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Ask HN: How do we best use the technology we've built?

1 points by djloche ↗ HN
At my startup, we spent months successfully developing a regression analysis based model to accurately and fairly price diamonds. With the goal of disrupting the retail diamond market, we built two free online tools that take advantage of this tech.

Our test advertising campaigns brought in a good deal of extremely high quality traffic (5minutes average time on site, <20% bounce, 10+ pages per visitor) - except that we saw little to no increase in brand awareness following the 2 month campaign. Our traffic returned to previous levels when we stopped advertising.

We've since tried improving our 'natural seo' and have moved up in the ranks for related search terms on google. While we've made progress in terms of ranking, our traffic figures still place the speedometer firmly in the 'without traction' zone.

How do we best use the technology we've built?

Do we return to the lab and pivot to a B2B based site targeting industry professionals? Raise capital to market nationwide, and hire a sales team to sell ads at rates better than adsense? Talk to search / tech / diamond industry players and attempt a direct licensing or outright sale? Keep the project on the backburner and wait for a competitor to have success and then copy what they do?

Suggestions/Comments/Criticism greatly appreciated.

(The site is: http://diamondpriceinfo.com )

1 comment

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Edmond
interesting idea but I am skeptical...the diamond busy is a cartel, market based pricing isn't part of the business model. Not to mention people buy diamonds for aspirational reason so price comparison defeats that purpose. Again, there really is no retail diamond market, there is only the appearance of one. All dealers ultimately answer to de beers!