Hello! I wanted to ask you for advice. Few weeks ago I had a "brilliant" idea that I will build a database of online tools, saas'es, etc. After some research (and questions on HN - Thank you! <3) I thought that maybe I could build mini (veryyyy mini) crunchbase.
The problem is, actually useful information are not freely available. So I was able to get "regular" things like url, title, description, contact/pricing url, socials.
And I think that it's not enough for the "power users", so people who would like to use my website for a market research or competition research won't find it useful (?)
So I was wondering if maybe I should try to pay for services like SimilarWeb and try to enrich my data with their data?
Or maybe I should pivot and try to target regular users who are looking for online tools? But then what, my competitor is google?
I also thought that I could make it for regular users and at the same time downscale significantly and instead of going into huge number of results - start filling them manually with way more information?
I would be very grateful for any feedback and ideas! Thank you!
Hi! At first I wanted to build something similar for regular folks that would be looking for online tools. But then I thought that while it could work, it would require a lot of additional work (researching how price tiers works for each website, does tool have free tier available etc.) and then presenting it in a nice, fancy way (screenshots, logos etc.).
So looking at the amount of "frontend" work I thought that I could pivot into targeting people that are not "regular" users. But rather:
- people looking for ideas for their business
- existing business researching competition or businesses to partner up with
- some general way to track trends, see what was done and in what way etc.
- maybe marketing people?
That is my current idea. Do you think it makes sense?
I had no idea about crunchbase. Hmm, so I guess the idea here is that I would be building crunchbase for poor people. It looks like they are charging 99$ per month or 588$ per year, for 4M entries (with far more info that I would have, and far more features). So the question is, could I steal some of their customers by offering much smaller amount of data with much smaller price?
I am wondering, if I would have 50 000 entries looking similar to what I already have in my demo (but with better search capabilities), would it be worth, let's say 5$ per month (x searches per day or something) and/or maybe 50$/100$ for a whole database dump in a .csv format?
Hi! I wanted to share my little "adventure" that I had in the past ~2 weeks. Basically, I got tired of constant thinking and I decided to build something, anything.
By accident I learned about thing called WebAssembly (basically you can execute pretty complicated programs locally in the browser without sending anything anywhere) so I immediately assumed that it could be used for a set of small, private tools.
Usually I am building with Python, Django, PostgreSQL, hosting it on PythonAnywhere. So this time I decided that I will step out of my comfort zone even further! So I went with:
- Rust (for tools that will be compiled to WebAssembly)
- Zola (static site generator since I don't need anything "dynamic")
- AWS S3 + AWS CloudFront (for hosting this static website)
(I even used AWS to generate my SSL certificate)
Let me know what you think, and of course if I can already sell my website for million dollars :D
