Show HN: Want – Discover Premium Products
want.app
want.app
Everybody’s got a friend they go to for shopping advice; the friend that can’t stop talking about their new self-cleaning water bottle, ceramic grill, or wireless mechanical keyboard. You know the type.
For me, this “friend” is actually a group of friends. During the pandemic, I started doing more online shopping. :sweat_smile: My friends and I had a text thread going to keep us sane. The thread became a place to talk about our new purchases (among other things), and to get purchase advice. We shared the cool new home gym equipment we got, discussed standing desks, and posted the new chef’s knife that we ordered.
I built WANT as an extension of that text thread.
## No Amazon Here
My friends and I noticed that less and less of the cool stuff we found was coming through Amazon. Many of the products we purchased were coming directly from the manufacturer’s website–usually fronted by Shopify.
Recognizing this, I’ve decided to block Amazon links on WANT. My hope is that this will encourage us to buy more (and higher quality) goods outside of Amazon. I also hope blocking Amazon emphasizes that WANT is not a deal site–it’s a place for finding high quality products and supporting the brands that create them.
## This is Just...
WANT is a lot like Reddit, Pinterest, Product Hunt, Instagram, and others. The app borrows heavily from each of these sites. WANT’s product discovery is similar to Product Hunt, its commenting system is like Reddit’s, and its shelf system will be like Pinterest’s boards. Visually, WANT is somwhere between Instagram and Twitter.
I like to think that, by combining different aspects of each of these sites, I’ve ended up with something useful and unique. =)
## Tech
I built WANT entirely myself, as a side project. The site is built with Ruby on Rails and Postgres. It's hosted on Heroku. I use Mailgun for email and Zenscraper to scrape submitted product URLs.
The iOS app is built in Swift, but it's mostly a WkWebView wrapper around the website; I built the app to provide a share extension, so users could submit products as they surf on their phone.
One annoying thing I dealt with was OAuth on iOS via a WkWebView. I've written more about that at https://cnr.sh/essays/google-oauth-wkwebview.
Anyhow, looking forward to your thoughts!