Hi, I'm a co-founder of Priceonomics. Basically we started seeing more traction from two things (that weren't our consumer price guide).
First, the traffic from our blog was dwarfing the traffic (and engagement) on our price guide. We originally started our blog just to get links to drive SEO to our price guide. But, it turns out we love blogging so we really put our hearts into it.
Second, we started getting a lot more revenue from helping companies acquire and structure data than we were making from the price guide. All those blog posts we write were we crawl the web and do analysis based on the data? That was testing this out. We'll be writing more about that soon, so stay tuned.
The result is that we decided to focus on helping businesses get data and writing about data via our blog. About a month ago we started depreciating the consumer price guide.
So you switched to client-services basically? What sort of clients? I'm guessing buy-side (hedge funds) and maybe a touch of sell-side (investment banks)? Those are the only client-service relationships that immediately come to mind which are profitable enough to pursue entirely.
Some of this yes. But really, our first customers were / are other startups that were dedicating a lot of engineering resources to crawling and analyzing data. Eventually one company we were helping asked if they could pay us. We sort of stumbled into our first revenue and then realized there was a business there.
Glad to hear you folks are still around and only pivoting to something (hopefully) sustainable.
I've always been a curious follower of Priceonomics for two reasons. One: the sheer research/depth of your posts that hit HN frequently. It's rare to find blogs that deep dive into such a diverse set of topics while writing eminently readable prose. Would love to read a post on how you find experts/how they research topics sometime.
Two: your name - Rohin Dhar - is a deprecation of my name - Rohin Dharmakumar. You've also been quicker than me in signing up with the @rohin usernames on most web services, HN included :) Glad to make the acquaintance!
But are you sure all the revenue coming from "helping companies acquire and structure data" is not correlated with the price guide access? That people that are long and short-term users of the price guide are the ones bringing their companies to your site?
Thank you Rohin and congratulations! I'm happy for you. It sounds like you've hit a market fit and will do well.
I am still sad for the loss of priceonomics as it was. I would be more sad to hear the business was not working out so this news is better. Still could the pricing engine continue to be a feature of priceonomics? Maybe remove the auto-generated image and the ads thus stripping the pages down to just the engine's pricing? Please?
I sent you guys an email back a couple of months ago and you never responded.
Most of the new articles, I have to say I like. I don't read all of them but I do read some of them.
I don't understand how you're turning this into value for yourselves. Where is this all heading?
I understand you're collecting data but how? How does that help you and other companies specifically?
Would love to learn more about the direction you're taking.
thank you for answering, your mentions tracker program must be working. I understand that blog traffic trumped your price guide, and you love it, and it brings in more money but did you ever think of your user/customer? it seems as though just from this thread and the tweet that was linked (amongst myself) there are a number of users that saw tremendous value in what you do. ever thought of turning the price guide into some sort of UGC engine powered by the people and moderated by a thin staff?
One of the competitive advantages the company I work for has is that it dogfoods its own software, which for some odd reason is a bit rare in its space -- we don't just think we know the problems our customers face, we're suffering them every day.
Somewhat relatedly, the managers I respect the most are the ones who continue to hammer out software themselves -- they don't just think they know the problems that software development faces, they're suffering them every day.
In both cases, it shows.
As such, I'm curious how you're planning to keep a healthy business helping other companies if you're not keeping your skills sharp on your own forge. I ask this in the nicest way possible. :)
I find the worst managers are those who try to pretend they are still developers. Managing is a full-time job, you need to be available for your team to interrupt; if you're writing code you're not. And since you will be interrupted, you can't pair-program or do anything that someone else is going to depend on.
I started a similar company, Shopobot. We launched, raised, got good press. Things looked great!
Shortly after we watched as Decide and Priceonomics launched.
After months of beating our head against the wall, we came to the conclusion that we weren't competing against Decide and Priceonomics. We were competing against Amazon.
Everyone we talked to loved the idea. But we found their praise didn't turn into clicks. We'd ask them why, and they'd always say, "oh, I just went to Amazon."
One day our lead dev was telling me about a recent purchase and I asked him if he used our site to find a good price. "No, I just used Amazon. I have Prime." That's when I knew we were fucked. Competing against Amazon without a really really strong value prop is not easy.
We've long since pivoted, Decide shut down, and now Priceonomics is perhaps pivoting. I think CamelCamelCamel is still at it! After all the VC money flushed out, the bootstrapper is still standing. :)
This reminds me, I have a long blog post to finish about how comparison shopping and price guides are difficult to pull off.
Amazon Prime is brutal to compete against. I'm averaging around 100 orders from Amazon a year (based on their order stats for my account), and almost whenever I do a search, I tick the Prime search restriction. I know it often means I pay more, but 90% of my purchases are impulsive purchases of the "I want this yesterday" kind where Amazon is competing against brick and mortar stores by me not having to go to a shop, and knowing I'll still have it the following day, and where other online sources don't enter into the picture at all.
The exceptions, where I don't go straight to Amazon, are very specific, and are a handful of vendors that ship as quickly as Amazon and that I go to for specific ranges of products (e.g. my supplements).
The only times I'll comparison shop, and where Prime doesn't come into it at all, is for really big items. E.g. my TV (but the TV before that was from Amazon...). My last laptop (but the two before that were from Amazon).
There's still a lot of value for pricing intelligence (see current #3 post talking about Amazon's Fulfillment-By-Amazon product) in arbitrage. The "shipped by amazon" has an immense amount of weight. It's pretty straightforward to acquire products (even from amazon 3rd party sellers), relist on amazon with FBA/prime/etc logos and profit.
Although Amazon has started it to do it themselves directly via "Amazon Warehouse Deals" -- http://www.amazon.com/b?node=1267877011 -- They'll actually purchase other seller's underpriced inventory and relist it themselves for a tidy profit. Especially easy when it's sitting in their warehouse already in a box.
This is a great "anecdote" (I don't have a better word...). It's easy to imagine someone finding cheap goods, setting himself up with fulfillment by amazon, and setting a price, and then Amazon deciding his price is wrong, buying his stuff, and relisting it (after all, it's already catalogued in their warehouse) themselves.
I don't think anyone thinks such behavior would be morally alarming... but that's certainly a common perspective when it comes to high-frequency stock trading. What makes the difference?
Google killed off comparison sites from the top of searches, if you can't find the comparison site it might as well not exist (or if it does it is spending tons on adwords to still be found).
search compare prices on bikes brings up no comparison sites
search compare prices on laptops brings up 2 comparison sites (one result per site)
search compare prices on watches brings up 3 comparison sites (one result per site)
search compare prices on software brings up 2 comparison sites (one result per site)
Problem is comparison sites spam the search engine listings pretty hard. It's only a matter of time before Google decides to do something about it...
Semantics3 (YC W13) gives you access to similar pricing data, but across several web retailers [1]. They seem to have a slightly different take: being a data API rather than a standalone website for product tracking and discovery.
Everything I can buy on Amazon, I buy on Amazon; everything I can buy "Prime + actually sold by Amazon", I buy this way, even if it's a little more expensive, because I know it will arrive on time no matter what, and I can return it with zero hassle.
There may be a micro niche of price comparison within Amazon, because some rare / specific products are sometimes sold at wildly different prices on Amazon (and listed many times; not just different prices under the same listing).
And of course Amazon's search engine is completely broken; an actual product search, limited to Amazon, that worked would add tremendous value.
Coming from Australia, we've never had much exposure to Amazon, which leaves a ton of opportunity for price comparison websites.
Personally, I'd find it a pain if a price comparison website diverged from their core search offering. Sites like [1]PriceGeek still have price comparison front and centre - much more useful for me as a consumer who can't tap into the benefit that Amazon provides.
There's still room for price comparison, just maybe outside of the US.
Have a question regarding competitive analyses before creating a startup. Since this seems to be an issue of doing competitive analyses about your market, how do you and other startups go about doing research about competitors?
Ecmmerce is a normal thing these days, so we tend to consider it more or less functional. But realistically, its still pretty broken. Checkout processes (including amazon's) are all different and most are clunky. The best way to tell what shipping will cost is to do a mock purchase. Amazon makes you choose shipping option before u see the price. You don t know hw long it will take. You need to give them your cc details.
Just using amazon for all purchases makes it all a little easier.
I'm building Shoptimate.com [1] and I'm in Europe. Amazon isn't as huge as in the US (and the multiple local Amazon sort of compete with each other).
But I also gave up on the website to build a browser extension. Shoptimate is bootstrapped and mainly active in Europe so I can execute more slowly and without the pressure of VC-money. But even then, it's a tough space.
Interestingly, my co-founder and I always still fell into the trap of purchasing something on the net and within a few days seeing the product for a whole bunch less. About a year ago, we set about building a tool that would "monitor/watch" the prices on our behalf and we wanted it to work on any shopping site.
A few month ago, we launched Pricify http://pricify.com and this is our first iteration. Basically, you can use a simple bookmarklet to add products to pricify from any online store, once the product drops in price the system sends you an email or facebook notification, if at any point the product hits it all time lowest price it sends you a separate email as well.
Last week we had a guy who bought a car as a result of the price drop he noticed and contact us to thank us. This has provided us further confidence of its use.
We've learnt so much already and are adding what our users are asking for. Ultimately, we want to build something that solved a problem for us in the hope that it solves the problem for others, so far we have been seeing promising results.
We want to get into the content, blogging from a SEO perspective, but we've had very limited bandwidth trying to focus on the main functionality itself being completely bootstrapped!
Early days, but would love any advice on whats already being learnt from the others out here.
We built this for clothes (http://www.shopofme.com) a while ago. It did some fashion specific stuff on top of it but in essence the same principal, alerts when items drop in price.
Might be interesting to chat as I'm still running the site as a side project these days after the primary business model didn't work out. We built a fair bit of pretty solid tech for it so might at least be some knowledge share there? Contact details in profile.
Just curious, how do you implement such a thing? I mean how do you avoid polling the stores zillions of times, which would probably eventually be shut off by the stores?
One thing I don't understand. Do merchants mind being "price-compared" like this, or not? If so, do they help with content like thumbnails, API for price data, stock availability, etc?
I remember some time ago octopart.com (similar tool) had problems with DigiKey (merchant) because it was merely redirecting to its products.
Wow my post hit the frontpage! This gives me a fine chance to see happens to an uncached wordpress blog behind Nginx and php5-fpm. So far no explosions.
Now I realize the guys behind priceonomics might read this I hope they take it well. I liked their early blog posts, those were interesting!
This homepage makes me concerned that the original business plan is not working out. It feels like they are resorting, or pivoting, to a classical product recommendation site. I hope this is not the case. Maybe I just hit a bad combination of randomized A/B tests.
I noticed this a while back. I'm guessing their blogging efforts were so successful, they decided to make it the focus and become a media business. I too would love to hear what's going on behind the scenes at Priceonomics.
Simple. They've built what search engines want vs what humans wanted: content that will rank in the search engines and get more shares/clicks. Thin product comparison pages no longer rank well and even worse a lot of them may give the signal that you're not a quality site.
Sometime this year or last, these guys probably looked at their traffic growth and realized this existing model was never going to cut it. Their sole strategy is search engine traffic and their pages were not ranking.
Readit News
First, the traffic from our blog was dwarfing the traffic (and engagement) on our price guide. We originally started our blog just to get links to drive SEO to our price guide. But, it turns out we love blogging so we really put our hearts into it.
Second, we started getting a lot more revenue from helping companies acquire and structure data than we were making from the price guide. All those blog posts we write were we crawl the web and do analysis based on the data? That was testing this out. We'll be writing more about that soon, so stay tuned.
The result is that we decided to focus on helping businesses get data and writing about data via our blog. About a month ago we started depreciating the consumer price guide.
Happy to answer any questions!
I've always been a curious follower of Priceonomics for two reasons. One: the sheer research/depth of your posts that hit HN frequently. It's rare to find blogs that deep dive into such a diverse set of topics while writing eminently readable prose. Would love to read a post on how you find experts/how they research topics sometime.
Two: your name - Rohin Dhar - is a deprecation of my name - Rohin Dharmakumar. You've also been quicker than me in signing up with the @rohin usernames on most web services, HN included :) Glad to make the acquaintance!
I am still sad for the loss of priceonomics as it was. I would be more sad to hear the business was not working out so this news is better. Still could the pricing engine continue to be a feature of priceonomics? Maybe remove the auto-generated image and the ads thus stripping the pages down to just the engine's pricing? Please?
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I don't understand how you're turning this into value for yourselves. Where is this all heading? I understand you're collecting data but how? How does that help you and other companies specifically?
Would love to learn more about the direction you're taking.
PS - Do you take guest bloggers?
Somewhat relatedly, the managers I respect the most are the ones who continue to hammer out software themselves -- they don't just think they know the problems that software development faces, they're suffering them every day.
In both cases, it shows.
As such, I'm curious how you're planning to keep a healthy business helping other companies if you're not keeping your skills sharp on your own forge. I ask this in the nicest way possible. :)
I started a similar company, Shopobot. We launched, raised, got good press. Things looked great!
Shortly after we watched as Decide and Priceonomics launched.
After months of beating our head against the wall, we came to the conclusion that we weren't competing against Decide and Priceonomics. We were competing against Amazon.
Everyone we talked to loved the idea. But we found their praise didn't turn into clicks. We'd ask them why, and they'd always say, "oh, I just went to Amazon."
One day our lead dev was telling me about a recent purchase and I asked him if he used our site to find a good price. "No, I just used Amazon. I have Prime." That's when I knew we were fucked. Competing against Amazon without a really really strong value prop is not easy.
We've long since pivoted, Decide shut down, and now Priceonomics is perhaps pivoting. I think CamelCamelCamel is still at it! After all the VC money flushed out, the bootstrapper is still standing. :)
This reminds me, I have a long blog post to finish about how comparison shopping and price guides are difficult to pull off.
The exceptions, where I don't go straight to Amazon, are very specific, and are a handful of vendors that ship as quickly as Amazon and that I go to for specific ranges of products (e.g. my supplements).
The only times I'll comparison shop, and where Prime doesn't come into it at all, is for really big items. E.g. my TV (but the TV before that was from Amazon...). My last laptop (but the two before that were from Amazon).
Although Amazon has started it to do it themselves directly via "Amazon Warehouse Deals" -- http://www.amazon.com/b?node=1267877011 -- They'll actually purchase other seller's underpriced inventory and relist it themselves for a tidy profit. Especially easy when it's sitting in their warehouse already in a box.
I don't think anyone thinks such behavior would be morally alarming... but that's certainly a common perspective when it comes to high-frequency stock trading. What makes the difference?
search compare prices on bikes brings up no comparison sites
search compare prices on laptops brings up 2 comparison sites (one result per site)
search compare prices on watches brings up 3 comparison sites (one result per site)
search compare prices on software brings up 2 comparison sites (one result per site)
Problem is comparison sites spam the search engine listings pretty hard. It's only a matter of time before Google decides to do something about it...
[1] https://www.semantics3.com/
Generally, the bootstrapper focuses on building a sustainable business early on (whereas the VC-funded startups try until the wellspring dries up)
There may be a micro niche of price comparison within Amazon, because some rare / specific products are sometimes sold at wildly different prices on Amazon (and listed many times; not just different prices under the same listing).
And of course Amazon's search engine is completely broken; an actual product search, limited to Amazon, that worked would add tremendous value.
Personally, I'd find it a pain if a price comparison website diverged from their core search offering. Sites like [1]PriceGeek still have price comparison front and centre - much more useful for me as a consumer who can't tap into the benefit that Amazon provides.
There's still room for price comparison, just maybe outside of the US.
[1] http://thepricegeek.com
Just using amazon for all purchases makes it all a little easier.
But I also gave up on the website to build a browser extension. Shoptimate is bootstrapped and mainly active in Europe so I can execute more slowly and without the pressure of VC-money. But even then, it's a tough space.
[1] http://www.shoptimate.com
A few month ago, we launched Pricify http://pricify.com and this is our first iteration. Basically, you can use a simple bookmarklet to add products to pricify from any online store, once the product drops in price the system sends you an email or facebook notification, if at any point the product hits it all time lowest price it sends you a separate email as well.
Last week we had a guy who bought a car as a result of the price drop he noticed and contact us to thank us. This has provided us further confidence of its use.
We've learnt so much already and are adding what our users are asking for. Ultimately, we want to build something that solved a problem for us in the hope that it solves the problem for others, so far we have been seeing promising results.
We want to get into the content, blogging from a SEO perspective, but we've had very limited bandwidth trying to focus on the main functionality itself being completely bootstrapped!
Early days, but would love any advice on whats already being learnt from the others out here.
Might be interesting to chat as I'm still running the site as a side project these days after the primary business model didn't work out. We built a fair bit of pretty solid tech for it so might at least be some knowledge share there? Contact details in profile.
One thing I don't understand. Do merchants mind being "price-compared" like this, or not? If so, do they help with content like thumbnails, API for price data, stock availability, etc?
I remember some time ago octopart.com (similar tool) had problems with DigiKey (merchant) because it was merely redirecting to its products.
Now I realize the guys behind priceonomics might read this I hope they take it well. I liked their early blog posts, those were interesting!
This homepage makes me concerned that the original business plan is not working out. It feels like they are resorting, or pivoting, to a classical product recommendation site. I hope this is not the case. Maybe I just hit a bad combination of randomized A/B tests.
Deleted Comment
Unfortunately I know them mostly from their blog and not their product.
Sometime this year or last, these guys probably looked at their traffic growth and realized this existing model was never going to cut it. Their sole strategy is search engine traffic and their pages were not ranking.