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Show HN: My kid choked on a toy, so I built this

recallbee.com

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Re: Show HN: My kid choked on a toy, so I built this

#3

Post by heelhook »

nowarninglabel wrote: post #2

That's a great idea and really focuses on the do one thing and do it well approach. Are you going to have some app where they could scan the barcode of the toy and get the info or is it all manually input?

Thanks! Yes, I'd like to get there at some point, but right now I'm just using an API to do product search based on name, UPC or others.

Re: Show HN: My kid choked on a toy, so I built this

#4

Post by benologist »

Your site says in 2013 one toy was recalled every three days, and you mention 37,000 toys being monitored but have sent alerts about only 1% of them. To me this says by default the recalls are so rare I may never buy an affected product just by chance, I think you need something more if you want $$ every month.

Maybe this would be a better service for kindergartens, schools, daycares etc rather than parents.

Re: Show HN: My kid choked on a toy, so I built this

#5

Post by heelhook »

benologist wrote: post #4

Your site says in 2013 one toy was recalled every three days, and you mention 37,000 toys being monitored but have sent alerts about only 1% of them. To me this says by default the recalls are so rare I may never buy an affected product just by chance, I think you need something more if you want $$ every month. Maybe this would be a better service for kindergartens, schools, daycares etc rather than parents.

Thanks for the feedback. The 37,000 is the number of toys being monitored by parents (i.e. added to the database by one of our users). The copy "Toys Being Monitored" definitely needs to be adjusted!

Thanks for pointing that out!

Also, regarding pricing: RecallBee is a pay-what-you-want service ;)

Re: Show HN: My kid choked on a toy, so I built this

#6

Post by joshstrange »

Really cool idea but how do you plan for this to pay for itself? I imagine the time commitment is pretty high to have to go through all toy recalls and/or safety hazards. It's one thing to only need to pay for servers but a humans time? Maybe you could use Mechanical Turk and then just feed donation into a bank account linked to it.

I love these little one-off sites but I worry that in a few years time they will all be graveyards.

Re: Show HN: My kid choked on a toy, so I built this

#7

Post by benologist »

heelhook wrote: post #5
benologist wrote: post #4

Your site says in 2013 one toy was recalled every three days, and you mention 37,000 toys being monitored but have sent alerts about only 1% of them. To me this says by default the recalls are so rare I may never buy an affected product just by chance, I think you need something more if you want $$ every month. Maybe this would be a better service for kindergartens, schools, daycares etc rather than parents.

Thanks for the feedback. The 37,000 is the number of toys being monitored by parents (i.e. added to the database by one of our users). The copy "Toys Being Monitored" definitely needs to be adjusted! Thanks for pointing that out! Also, regarding pricing: RecallBee is a pay-what-you-want service ;)

Do you have any statistics that show why every parent should use this service? What is the risk of buying a recalled toy, or one that will be, on Amazon or at Walmart? What % of families have at least one recalled toy their kids might be using?

Re: Show HN: My kid choked on a toy, so I built this

#9

Post by pccampbell »

I think this is awesome in terms of a product. Could be interesting to expand to other types of recalls (just go through the Ralph Nader list). Most of this information is publicly available, but in such shitty databases that it's not even worth pursuing. If I was a parent, I'd definitely sign up and probably pay a low amount.

Also, if you want some free help tracking your subscription metrics for Stripe, feel free to check out profitwell.com (completely free). Would love your feedback on that as well, if you don't mind. :)

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