Good or bad site idea?

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Kiopa_Matt

Banned
May 13, 2011
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Basically, a news feed for companies you regularly purchase from. People are quite conscience nowadays about who they purchase from, only want to purchase from companies they deem ethical, etc. However, many times people don't know who they're buying from. For example, if you purchase Uncle Ben's rice, you're actually buying from Mars, Inc.

So scrape the shit out of various massive product lists out there, and link them up to their parent companies. Then allow people to create a free account, easily enter the products they enjoy, and the site automatically keeps them up-to-date with what that company & parent company(s) are doing.

For example, if some company is being sued by a govt somewhere for unfair labor practices, people would probably want to know. Same goes if a company is spear heading a movement that is helping people of a region. Basically, just keep people quickly informed about who they're purchasing from.

Good or bad idea?
 


Hipster as fuck. I would create an Iphone & Android app where you could also search products (when you are in store before buying). You could even use some image recognition algorithm for detecting product logos in order to retrieve the date from database.

But this pretty much turns in full-time startup (mainly getting the traction). You may get lucky but in most cases it requires a lot of time and the chance for major success is still relatively low.
 
GoldMarketing said:
But this pretty much turns in full-time startup (mainly getting the traction). You may get lucky but in most cases it requires a lot of time and the chance for major success is still relatively low.
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Exactly, hence why I posted it publicly. I'm not going to develop the thing. I think it's a decent idea, but it's a 3 year job, minimum cost of $500k, with hopes you did it right and get bought out at the end. Tough to justify.
 
I would use it. Especially for something like Field Notes which comes out quarterly in limited runs. I never know if I missed the email from them, and always worry I will miss that particular run. Ideally a SMS notification would be great.
 
Kiopa_Matt said:
I'm not going to develop the thing. I think it's a decent idea, but it's a 3 year job, minimum cost of $500k, with hopes you did it right and get bought out at the end. Tough to justify.
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Sounds like you just answered your own question.

If the magical gay webmaster fairy could poof it into existence with a flick of her dick I might check it out once or twice to confirm that corporations are indeed "up to something" and then forget about it.
 
Kiopa_Matt said:
Exactly, hence why I posted it publicly. I'm not going to develop the thing. I think it's a decent idea, but it's a 3 year job, minimum cost of $500k, with hopes you did it right and get bought out at the end. Tough to justify.
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Throw a fancy flat theme with thin icons and lots of buzzwords about using big data or being the Uber for X and you'll have Sand Hill firms lined up.
 
First lukep and his Thai fishing thing and now this.

If you're not the same person, you're at least sharing a house.

Let me guess, your untrained dogs are actually a euphemism for lukep?
 
I love the idea, and I actually had a similar idea a while back.

My idea was to mine through all of the practices of each company as well as the campaign donations made by people at that company to create a "political/social footprint" for each company.

Users would then fill out a short quiz (or simply specify what issues were most important to them) and they would get a "political/social footprint" as well.

Then I would provide a product search engine where a user could search for any product they want to purchase and we would rank all of the results based on how the companies actions aligned with the beliefs of the person searching. The listing would show all of the recent actions that company has done and how those compare with the ideals of the person searching.

So a super pro-environment liberal would be shown products produced by companies that have practices that support the environment and campaign donations that are pro-environment. A hardcore libertarian would be shown products produced by companies that have pushed for less government involvement. And in both cases they would be shown why each company matches or doesn't match their ideals.

I think there is a big market for these sorts of "socially conscious" informational websites.
 
Reminds me a bit of a site that was around 10+ years ago where you could compare, on a massive 3D flow chart (think it was flash driven), all the board members of all Fortune 500 companies and see which members were on multiple boards at different companies.

Can't remember what it was called and can't find it searching, so have no idea if it's still around.
 
Kiopa_Matt said:
People are quite conscience nowadays about who they purchase from, only want to purchase from companies they deem ethical, etc.
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Eh, not as much as you think. Most people talk a good game, but in the end they don't really give a shit.

Kiopa_Matt said:
easily enter the products they enjoy
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You want me to enter in the products I like. Nope, too much work.

Kiopa_Matt said:
For example, if some company is being sued by a govt somewhere for unfair labor practices, people would probably want to know.
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Everybody knows Apple products are essentially built by slaves and despite having the most liberal, hipster, SJW user base of any company in existence, it doesn't affect their sales. Nobody really cares. They say they care, but they don't care enough not to use the product. And it's not just Apple, the same can be said for a lot of companies. People aren't nearly as concerned as they say they are. So I don't think notifications about "what a company is up to" would really resonate.

cardine said:
So a super pro-environment liberal would be shown products produced by companies that have practices that support the environment and campaign donations that are pro-environment. A hardcore libertarian would be shown products produced by companies that have pushed for less government involvement. And in both cases they would be shown why each company matches or doesn't match their ideals.
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I like this idea a lot more. You're taking away the value judgment on a company's actions. To carry the example further, I actually don't care if Apple treats their 3rd world workers like shit, if I liked their products I would still buy them. Don't berate me and make me feel bad for buying a product from a company that does "bad things" based on whoever makes that subjective judgement.

Doing it this way it's all about how a company aligns with you, not how "good or bad" the company is.
 
I like the idea as some companies like Apple need outing. I wouldn't use it though as I still use Apple's products.
 
Unarmed Gunman said:
Doing it this way it's all about how a company aligns with you, not how "good or bad" the company is.
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Eventually with the right size user base you could sell placement to companies in search results, email etc. according to 'alignment profile', allowing them to reach a pretty well targeted demographic of buyers.
 
MSTeacher said:
Eventually with the right size user base you could sell placement to companies in search results, email etc. according to 'alignment profile', allowing them to reach a pretty well targeted demographic of buyers.
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Plus I could be wrong, but would imagine having say 50 million personalized shopping lists, each assigned at the very least an e-mail address and GeoIP'd location, would be quite valuable.

It would be tough to monetize directly, but that data could become quite valuable, hence why you couldn't expect a penny of revenue for at least probably 3 years.
 
Kiopa_Matt said:
Plus I could be wrong, but would imagine having say 50 million personalized shopping lists, each assigned at the very least an e-mail address and GeoIP'd location, would be quite valuable.

It would be tough to monetize directly, but that data could become quite valuable, hence why you couldn't expect a penny of revenue for at least probably 3 years.
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So basiacly Amazon wishlist?
 
dmnEPC said:
So basiacly Amazon wishlist?
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No, not a wish list. Shit that you already buy on a regular basis. You pitch it as being an ethical and socially conscious consumer. I can easily see women posting on Facebook, basically, "look at how awesome and ethical I am -- I signed for this -- you HAVE to check it out".

On the back-end, all you really care about is those personalized shopping lists. Who gives a shit of they forget about the site two weeks later -- as long as you get their shopping list. Get a good 50 million of them, and you can probably sell them for a good penny, especially when each has an e-mail address and GeoIP'd location attached to them (at the very least).

Obviously it's best to retain them and keep them coming back, so you can continue gathering more data, but that initial chunk of data is what's most important.
 
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