Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Daily Deals for Hackers - Interested?

surveygizmo.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 36 posts

Re: Daily Deals for Hackers - Interested?

#11

Post by babyshake »

Deals for hackers seems like it could be a good way to start off with a narrow scope and a targetted audience, but by calling your site DealsForHackers you are essentially limiting yourself from ever growing beyond this relatively small audience.

Personally, I think there's a more interesting market opportunity in helping developers monetize from the daily deals space, rather than making a daily deals product meant for developers as end-users.

That having been said, I'm still a hacker and I'm still interested in good deals. Too bad you don't have a field for survey takers to provide our e-mails so you can inform us of when we can use your service.

Re: Daily Deals for Hackers - Interested?

#13

Post by gaustin »

babyshake wrote: post #11

Deals for hackers seems like it could be a good way to start off with a narrow scope and a targetted audience, but by calling your site DealsForHackers you are essentially limiting yourself from ever growing beyond this relatively small audience. Personally, I think there's a more interesting market opportunity in helping developers monetize from the daily deals space, rather than making a daily deals product meant f…

> Personally, I think there's a more interesting market opportunity in helping developers monetize from the daily deals space, rather than making a daily deals product meant for developers as end-users.

Things like a marketplace for matching deals to sites or a "Shopify" for coupon sites?

Re: Daily Deals for Hackers - Interested?

#14

Post by gaustin »

zach wrote: post #9

What would really be valuable and popular would be if you could find a way for us to get a group discount on these $80-$100 books that are priced as textbooks. There is a huge amount of pent-up demand there. Take the extreme but famous example of when one of those books, Lisp in Small Pieces, was mispriced for $13 including shipping at amazon.ca in 2007 -- it became the #1 seller, on a book that I imagine sells maybe…

There's a pile of "textbooks" on my wishlist that I just can't afford. Something like this that would knock off a significant portion of the price would be amazing.

When the Pragmatic Bookshelf had their huge Thanksgiving sale last year, I dropped $300 dollars on books, which is pretty close to my usually yearly tech book spend.

Re: Daily Deals for Hackers - Interested?

#15

Post by pchristensen »

zach wrote: post #9

What would really be valuable and popular would be if you could find a way for us to get a group discount on these $80-$100 books that are priced as textbooks. There is a huge amount of pent-up demand there. Take the extreme but famous example of when one of those books, Lisp in Small Pieces, was mispriced for $13 including shipping at amazon.ca in 2007 -- it became the #1 seller, on a book that I imagine sells maybe…

Maybe a Groupon style "You get this price is X people commit" rather than an AppSumo-style deal that anyone can buy.

Re: Daily Deals for Hackers - Interested?

#16

Post by paulgerhardt »

This strikes me more as a Woot for entrepreneurs instead of hackers.

What would be cool, personally, is have the site feature products which for one reason or another are known to be hackable.

Things such as the Girltech IM-Me which can be flashed into a spectrum analyzer, Open-WRT compatible routers, KisMac compatible wifi cards, the Breville BKE820XL hot water kettle which has a non-mechanical switch so it can be hacked to be controlled from your phone and send you push notifications when the water is boiled, remote control power outlets from AliBaba, Hot Air reflow stations, Emotiv's EEG, Quadrocopter kits to deploy some of the UPenn GRASP code, and so on.

++EDIT++

What I realize now, thinking about it some more, is a site like this might actually be ideal for hacker ore. Apple would never think to let their merchandise go on Woot, but something like a Samsung TS-H943 as shipped is in every sense of the word, mediocre - the one special thing about it is it let's one install custom firmware to read non-standard DVD's - it's only a matter of selection for digging up more deals like this that manufacturers would be happy to let go on bantler.com like sites...

Re: Daily Deals for Hackers - Interested?

#17

Post by will_lam »

Hmm. I left a comment in the survey but I figure I'd chime in here as well.

AppSumo can definitely move into this space as it's related.

There should be plenty of room in this niche as they seem to be the only player.

Would love to see what you can do in terms of defensibility and innovation.

Re: Daily Deals for Hackers - Interested?

#18

Post by babyshake »

gaustin wrote: post #13
babyshake wrote: post #11

Deals for hackers seems like it could be a good way to start off with a narrow scope and a targetted audience, but by calling your site DealsForHackers you are essentially limiting yourself from ever growing beyond this relatively small audience. Personally, I think there's a more interesting market opportunity in helping developers monetize from the daily deals space, rather than making a daily deals product meant f…

> Personally, I think there's a more interesting market opportunity in helping developers monetize from the daily deals space, rather than making a daily deals product meant for developers as end-users. Things like a marketplace for matching deals to sites or a "Shopify" for coupon sites?

Maybe something like a Shopify, although those are unsurprisingly starting to spring up left and right. I'm thinking more of something like building a nice, consistent cross-platform API for deals.

Unfortunately, sites like Groupon have draconian developer terms of service (http://www.groupon.com/pages/api-terms-of-use). Basically, what they're saying is that you can show Groupon deals to end-users, but you can't do anything else.

Re: Daily Deals for Hackers - Interested?

#19

Post by abyssknight »

I said this on the survey, and it seems that several others agree, but I would love to see more physical things on a daily deals site for hackers. AppSumo is too much SaaS for me, and I have a day job where I don't get to make those purchasing decisions. However, hackable things, books, software -- that I can really get into.

Re: Daily Deals for Hackers - Interested?

#20

Post by nihaar »

What about a Groupon like site for freelancers and designers? Flash sale for a small quanta of work such as a mockup or design or protoype that would eventually help spread the freelancers/designers business as well (by building up a portfolio and referrals). There would obviously have to be a small limit on the number but each day a freelancer/hacker/designer could be featured and any number of "units" could be put on sale.
Post reply on HN