Priceonomics (YC W12) Tells You What Everything is Worth

http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/22/priceonomics/

by omarish • 15 years ago

94 39 15 years ago

adelevie2• 15 years ago

I remember when SeatGeek presented at TechCrunch Disrupt(?) in 2009, pg took issue at the fact that they didn't use their ticket price data to arbitrage the secondary ticket market. Does Pricenomics use its data to arbitrage any markets, and if not, why should the same criticism not apply?

All that aside, Pricenomics looks compelling. Hopefully it will substantially increase the efficiency of second hand "stuff" markets.

rohin• 15 years ago

We've been investigating arbitraging Aeron chairs. We're finding they're very hard to lug around. We'll keep you posted!

adelevie2• 15 years ago

Haha. I thought you were being facetious until I saw it on your about page. Now I'm not sure what to think :/

revorad2• 15 years ago

But wouldn't that be worse for the users?

themenace• 15 years ago

I think it's a great idea and wish these guys success. But isn't eBay (and perhaps Craigslist) in a much better position to provide this functionality? They have enormous historical databases on the prices of things.

veemjeem• 15 years ago

wouldn't microsoft (bing), google, walmart, etc? I think this is why startups exist...

jerryji• 15 years ago

Talking about historical database on prices, how about a real-time platform that records (and social broadcasts) all real things that have been bought and sold? -- http://bizspeaking.com

nostromo• 15 years ago

Congrats on the launch guys. We do something similar but for different online markets -- most commonly Amazon -- (e.g.: http://www.shopobot.com/tv/). One of our most common user requests is to provide this info for CraigsList and Ebay, so I'm sure you'll find success there.

jrubinovitz• 15 years ago

I went hunting for "macbook pro i7" and every item I clicked on (something like 4 or 5) had already been sold. It does look like something I would use otherwise(EDIT: as in if I had a better success rate when I clicked).

omarish6• 15 years ago

Makes sense. We'll have fresher data up there in the very near term. Also, it's not super obvious, but you can use the left and right arrows in that lightbox to navigate the listings.

ilamont• 15 years ago

How do startups get around the Craigslist TOU against using "automated means, including spiders, robots, crawlers, data mining tools, or the like to download data from the Service" (http://www.craigslist.org/about/terms.of.use)?

paulhauggis• 15 years ago

I wondered the same. A guy was actually sued over this for his automated crawling/posting bots he was selling as a service. From what I've heard, their lawyers are pretty relentless.

I think he is also a reader on HN.

jpdoctor• 15 years ago

Don't the padmapper/etc housing crawlers do this?

Those are incredibly useful too, it is much easier to see those things on a map.

CoffeeDregs• 15 years ago

You don't crawl Craigslist; you tickle Google. Craigslist can't block them... But you'll still need an excellent lawyer...

slig• 15 years ago

I thought Google was heavily against automated searches and blocked bots on spot.

gms• 15 years ago

They don't - it's a bit "don't ask, don't tell". The hope is that if Craigslist ever decides to enforce the TOU, said startup is popular enough that they can work out a deal.

binarysolo• 15 years ago

I think a solution using RSS feeds may get around this, if you can have RSS feeds to everything. (Not super familiar with CL feeds.)

richardburton2• 15 years ago

Cool! 'Macbook Air' did not return a result though :(

midas• 15 years ago

Thanks for the feedback and sorry about that. We made some tweaks to our search this morning to speed it up for launch and some searches like yours suffered as a result. This (unintuitive) search should get you what you're looking for: http://priceonomics.com/search?s=apple+macbook+air

We'll get it cleaned up for you in the next version!

omarish6• 15 years ago

Fixed! http://priceonomics.com/search?s=macbook+air

richardburton2• 15 years ago

Cool - thanks a lot!

colinm• 15 years ago

Price for EVERYTHING? But no commodities, oil, coffee, etc.

zeratul• 15 years ago

Note to self: data mining web app; few visual bugs; duplicates; I can see only "Bad News! This Item Already Sold."; no info where an ad comes from; they use jquery; actually http://www.shopobot.com/ by nostromo looks better (but they just focuse on amazon price monitoring);

forensic3• 15 years ago

Seems like premature publicity. Great idea that is far from being useful right now. If you actually want customers you need to prove you can provide value.

My first try was "iPhone 4" and it showed me the average price for all iPhones, from iPhone originals to broken iPhones to locked iPhones etc. That's useless. unless you can identify the specific product and give me a number, this is not useful and I'm better off googling it

omarish6• 15 years ago

Sorry, that isn't quite as clear as it could be. Here's a link to the page you're looking for: http://priceonomics.com/phones/apple/

forensic3• 15 years ago

Ah, so it's your search feature that is broken.

ryanglasgow• 15 years ago

I searched 'iPod' and there were no results. Why would they launch a half-baked website 3 days before Christmas? They should have admitted they missed the holidays and polished things up before launching.

omarish6• 15 years ago

Hey Ryan - that's my fault. I pushed some last minute fixes to handle the TC traffic. Apple iPod works but iPod doesn't. We'll have to graduate to a proper search tool at some point:

http://priceonomics.com/search?s=apple+ipod

Nonetheless, thanks for the feedback!

cperciva• 15 years ago

Your sorting by price is broken: It's sorting strings, not numbers, and counts "$900" as being higher than "$2000".

rokhayakebe• 15 years ago

I used to be "kind-of-a" used car dealer, and I always thought I could build this same product to help get a better idea of how much to bid on cars at the auction. Basically it would get current listings on CL in my city for model ZYX from YY to YY. Knowing how many similar rides are on the market and the average asking price is great insight.

revorad2• 15 years ago

Do you guys actually have any products available or is this just an email harvesting launch? I ask because I tried a lot of items and they were all sold out. :-)

I'm impressed by your courage to launch with a half-baked product like this. I wish I could do the same.

rorrr• 15 years ago

So it's yet another price comparison site. What's so special about it?

Tichy• 15 years ago

At first glance I didn't see anything that searching ebay with "show only expired auctions" wouldn't also give me. But it is probably still early days...

Priceonomics (YC W12) Tells You What Everything is Worth

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