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Daily Deals for Hackers - Interested?

surveygizmo.com

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Re: Daily Deals for Hackers - Interested?

#2

Post by DealsForHackers »

HIGH LEVEL PITCH: DealsForHackers.com is a daily deals site for the hacker / startup crowd. (Groupon meets TechCrunch).

This is a concept I'm taking a pure Customer Development approach with - if I get enough people to say that they'd be interested in the concept, I'll move forward to the prototyping / initial deal gathering phase.

Why the new / anonymous account? My boss and co-workers read HackerNews constantly, and I'd prefer that they don't know I'm thinking about starting my own thing.

I'd love to know what the community thinks about this!

Re: Daily Deals for Hackers - Interested?

#8

Post by DealsForHackers »

tonystubblebine wrote: post #7

How would this be different than AppSumo?

AppSumo is great, and there would certainly be some crossover between the two services.

However, DealsForHackers would focus on a wider range of offerings, beyond just software. Think discounted conference tickets, hardware discounts, hacker food (whatever that means), etc.

Re: Daily Deals for Hackers - Interested?

#9

Post by zach »

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 a thousand copies in a year.

Nobody actually got their book (the publisher probably didn't have that many) and $13 is ridiculously cheap, but it's a fascinating story. Clearly, a lot of people had that book on their "someday wishlist" (a fantastic market for deal sites) or just appreciate a seemingly one-time deal on that kind of item.

If you can package books together, app-bundle style, or sell them out of season with the academic calendar, it would offer a good opportunity for price discrimination.

Also, although academic publishers are super-wary about the used book market, they also know that their textbooks are being torrented left and right. Maybe this would be a channel they could have more control in.

Re: Daily Deals for Hackers - Interested?

#10

Post by aresant »

AppSumo has shown that there's definitely interest in this area.

This is so flippin' easy to build that it comes down to this - are you passionate about it?

If you are, and you can dedicate a year to seeing it through, you will build a nice business out of it.

If you expand your "hacker" definition to include the audience that buys gifts @ ThinkGeek.com you could be on to something big.

When I say this is easy here's what I mean:

a) The tech is a piece of cake.

b) The design is linear and lots of examples for inspiration in this space.

c) You will make it or break it based on the strength of the deals, just like everybody else competing in this space.

For instance if you found a way to convince ThinkGeek to provide you with a 5% off or something from them (plus a comission to you) in exchange for long-term featured advertising you would essentially be in front of every major "geek" audience from slashdot to reddit to etc in no time.

Plus the company that owns ThinkGeek owns Slashdot and you'd be a perfect aquisition if you expanded your market, aggregated an incredible list of geeks with credit cards.

So go out there and get it done! I want my 5% off ThinkGeek by Christmas.

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