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Show HN: I built a Rotten Tomatoes-style platform for durable products

buyforlifeproducts.com

321–330 of 413 posts

Re: Show HN: I built a Rotten Tomatoes-style platform for durable products

#321
post #243
post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you open to the possibility of competing brands bombarding decent products with negative reviews? FWIW, almost every [negative, because I'm trying to warn others about wasting money] Amazon review I leave is removed for arbitrary reasons set out by Amazon. They seem uninterested in contributions like "this mouse was $30 not 6 months ago, and the current $90 price tag is unconscionable. [LG G602 mouse]" The few ti…

Well, you're not actually reviewing the product. Sure, I wouldn't mind a time series of the price history of an item esp in cases with large jumps. But, generally the point of reviews is to tell me about the product. I can do my own evaluation of what I am willing to pay.

Hijacked product pages and price swings are two of Amazon Shopping's biggest vulnerabilities from my view. Do you know of a price history website/app like you're describing? Sounds like a very good idea.

Re: Show HN: I built a Rotten Tomatoes-style platform for durable products

#322

Not sure if you're looking for site design suggestions but I would get rid of the "carousel" and instead have a grid of items below the fold so people can scroll for a brand they recognize. The carousel is simultaneously too slow and too fast. The visitor has to sit and wait to see a brand they recognize, and then when they do, they only have a second to recognize and click. Scroll works well on all modern devices an…

Yes. Move your current home page to an About page.

The home page is the product so it should have a big search box, a list of categories, and then some top items. Ideally, all three of these will fit above the fold on mobile and desktop. Don't do infinite scroll. At the bottom, have a bigger category list, another search box, and a site map footer. Later, you can use session recording to see how strangers use your landing page and then make it really good. Make your call-to-action button "Add Review" bold.

Show ownership costs in meaningful units: $/100-washes for clothing, $/100-miles for footwear/socks/cycling gear, $/year for business equipment, $/100-meals for kitchen equipment. Put the ownership cost on the search results page and product page, not the item cost. When receiving a review, ask how many times/miles/washes the person used the item every month, when they bought it, and when did it break. When showing the review to others, show the calculated ownership cost as a single number.

Some products are so good that they take many years to wear out. Reviews for products that haven't broken can be misleading. For these kinds of products, your review submission page can explicitly ask if the product wore out or not.

Another problem to solve later: Companies sometimes change a product without changing its name or version number. Usually they make it cheaper. The cheaper version is a different product. The review site should list it as a different product and separate the ratings & reviews. You could use year numbers, eg. "DrTung's Smart Floss (2006)" and "DrTung's Smart Floss (2019)".

People give wildly different responses when asked for star ratings. So don't do that. Instead, ask a concrete question and use that to calculate a rating. Examples: "Will you buy this again when it wears out?" "Would you recommend that your family/friends buy this?" "Do you use other products that do the same thing as this?"

Most folks can't keep track of their purchases & uses so here's your paid product idea: Make an app that lets me record when I bought something, how often I use it, and how much it's costing me. Give me the option of sharing my anonymized usage data with others. Make it super easy to add an item, for example, let me forward order confirmation emails to your service or copy/paste chunks from an email or a product page. Sell the app super cheap: $5/year, $1/month.

It'll be a crowd-sourced Consumer Reports. I pay for Consumer Reports now because I think they really help society. They just need to modernize. Now is your chance!

Re: Show HN: I built a Rotten Tomatoes-style platform for durable products

#323
Good prototype. To achieve your goal of best products in categories and subcategories, you will need a few things:

* Universal equations that can be applied to all products or major categories of products for what is 'best' durable for long term use, including adjustments for value/price. Have to evaluate for self-repair vs pro repair. Availability and price of spare parts. Account for geographic location.

* To help sell the 'best' recommendation for subcategories of 'best', you could show other products that were close but are not the best. But to help users see 'best' in specific categories (ex. not best durable fridge, but best quietest fridge) you will need many custom filters. Some ideas to copy are the extensive filters on Digikey for say, an alum. electrolytic capacitor: https://www.digikey.com/en/products/filter/aluminum-electrol... or on McMasterCarr for a screw: https://www.mcmaster.com/screws

* A good test of 'best' durable in my mind, is answering the question: Would this product be the one chosen to go with the Mars colony ships? Is it fairly cheap, durable in all environments, easy to repair, easy to make spare parts, lasts a long time, low maintenance, etc?

Re: Show HN: I built a Rotten Tomatoes-style platform for durable products

#324
post #292

One of the most interesting things you can ask in a store with high-end clothing is "Which of your items are most likely to last a hundred years?" There's a special joy that arises between you and the shopkeeper as the veil of bullshit disappears and they tell you up front that 95% of the clothes they sell are disposable name-brand garbage made overseas, but THIS item, typically made of denim, or wool, or leather, ha…

Another example is e.g. original England-made Dr Martens shoes (the China-made ones are held in poor regard, apparently). Apart from highly durable and long-lasting, for me an important factor is repairability. You can take such a shoe to a generic repair shop and replace parts if e.g. you walked on glass and it cut through the sole.

Meanwhile my SO bought some fashionable expensive sneakers that broke in the sole after a few days of wearing. SO took them back to the shop and they just gave SO another pair. That’s just sad.

Re: Show HN: I built a Rotten Tomatoes-style platform for durable products

#325

Good prototype. To achieve your goal of best products in categories and subcategories, you will need a few things: * Universal equations that can be applied to all products or major categories of products for what is 'best' durable for long term use, including adjustments for value/price. Have to evaluate for self-repair vs pro repair. Availability and price of spare parts. Account for geographic location. * To help…

One other thing I haven't seen anyone tackle is to evaluate 'best' durable via first principles equations and engineering.

Ex of a fridge:

* Define the physics of how the product performs over its life: physics of door opening and effort to lift the door, compressor energy to turn on, vibration life cycles and wear, power converter wear, etc.

* Define theoretical best performance for the product for each use case in fundamental physics.

* Get performance data for real test units.

* OR if testing real units is too expensive and time consuming. Put modeled fake units in a physics simulation engine (like https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/PhysicsSection.html) and stochastically seed millions of virtual units with minor differences and virtually test to failure.

This would result in a much stronger measure of 'best' durable, that then, the crowd-sourced reviews would, hopefully, reiterate.

Re: Show HN: I built a Rotten Tomatoes-style platform for durable products

#326

A few months ago, I began developing the Buy For Life platform. It started as a simple list where people could add brands that manufacture durable products. It now evolved into a full platform with aggregated product reviews from all over the web, discussions, and various metrics to calculate a score for each brand and product. I want to help people finding the most durable and sustainable products in the world. It s…

I guess a problem it'd be interesting to think about is sifting false reviews from real ones.

Re: Show HN: I built a Rotten Tomatoes-style platform for durable products

#328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another thing is product revisions. Version 1 might be an actual BIFL product. Version 2 might have a small yet significant revision impacting quality. Even process revisions like offloading part of the manufacturing process or a different part supplier can impact the longevity of a product.

...or be bought by a private equity firm with a spreadsheet that says the craft-built premium reputation can be gutted and slapped onto cheaply-made versions for x years before the market notices the shift but by then enough profit will have been extracted that acquiring and gutting the brand will have made net positive financial returns. There's a famous story that I believe Henry Ford scavenged junk yards for broke…

I sold computers and computer accessories at a big box store, and there was an HP rep that would sometimes hang out in the printer aisle to answer questions and evangelize HP printers. I remember he told me a story of how, when HP printers were built really solidly, the CEO had a meeting where he demonstrated this by standing on the printer, and it didn't budge. The takeaway to this wasn't, "Hey, we make a great product. Look at this!" It was, "Hey, we make too durable of a product. We should cut costs because this is costing too much!"

Re: Show HN: I built a Rotten Tomatoes-style platform for durable products

#329

A few months ago, I began developing the Buy For Life platform. It started as a simple list where people could add brands that manufacture durable products. It now evolved into a full platform with aggregated product reviews from all over the web, discussions, and various metrics to calculate a score for each brand and product. I want to help people finding the most durable and sustainable products in the world. It s…

Actually, I don't think that durability is the primary driver of my shopping decisions. I mean, I am a guy who still uses his 8 year old smartphone on a daily basis, so durability is relevant for me, but when I buy something, I want something good. So just because it is made of plastic and can be used for the next 350 years, doesn't mean I would enjoy using it for a single day. Duration is just one aspect of a high q…

Durability in a class of products has a tendency to correlate with the realms of quality I personally care about in my experience. YMMV of course. My selection attributes are invariably different from yours.

Personally, I assign a higher "durability" to a product if it is easily repairable. Parts and schematics/instructions are readily available, at reasonable cost for generations. Ideally seven generations or engineering blueprints released once parts are discontinued. If necessary, I can Ship of Theseus-repair such products over time, which I'm okay with as long as the time between repairs is roughly about the time for less-durable products to break into irreparable junk (without an extensive fabrication shop, which I'm oh-so-ever-slowly building up but could never justify the cost of on that repair capability basis alone).

Most products I select on this durability basis tend to have been in the market for a long time and have a lot of thought refined into their design over that time. I suspect durability raising the cost means the manufacturer has to compete on other axes like usability, functionality, listening and incorporating customer field/operational experience, and overall value by marketing uses it can be put to. Functionality tends to take a hit, especially with commercial-grade gear (compare a commercial restaurant microwave to a consumer model), so I go in with that expectation; sometimes more features is just more fiddly bits to break.

Mostly I do this because I'm utterly fascinated by the shape of design decisions that stand the test of time, and I'm compensated sufficiently to pay for it. Partly I do this because our species faces an energy cliff within an absurdly brief blink of geologic time, and I wish we could keep increasing amounts of stuff out of landfills.

Re: Show HN: I built a Rotten Tomatoes-style platform for durable products

#330

I like the concept but since it's open to the public it will suffer from ignorance. For example, take the Salomon Quest boots that are listed. I own a pair of them. While they're good boots for the price they do not deserve an A- score. They are not BIFL. The soles are glued making them not resoleable. The sole on one of mine has started coming unglued too. The same can be said for the Victorinox Fibrox knife that ha…

"BIFL" footwear; genuinely curious, does such a product even exist?

https://en.trippen.com/products/derby-m

I have had several of these that I still wear after 20 years. They have been refurbished.

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