of use and privacy policy.
I expected the review to be posted. If it's in a moderation queue I'd expect to see a message indicating that's the case. And if the review didn't get saved I probably wouldn't leave another one.
https://www.buyforlifeproducts.com/products/37
BTW for SEO juice you might want to change URLs to include the product slug. E.g. something like:
https://www.buyforlifeproducts.com/products/37-icebreaker-ba...
This brings to mind some considerations for you:
1. Professional tier tools are often much hardier than consumer, and often a pro tool would last a lifetime for a consumer user, but only a few cycles professionally
2. Warranty and replacement is very important here. Example is Osprey who _had_ an incredible no questions replacement, but they've changed it while keeping the "all-mighty-guarantee" name.
Elements to consider. I'll try add a Leatherman review.
Have you ever looked at the BIFL subreddit?
One user explained the problem with the BIFL community very well in his post:
"I joined this sub for the purpose of buying stuff like lifetime warranty backpacks (osprey), great tools, camp gear, kitchen wear ect. Yet this sub has basically became an Instagram for the old shit people find in they're grandparents house which offers no benefit to me now. I'm not going to buy, nor could I even find a kitchen aid mixer you grandma still uses from the 70s. Most stuff back then was made to last, we know that. I want stuff thats still made today with quality."
To be honest I was hoping it was even more like RottenTomatoes, focused on aggregating credible professional reviews of products (like RT focuses on professional critics, though they do also have user reviews).
I think there might be some value in keeping it a niche community with known usernames and maybe moderators. Amazon reviews are not a community, and I think Amazon might not want to fix the issue as bad as we think. In Amazon all the reviews are anonymous and it's not clear at a glance what kind of buyer is giving a review.
I could also imagine picking reviewers by interviewing them initially - someone who owns and uses the product for a while.
For what it's worth, this was the review:
> No logo on the hat, because the design is iconic.
There are logos on some of the hats, at least on my T3 wanderer there is. Mark Symons says no frills but, well, there are some. They're not cheap, which "no frills" tends to imply. They're pretty good quality, and overall, the best
- Registration via Google, even for a non-Google email address. I really don't want any third parties scooping up my address.
- The price should have a currency associated with it. You might not do much with it right now, but you could for example integrate with a third party to convert 1995 Yen to 2020 US dollars, allowing anyone to see the price in their preferred currency at this time. Country of purchase would also be useful in this case, since prices can vary a lot across markets and this would enable at least rough translation based on known ratios between countries for different product categories.
- The weight unit should be an enum, not a string. That way it'll be trivial for you to convert to the user's preferred unit (kg for something like 95% of the world).
- Searching for "backpack" returned no results, which is weird.
- It would be useful to have some help text for the BIFL score, to have a slight chance of people rating using similar criteria. I'm not sure the BIFL score is even going to be very useful; maybe it would be better to generate it based on how long people have had the item and its condition at submission time.
- The front page without any filters applied shows 43 products. After switching to brands it shows 157 results. Are there really more brands than products?
On a more general note, if the data is supposed to be community driven it might make sense to also make meta-reviews community driven, like Wikipedia and Stack Overflow.
All that said, thank you for building this! I desperately want a site like this, focusing on reliability ahead of cost, packaging, and design.
I think Rotten Tomatoes is not the site to copy here, but rather Criticker: if I can rate items and compare my ratingset to similar ratingsets, that would be valuable. It's more of a cornucopia of the commons [1], if you will, where contributing even a little will reward you epsilon (and everyone else, too).
[1] http://bricklin.com/cornucopia.htm just read about this guy a la the Visicalc thread, never thought I'd use the phrase
The links to company pages and storefronts is big bonus for this site over that community
The other rock it could founder on is green. I mean, if you buy something once, that's pretty green, but so often this sort of thing turns into sackcloth and ashes or absurd high fashion sackcloth and ashes that cost too much. The green variety is already a sort of consumer preference in Germany, but I think their idea has some "well made" meaning as well (nachhaltig? I dunno).
Here were a couple of places like that my German pals sent me early this year when I was thinking about it in earnest:
https://utopia.de/bestenlisten/onlineshops/
https://www.torquato.de/haus-wohnen/
Anyway, it's just a bunch of disconnected thoughts in my mind. Good on you for taking it further. I had thought the sibyl problem would make a rotten tomatoes type thing too difficult if it ever got juice (even if it didn't; bots are everywhere linking trash products). I had also thought it would be very difficult to scale as a manually proctored catalog of carefully assessed things, and it would be real easy to corrupt if you don't scale to the right kinds of reviewers.
The world does need more stuff like this. People who make shitty products should be punished.
Nonetheless this site looks great for getting what info we can. Nice work and I'll be saving it.
One thing I have a concern about: is the country of origin related to the specific product or the company itself? An example is the KitchenAid refrigerator. I think KitchenAid does make a lot of things in the US, like their mixers, but the refrigerator listed (according to other websites) is made in Mexico. This might be a little confusing as the listing makes it look like the fridge is made in the US.
Also the "made in" drop down specifically keeps the fridge in the list when set to "US".
If there are more resources about building durable products and lasting companies, please share. I’m very interested in this.
Things like knives or cookware require a decent understanding of the materials used, construction process, and potential use cases to really guage if it's BIFL or not in all common contexts. You'll wind up with most people rating it based on two things I think: How long they've personally had it, and how much they like it.
You'll also get people adding items like an iPhone because they just like it. But a phone is essentially a disposable electronics device. It doesn't really belong on a BIFL website.
Perhaps a series of parameters need to be defined in order to enter a review at all. Try to determine the attributes that comprise a BIFL product and have reviewers define how the product meets these criteria. How is it durable? Why? What is repairable about it? Is it easy to find repair services? How long do you think it would really last for a typical owner?
Just trying to help - I'm a major fan of BIFL items, but over the years I find I'm routinely disappointed by what others believe fits in the category. I essentially don't pursue BIFL items on the internet through any social means anymore because it tends to be pretty bogus.
* Universal equations that can be applied to all products or major categories of products for what is 'best' durable for long term use, including adjustments for value/price. Have to evaluate for self-repair vs pro repair. Availability and price of spare parts. Account for geographic location.
* To help sell the 'best' recommendation for subcategories of 'best', you could show other products that were close but are not the best. But to help users see 'best' in specific categories (ex. not best durable fridge, but best quietest fridge) you will need many custom filters. Some ideas to copy are the extensive filters on Digikey for say, an alum. electrolytic capacitor: https://www.digikey.com/en/products/filter/aluminum-electrol... or on McMasterCarr for a screw: https://www.mcmaster.com/screws
* A good test of 'best' durable in my mind, is answering the question: Would this product be the one chosen to go with the Mars colony ships? Is it fairly cheap, durable in all environments, easy to repair, easy to make spare parts, lasts a long time, low maintenance, etc?
Ex of a fridge:
* Define the physics of how the product performs over its life: physics of door opening and effort to lift the door, compressor energy to turn on, vibration life cycles and wear, power converter wear, etc.
* Define theoretical best performance for the product for each use case in fundamental physics.
* Get performance data for real test units.
* OR if testing real units is too expensive and time consuming. Put modeled fake units in a physics simulation engine (like https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/PhysicsSection.html) and stochastically seed millions of virtual units with minor differences and virtually test to failure.
This would result in a much stronger measure of 'best' durable, that then, the crowd-sourced reviews would, hopefully, reiterate.
That means a geographical restriction and product restrictions.
Good candidates for a niche include things that people only buy once or intend to buy once where the cost is high and people can afford the time to do their research.
You also need your niche to be something people are passionate about and therefore willing to put in the effort writing reviews.
Once you have momentum in your niche you can then accept reviews for a wider range of products. Then, if that goes well, you can go to other markets, for instance open up in the rest of the English speaking world.
Facebook started with one college, went on to other colleges, went on to the colleges outside the US and then opened their doors to everyone.
Gamification works too. If you can get people in a trade to be motivated to write reviews then you can give them internet points that they might like to have.
Also try and work on your own pain points. What have you agonised over buying to arrive at a choice that has worked for you?
Products also need the resources to keep them going. Service manuals and part numbers matter.
How people use the site matters too, for adding in reviews you almost need a complete product database of every product ever made by barcode with GTIN images magically appearing.
If you can engage people to submit reviews, e.g. this week we are looking at toasters, what you got folks? as the topic. Then people could be prompted to help out.
As mentioned though, the scope is considerable, larger than an ecommerce project and you need to focus on a niche, get that working and then use the platform for everything else.
I went to buyforlifeproducts.com to submit a few suggestions but was disappointed to see I couldn't make any submissions without an account. I understand accounts help keep out the rif raf, but for me, too high of a barrier to contribute at this time.
Not only it is essential for reviews that focus on durability but it should be actively encouraged. A review can easily go from "nice, solid-looking all-metal construction" to "the hinge just broke, upon closer inspection, it is actually quite flimsy and impossible to replace".
First thing I would request as a feature is a way to be notified when new durable products are added.
Another feedback: the name did not catch my memory yet. After going to the site I could not even remember the name of it when I wanted to go back once the tab was closed. Maybe show the website title in big letters or go fo a different name? (durable-products.com is available and maybe good SEO wise for example). AND we also know that "buy for life" will only match a very few products (like pans, but not socks most probably), durable might be more accurate.
Final feedback: I understand it's not a commercial project, but why not? I think you can totally create affiliate links while still maintaining a high level of trust and independence. Plus the fact that many times I searched on your site where to buy the products. I had to open a new tab and google them :)
Good luck!
What I honestly dislike, however, is to see all the google tracking going on there... is that really necessary?
Seeing durability over time would be helpful, maybe a graph or recent rating trend indicator. It’s very frustrating to buy in late to a quality product/brand just to find that have cut costs and it’s not as durable as it used to be.
Would also be great to correlate that to source establishment to help me know where it’s best to buy or find used.
Kitchenaid Refrigerator - Unless it's a lemon, any refrigerator should last at least 10 years. Although all are at risk for the coolant leaking, but all can be repaired. I don't really see what would set a "BIFL" fridge apart.
Nalgene - I had a few Nalgenes that I thought would last forever, then the harm of BPA was discovered. I'm now wary of any water bottle made of plastic. I've got a stainless canteen, but I still don't consider this "for life" as they can get dented, you might need to buy more for trips etc.
Socks - No matter how sturdy they look when new, eventually they're going to end up worn through. Buy yourself nice socks, especially for hiking. But they're a wear item, not capital equipment.
As others have pointed out, once you gain traction, fake reviews are going to be a big problem. It seems like the solution to that is moving towards a more "Rotten Tomatoes" style system, where only the established experts give feedback. This might start as having two ratings - "experts" and "community", but I expect you would quickly find the "expert" rating to be much more useful to people.
How would you prevent me from taking some $ from Corporate to write a genuine sounding but heavily biased review?
I am not trying to be snarky, but in my understanding that is exactly how micro-influencing on Instagram etc. works and IMO its very dangerous for your value proposition.
I want to see it... maybe.
Also, I have zero interest in "following a brand". What I want from a site like this a way to research items when I am thinking of buying one, and to contribute back my knowledge on the few occasions when I have some. I don't want yet another content stream attention suck - please think seriously about how you can make a great site while using as little of everyone's attention-budget as possible. I signed up based on your HN comment, but just going from the site I would never have done - it looks like either marketing or a content farm.
E.g. I've got my Dell E5500 about a decade ago and still totally enjoy it. Since then I've just replaced the HDD with an SSD, replaced the RAM once and clean the fan every now and then (super easy!). It really seems built for ease of maintenance/upgrading as a top priority. Everything works perfectly. The only thing it can't do is modern 3D gaming (which I don't want).
I'd don't mind buying a modern analogue which would last me the next 10+ years but I don't know which modern model can be expected to be nearly as durable and pleasure to maintain.
Keep it up! :)
Edit: there are some great libraries to compress images too. e.g. https://github.com/semiromid/compress-images
As an example, after I got upset throwing away my 5th coffee maker in a row, I found myself a Bunn pourover coffee maker on craigslist. They are made for huge duty cycles and every part is hard wearing, replaceable and easy to get ahold of via commercial coffee distributors.
Now every time I have something needing replacement I look at commercial options, but I'm never sure what the actual cost/lifespan/repairability is vs consumer options.
So, you might think, your TCO of the commercial grade widget is $300 and the consumer grade is $550. Easy win for the commercial widget! But then factor in the potential uses of that extra $1500 upfront. Assuming you were earning an average of 3% on your cash during that period, you would have made $515 on 10 years' interest on $1500. Now, put your money into an index fund, and your returns would be (historically speaking) thousands of dollars.
(Before the inevitable comment, there are plenty of ways to earn a return on money that don't involve an index fund. Investing in your home, high interest savings accounts, Treasuries, paying down any debt, etc etc.)
So you can easily see that for most things - where maintenance is cheap - it's not worth it. This includes most white goods, almost all electronics, etc. Where maintenance is expensive, though, you can save a lot by buying commercial. The classical example is the Isuzu crew cab trucks: if you do need to haul a lot of stuff, they're far cheaper in every way than comparable consumer options.
Commercial items are often available in classifieds, auctions and going out of business sales.
There is an element of luck in finding something worth buying (and some opportunity cost for the time I guess?), but being patient and relentless with a few well set up search filters has let me get a lot of things for pennies on the dollar.
I really want to do this with another item I seem to always be replacing, the microwave, but have found that a much more difficult thing to get ahold of at a reasonable price.
On the other hand all things are not equal. Take laptops. You might think that a cheap one that costs a quarter of an expensive model would mean that you change it more often for the same cost.
By the end of the upgrade cycle you'd probably have a faster cheap laptop than the original expensive one and that might be true but you'd also have to live with the cheap keyboard and the cheap screen and the cheap build quality of the case.
So you have to make the trade off I guess.
Example: There is a product with the word Dungarees in it, but I can't find any reference to it in the Network tab.
Also, I can't see any place to submit a new product
If you want a nice pair of monkey boots, Solovair are the guys to go and see not Dr Martens.
These are exactly the sort of small manufacturers I like to know about and this is an interesting project to find them.
If you're going to get something once it's nice to find a firm that actually does both the design and the manufacture in their own factories even if you pay a small premium over a generic knock off.
I know that's a ton of work, not a minor suggestion but it would be super cool.
This is a new category of websites that are frontends for Reddit content. A year ago someone made a jobs website that compiled interviews with people in different occupations. All were from Reddit and uncredited.
I approved a post of this website, but I would recommend making a self post describing your journey if you want more visibility on the subreddit.
I theorized that reviewers would have their own scale, both in median (maybe they only give 4s and 5s), as well as range (a lot of people only give 1s and 5, losing all the resolution of the middle). My solution was to continuously keep each reviewer's ratings normalized both to the centerpoint (each review would have a delta added to it to re-center) as well as to standard deviation (each review would be scaled so that their overall stdev would be 1.0). The result is that everyone would look like a nice normal curve around 3.0.
This has a nice side effect of diluting ratings spam, too. If somebody spams 5s, they wind up being just average 3s. Even if they spam 1s and 5s, they're at least normalized to a lower spread.
Cool.
Comment: looking at the Lodge Skillet, I can easily see how this is not going to scale well for products with many, many reviews. The page is already cluttered and hard to navigate with just a few dozen comments. Do you have a plan to collapse the UI into something more of a summary that can be expanded?
One thing I have in mind was suggested by another user:
To combat brands changing over time as they often do, graphing the rating over time may let you see when/where the brand went from quality to cashing in on the recognition. I could see such a feature eventually evolving into more, like allowing people to highlight major points on the timeline (like an acquisition or change in manufacturing location) or letting you filter reviews to a certain period.
But that's quite a big feature, something for the future :)
Also I'll put in a little plug here for /r/BuyItForLife/ -- great subreddit for talking/sharing about products that aren't engineered with planned obsolescence in mind.
The only thing I can guess as being the issue is there's a strict dependency on google fonts?
Wondering if there's anything we could do to fix this relationship or if community submitted reviews are broken in general.
Search bar at the top isn't working for me (Chrome on macOS). When I hit return, nothing happens.
Small feedback: all the newlines from my review went missing once it got published! If this is intentional (like in HN) perhaps put a link to formatting guide next to the editor.
A tool like this would decrease research effort sig.
I'd personally trust the masses more than a pro.
Biggest risks are obvious: manipulation of scores, minority voices on niche products, etc.
Just a datapoint!
Quick suggestion: the search could maybe return a results not found message when it can't find anything instead of doing nothing. Otherwise people may think it's broken.
come on, look at its name. Rotten Tomatoes is obviously meant to be a joke website.
I'm running on ubuntu, firefox with umatrix & ublock origin.
What's the plan for monetization in the long run?
I’m not a fan of the horizontal slider on a short page with almost no vertical height. I also don’t like how each tile doesn’t even fill the width of the screen. It’s much easier and faster for me the scroll vertically than horizontally. This really made the landing page not work for me visually and functionally to the point where I might bounce.
I don’t understand why you’re showing me a cast iron pan, socks, a jacket, a water bottle, a pocket knife... It seems very random. It made me think those were the items that were on sale?
On the landing page tiles, the way you show the score on the tile, was visually confusing for me. At first I thought it was a price, then I thought maybe a count or a timer or a bid or something? I’m still not quite sure what it is. If it’s upvotes and you’re trying to show hot products this month, consider stealing some design elements from ProductHunt - you’ll see how they make the count an obvious upvote, and they label the section so you can understand why those 3 things are being shown.
Now, your Discover page layout on the other hand is a lot stronger in my opinion. The information layout was a lot easier to understand, it was easy to scroll through, and although I’m sure you have some algorithm for what order they are shown it didn’t feel like specific ones were being pushed.
You might strongly consider just making the Discover page your home page and and just leading with that!
I wonder if you measured percent of unique visitors that performed a search, or average number of items viewed, you would see a huge boost for new visitors who arrived directly on the Discover page versus the current landing page.
If you did this A/B test and wrote about it you’d probably get another shot at the HN front page too.
I think your biggest challenge will be crowdsourcing more product entries. You’re probably well below critical mass where visitors are likely to find something in a given category they’re looking for.
But the core idea of buying specifically for longevity and quality in order to appreciate long term value I think is a great concept.
Just thinking off the top of my head I’d want see products in all of the following categories;
Electronics (Charging cables, rechargeable batteries, maybe data storage) Tools (Essential tools everyone should have 1 of) Household items, from pillows and blankets to fans and trash bins, to personal care like quality brushes and beard trimmers.
I could go on and on, somehow you need to entice or fund the buildout of the database.
I assume you monetize through Amazon product links?
I LOVE THIS IDEA!