Leaving Google (for now)

http://www.danshapiro.com/blog/2013/07/leaving-google-for-now/

by DanielRibeiro • 13 years ago

27 4 13 years ago

Hey Dan, Was always curious what you were doing there... Do you think there is a place in the market to launch another sparkbuy-esque site being that it doesn't seem like anyone has done anything "great" in that same space?

Feel free to respond to: chris@clientbiller.com

DanielRibeiro• 13 years ago

Quick heads-up: Dan Shapiro's HN handle is this: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=danshapiro

We just happen to have the same three first letters on our first names. Dan is actually active on HN.

danshapiro• 13 years ago

Amusingly I only found this because someone tweeted angrily at posting such self-promotional content to HN.

To the parent: Sparkbuy's secret was that underneath the UI was a data set that was really, really good. Folks at Amazon and Bing confirmed it was orders of magnitude more complete and accurate than anything they had.

I think that opportunity is still there, although I haven't kept up on consumer electronics data quality lately. But if you can produce a real time feed of accurate data about products on the market, I think you'd still find a buyer for that.

The actual business model of running a comparison shopping UI on top of said data feed is much harder, and we never proved it out (because we weren't around long enough).

Leaving Google (for now)

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