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Apply HN: Discovery List – Product Hunt for products you can actually buy

10 points by plyleung ↗ HN
Discovery List Beta: https://www.discoverylist.com

Problem: We're targeting people with a spare $100 to spend and want to buy something unique and exciting. Online retailers like Amazon only work well when you know what you're looking for. Discovering new products by trawling through product blogs and browsing Twitter feeds is inefficient since most of them cover the same products as each other.

Discovery List: provides 3 lists of user-submitted products (under $100, over $100, pre-orders) upvoted by other users. Each product has a price, description and buy link. Users can save products to a wishlist to find them later. Eventually, we want Discovery List to be a detailed directory of everything buyable on the internet.

Making Money: We make money when people buy products from our affiliate partners.

About Us: We're two brothers who live in Melbourne, Australia. I'm an actuary who codes and my brother is a software engineer with a PhD.

6 comments

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lahdo
Like your idea.

Maybe additionally create a gift idea generator.

Users will add products they wish to have, and other people with vote if they like them.

You can then suggest gifts for people with similar interests.

levng
Timothy here, one of the co-founders. A gift idea generator/recommender is definitely in the works. We would use the users upvotes and lists to feed into a collaborative filtering algorithm. Thanks for the pointer!
pjlegato
What's your marketing plan? That is, how will you find buyers who are interested in this concept, and get them onto your site?
Geekette
Might be useful to focus on products within a certain niche and/or people of certain profile (e.g. comic book enthusiasts or specific genre of art). Otherwise, there are already so many gift/shopping suggestions services with big user communities and large product directories. I wouldn't be inclined to use a new service unless it demonstrably found me items that others didn't.