A website to answer the question "what kind of dog food should I buy?"
It was a price comparison website that allowed you to quickly find the best priced dog food (unit price -- like $ per 1 pound weight) and it could be filtered by dog food ratings (you could compare expensive 5-star quality ingredient foods while ignoring any of the cheap 1-star ingredient foods). There is an independent website that reviews dog food based solely on ingredients, created by a veterinarian that I used for assigning SKUs to quality cohorts. I felt that most of the reviews on e-tailer website were heavily opinionated, based on anecdotes -- not data, and many were brand-sensitive ("I only buy so and so brand because all other brands suck").
The site was fully built, had some decent SEO, it integrated with 12 e-tailers, I registered and tagged all of the products for many affiliate marketing systems, I bought several hundred dollars worth of AdWords campaigns and iterated about 6 times. The scraper and display website took a few months. I spent a few days cleaning obviously erroneous data. It took a day's worth of time to sign up for all of the affiliate programs (effort staggered over a few weeks). I built a few scripts to automate the browser to search the affiliate websites for the correct affiliate links (some programs were much more customized than just adding a site-wide tag). I ran it for over a year and there was only one conversion that was paid by the affiliates, but it was too small for them to cut a check.
The idea, after the website was built and running, got some interest from a former CEO (now VC) and from a wealthy friend of the family, but I never followed up with either. I felt like all of the hard work of the product was done and the majority of work remaining would need to be marketing and generating inbound links.
I'm still convinced that there is a need for more price comparison websites that are unit-price indexed. Amazon doesn't have search by unit price and only occasionally has unit price. Things that come in packages of varying size (like dog food, batteries, household detergents and liquids) are hard to compare for value. I found two other sites with this idea, one was shut down and the other was focused entirely on supplimenting Amazon.
One problem I had is that the fine print on most of the affiliate programs prevented me from competing on many of the necessary AdWords search term keywords that I would have needed to advertise to get any real traffic. Basically, I felt my web interface was superior to both the e-tailers for finding the right product, but I couldn't compete for that AdWord traffic because my competition with them would drive up their marketing costs.
It was a price comparison website that allowed you to quickly find the best priced dog food (unit price -- like $ per 1 pound weight) and it could be filtered by dog food ratings (you could compare expensive 5-star quality ingredient foods while ignoring any of the cheap 1-star ingredient foods). There is an independent website that reviews dog food based solely on ingredients, created by a veterinarian that I used for assigning SKUs to quality cohorts. I felt that most of the reviews on e-tailer website were heavily opinionated, based on anecdotes -- not data, and many were brand-sensitive ("I only buy so and so brand because all other brands suck").
The site was fully built, had some decent SEO, it integrated with 12 e-tailers, I registered and tagged all of the products for many affiliate marketing systems, I bought several hundred dollars worth of AdWords campaigns and iterated about 6 times. The scraper and display website took a few months. I spent a few days cleaning obviously erroneous data. It took a day's worth of time to sign up for all of the affiliate programs (effort staggered over a few weeks). I built a few scripts to automate the browser to search the affiliate websites for the correct affiliate links (some programs were much more customized than just adding a site-wide tag). I ran it for over a year and there was only one conversion that was paid by the affiliates, but it was too small for them to cut a check.
The idea, after the website was built and running, got some interest from a former CEO (now VC) and from a wealthy friend of the family, but I never followed up with either. I felt like all of the hard work of the product was done and the majority of work remaining would need to be marketing and generating inbound links.
I'm still convinced that there is a need for more price comparison websites that are unit-price indexed. Amazon doesn't have search by unit price and only occasionally has unit price. Things that come in packages of varying size (like dog food, batteries, household detergents and liquids) are hard to compare for value. I found two other sites with this idea, one was shut down and the other was focused entirely on supplimenting Amazon.
One problem I had is that the fine print on most of the affiliate programs prevented me from competing on many of the necessary AdWords search term keywords that I would have needed to advertise to get any real traffic. Basically, I felt my web interface was superior to both the e-tailers for finding the right product, but I couldn't compete for that AdWord traffic because my competition with them would drive up their marketing costs.