Show HN: My kid choked on a toy, so I built this

http://www.recallbee.com

by heelhook • 11 years ago

133 100 11 years ago

That's a great idea and really focuses on the do one thing and do it well approach. Are you going to have some app where they could scan the barcode of the toy and get the info or is it all manually input?

heelhook8• 11 years ago

Thanks! Yes, I'd like to get there at some point, but right now I'm just using an API to do product search based on name, UPC or others.

benologist3• 11 years ago

Your site says in 2013 one toy was recalled every three days, and you mention 37,000 toys being monitored but have sent alerts about only 1% of them. To me this says by default the recalls are so rare I may never buy an affected product just by chance, I think you need something more if you want $$ every month.

Maybe this would be a better service for kindergartens, schools, daycares etc rather than parents.

heelhook8• 11 years ago

Thanks for the feedback. The 37,000 is the number of toys being monitored by parents (i.e. added to the database by one of our users). The copy "Toys Being Monitored" definitely needs to be adjusted!

Thanks for pointing that out!

Also, regarding pricing: RecallBee is a pay-what-you-want service ;)

benologist3• 11 years ago

Do you have any statistics that show why every parent should use this service? What is the risk of buying a recalled toy, or one that will be, on Amazon or at Walmart? What % of families have at least one recalled toy their kids might be using?

joshstrange• 11 years ago

Really cool idea but how do you plan for this to pay for itself? I imagine the time commitment is pretty high to have to go through all toy recalls and/or safety hazards. It's one thing to only need to pay for servers but a humans time? Maybe you could use Mechanical Turk and then just feed donation into a bank account linked to it.

I love these little one-off sites but I worry that in a few years time they will all be graveyards.

darkstar999• 11 years ago

Just throwing out ideas here.. you could reward user contribution of recalls by sharing a portion of the subscription revenue. You would require the user submitted recall to include a link to an official source. Pretty easy to verify.

jared314• 11 years ago

Is this a front end on top of the current government provided resources [1] [2] [3], or does this include other sources?

[1] http://www.recalls.gov/

[2] http://www.cpsc.gov/en/Recalls/

[3] http://www.saferproducts.gov/

heelhook8• 11 years ago

I'm using those sources, but I'm also monitoring a few dozen parents and educators forums where safety concerns are sometimes raised, even if they don't convert into actual recalls, and treat those reports as minor alerts.

gburt• 11 years ago

Manually?

pccampbell• 11 years ago

I think this is awesome in terms of a product. Could be interesting to expand to other types of recalls (just go through the Ralph Nader list). Most of this information is publicly available, but in such shitty databases that it's not even worth pursuing. If I was a parent, I'd definitely sign up and probably pay a low amount.

Also, if you want some free help tracking your subscription metrics for Stripe, feel free to check out profitwell.com (completely free). Would love your feedback on that as well, if you don't mind. :)

gamerDude• 11 years ago

I had the idea to do the same thing for drugs and medicine you are taking.

Obviously this is a big task, perhaps v2, but have you thought about monitoring every toy, so that I could look up a toy before I buy it?

williamjackson• 11 years ago

I hope you don't buy a toy that is already recalled. It is against the law in the US to sell a product that has been publicly recalled. http://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=granuleid:USC-prelim-...

heelhook8• 11 years ago

This was recalled last week.

http://www.amazon.com/Dream-Me-Layla-Bassinet-Cradle/dp/B004...

heelhook8• 11 years ago

Yeah. I definitely want to do this and have it on my very-near-term todo list; I just wanted to get this version out the door and start getting feedback from a broader audience (up till now I've just handed out invites to my network of parents and friends).

Thanks for the feedback!

muppetman2• 11 years ago

This looks really good, but like so many sites I find on here, it makes no mention of country. So I assume you're just monitoring toys recalled in America?

i.e. It's probably not worth me in New Zealand signing up?

chrisBob• 11 years ago

This seems like a case where the country shouldn't matter. A recall in the US could help your kid no matter where you live.

masukomi• 11 years ago

that assumes the user is going to take the time to figure out which of their toys originated in the US OR waste time entering toys with the mistaken belief that the service is watching for them.

muppetman2• 11 years ago

Well yes, there's a good chance some of the toys, especially the bigger brand names one will also be affected. But there's also a lot of Australian make and New Zealand made toys here.

I know I could sign up for better coverage of recalls than I currently have, but I'm not going to enter all the toys we have if only ~10% of them have any chance of being monitored.

kazinator• 11 years ago

I don't see the back story anywhere on the site, but I hope your child is okay!

heelhook8• 11 years ago

He is, it was a minor scare. But a scare nonetheless, and it was on a toy that had been recalled months ago. Its amazing, but there are a lot of toys and kids' furniture that have been recalled and yet are still available for purchase on amazon!

kzhahou• 11 years ago

What was the toy?

Alupis• 11 years ago

have been recalled and yet are still available for purchase on amazon!

Recalls are not mandatory I believe, and majority of products on Amazon are sold by 3rd party sellers (everything from part-time-single-person operations to big distribution companies).

rhubarbcustard• 11 years ago

You should add the story of your son's scare to the site - gives it a more human and personal vibe and give potential customers something to relate to.

cdnsteve• 11 years ago

Or McDonald's. I've seen more than one recall poster for the stuff in the kids meals, scary.

jmlucjav• 11 years ago

I contracted for a company with the same idea (I built the matching engine from incoming alerts to products in the db). It went under, that was 3 years ago. They were not focused on toys, though. There is some traces of their android app here: http://www.amazon.com/Cyberellum-LLC-Recall-Alarm/dp/B007MCK...

bonzoT• 11 years ago

Hmm. When I read the headline, I thought this had some angle with a lawsuit type service. If "my kid choked on a toy" and was injured, I would use a lawyer. So perhaps, you could build some sort of class action feature for peoples kids who were injured to file together and split the compensation. And maybe the site takes a fee as a percentage.

robkix• 11 years ago

And that's the thought process that got a bunch of toys banned or restricted (such as magnets[1]) even though they can be responsibly used by many children. I don't think the problem is the product and certainly making it easier to start class action lawsuits will only further decrease the available toys until all we can purchase are pictures of toys. Just don't get a paper cut.

[1] http://gizmodo.com/5929064/buckyballs-have-been-banned-by-th...

stephengillie• 11 years ago

Do you have any concerns that the system could be abused? Maybe a someone would start paying some Amazon Turkers to make complaints about a competing product?

What do you think about expanding this to 3d-printed stuff? Analyze blueprints for child safety before printing?

austenallred• 11 years ago

My main concern would be that I have to input all of the toys my kids are using. I'm just not sure that I would ever do that. But looks cool.

Also, the right side of the site doesn't seem to be constrained; I can scroll way over - http://take.ms/P4CZQ

porter• 11 years ago

I'd rather just get a digest email of all recalls that day or week. Anything critical text me.

cornstalks2• 11 years ago

Same, I can scroll pretty far to the right. Running Chrome 41.0.2272.76 on OS X 10.10.2.

hpritch5• 11 years ago

Bootstrap favicon? :)

heelhook8• 11 years ago

Woops. Thanks! :D

kendallpark• 11 years ago

How did you decide upon the pay-what-you-want pricing model?

orkj• 11 years ago

I really like the landing page, but I feel I have to point out one obvious thing:

Your sign-up page[0] not only resembles the one of Basecamp[1], but you chose to actually copy (not like copy from it, but _copy_) the graphics from it? And the graphics features a dude wearing a Basecamp sweater?

I can see why you want to find design inspiration in Basecamp, but for me that stuff is just too close to the original ;)

As I said. Just a friendly pointer. You might want to change that. Other than that I wish you the best of luck, and this looks like a great start and an interesting idea!

[0]http://www.recallbee.com/account/start

[1]https://basecamp.com/start

heelhook8• 11 years ago

Thanks, I actually copied the image to see what it'd look like in place and forgot to take it out. I'll address that first thing!

Again. Thanks so much for that!

grey-area3• 11 years ago

Did you pay for the other illustrations on your home page? They look a bit disparate, and some turn up elsewhere in an image search:

https://dribbble.com/shots/1553377-Changing-Homes?list=users...

http://dabbled.org/this-robot-has-expired/

http://www.creativebloq.com/illustration/illustrations-strip...

If not perhaps consider paying one of the illustrators (Daniel González stuff looks excellent) to make you a set of illustrations which are all in the same style - your pages would look a lot more coherent if they didn't have a grab-bag of styles going on, and also you could have a lot of liability if you don't have permission for every image on your site.

It's not really on to just copy images from the web without attribution or payment - you could be sued for a lot of money for that basecamp image for example which is still up.

Otherwise, it's a nice site and great idea though.

uptown• 11 years ago

5 hours later ... still there.

alexcabrera• 11 years ago

Great idea, caught a couple grammar problems:

When a safety issue is raised on one of your kid toys we send you immediate alerts to make sure you are in the known.

should be...

When a safety issue is raised on one of your kid's toys we send you immediate alerts to make sure you are in the know.

The `kid's` part can also be `kids'`, I think. Maybe. I'm terrible at plural possession.

Retr0spectrum• 11 years ago

Just to confirm, `kids'` is correct for plural posession.

If you want to be really pedantic and overanalyse it, there are three possible situations. `kids'` if you assume the parents have multiple kids, and `kid's` if they have one. However, if you assume that "your" refers to all the parents on the internet collectively, then `kids'` is correct again. Since `kids'` is correct in 2 out of 3 scenarios, that's what I would go for.

hspak• 11 years ago

FYI, there doesn't appear to be any input validation for the "How It Works" interaction.

Blahah• 11 years ago

Beautiful idea and execution.

Seems to me that you could monetise this by selling to businesses. For example, you say in the comments that amazon still sells some toys that have been recalled. This is illegal and could land them in some trouble. So you can approach them with a price for recall updates matched to their product listings, so they can suspend sales. If you word the licensing right you can then give the service to concerned parents as cheaply as you like, while charging companies for saving them a legal hassle.

anigbrowl• 11 years ago

Yeah, I think the real value here is not in B2C, but B2B where you specialize in providing regulatory information to retailers in actionable form, like correlating SKUs with product URLs and so forth.

accountmaker• 11 years ago

is usable to check it out

vortico2• 11 years ago

Your HN account could come in handy if you register more example accounts and people don't abuse them.

LordHumungous• 11 years ago

Is your kid ok?

kybernetikos• 11 years ago

Once you have a database of toys that parents have, there are other ways you might usefully use the data, like allowing parents to join toy swap or library groups, provide purchase recommendations based on similar toy choices (you could perhaps even monetise via affiliate sales of toys), etc.

fishnchips3• 11 years ago

Beautiful execution but I find the purpose misguided. I am a parent too so maybe that's a cultural difference (EU vs US?) but if my kid choked on a toy I would pay closer attention to toys going forward rather than look for toy vendors to do my parenting for me.

taco_emoji• 11 years ago

How about both?

fishnchips3• 11 years ago

Sure, as a parent you should be able to decide what the appropriate response is. But at least to me this particular class of problems does not need an app but simple common sense.

Harimwakairi• 11 years ago

You make a good point, but surely you'd admit that you're not versed on every possible danger that a toy could present. For example, what if we discover a year from now that a particular paint or varnish that we thought was completely safe is actually toxic?

I would imagine that both our governments pay experts to research such things, and making their conclusions more accessible seems like a useful enterprise.

raisedbyninjas• 11 years ago

Part of the expense of products is to ensure a good, safe design. I could use common sense and research toxicity of materials, off-gasing, tensile strength, resistance to hot/cold/UV, shapes that are vulnerable to choking, strangulation, puncture wounds, etc. If every parent had to go through this for each purchase it would be a massive, unnecessary duplication of effort. This would take considerable time just for childrens toys, not to mention food, cars, and office buildings. I'm glad that cars have recalls driven by real engineers that drivers are proactively contacted about rather than relying on the average person's "common sense" about vehicle safety.

Noelkd• 11 years ago

There are two newsletter sign up options at the end of the page.

mkarr• 11 years ago

What happens when you (somehow) fail to set the status of a toy you track to "recalled" during some part of the recall period, and then one of your subscriber's kid harms themselves with said toy? Have you anticipated how to protect yourself from your subscriber in such a case?

vortico2• 11 years ago

It's hilarious that this kind of "protection" is needed in the U.S., in 2015, etc.

But I don't see any Terms of Use on the website at all, so it might be worth your time to cover your legal bases before there are too many subscriptions.

slapshot• 11 years ago

This model seems to come up every few years but never quite makes it. Here's a version from 2000 with uglier graphics and more shouty copy, but the same idea: https://web.archive.org/web/20001018093126/http://www.safety... . I remember another version where you scanned your household goods to get recall updates.

Of course, previous failure doesn't mean the model is doomed (see grocery delivery in 2014 vs 2000) but there may be a piece missing --- is this a service that Amazon or Toys-R-Us could provide as a value add? Otherwise I'm not sure how you get CAC below LTV at a scale to cover overhead.

twrobel2• 11 years ago

If you're letting people enter in their credit card information at any point for any reason you MUST get an SSL certificate and force people to use a TLS secured connection.

Infosec 101

twrobel2• 11 years ago

At a bare minimum you can get a free SSL cert here - https://www.startssl.com/?app=1

It doesn't include any real verification, so it doesn't give any assurance that you are who you purport to be, but it at least prevents people's credit card numbers from being sent across the web in plain text.

MichaelGG• 11 years ago

but it at least prevents people's credit card numbers from being sent across the web in plain text.

Which is probably how no one individual's card info was stolen, ever.

thebeardisred• 11 years ago

Admittedly that's all happening with javascript passthrough to stripe's API using https.

gameguy43• 11 years ago

This. I added https to my site to get users to stop worrying, but AFAIK you don't need it with Stripe.

scott_karana• 11 years ago

Ugh. I guess that's technically true, but it doesn't prevent me from feeling heeby-jeebies.

What's to stop a malicious MITM (using an iframe, say) from fucking with Stripe's javascript during runtime if you're not using HTTPS yourself?

EDIT: turns out that Stripe themselves recommend SSL[1] for the same reasons we both guessed:

  Do I need to use SSL/TLS on my payment pages?

  Yes, for a couple of reasons:

    * It's more secure. In particular, it significantly reduces your risk of being exposed to a man-in-the-middle attack.
    * Users correctly feel more comfortable sharing their payment information on pages visibly served over SSL. Your conversion rate is likely to be higher if your pages are served over SSL/TLS, too.

1 https://stripe.com/help/ssl

mholt• 11 years ago

I think people forget that any non-HTTPS page can be tampered with in flight. For example, to deliver a form that looks like it uses Stripe but actually goes to an attacker. HTTPS is a 100% must on all pages for a business.

Backlash85• 11 years ago

That's how true startups are born. Building a solution to an ever ongoing problem. This company will sustain itself as usually passion comes with success, how much more passionate can you be after your kid has choked on a toy? Kudos to the op

lordbusiness• 11 years ago

Bravo! This is a brilliant idea, and quite well executed. I wish you every success.

Thank you.

marcusgarvey• 11 years ago

Please reconsider describing your newsletter as "high value", which is corporate jargon and doesn't seem suited to your audience. Instead explain what someone signing up will get from it.

nickodell• 11 years ago

You've got a typo on the main page.

know -> known

foxylad• 11 years ago

Clicked link hoping to see a muzzle for babies. Was disappointed.

pbhjpbhj2• 11 years ago

I can't see me listing all the stuff I bought (not much!) for the kids on your site/app or whatever - this is increasingly an issue.

Perhaps you can sell a service to Walmart/Amazon/etc. whereby you maintain a list of recalled toys and then monitor their products (and eg Amazon marketplace) to make sure the toys're not being sold there?

Also supermarkets and other retailers have histories of goods purchased seems that there should be some way to use that to gather the ownership data rather than have users enter it themselves.

kiluagank• 11 years ago

Would love to see a demo, if you have video how your service works, that would be awesome. i would not subscribe to something that I have no idea bout it. Video would be great

stickhandle2• 11 years ago

I can only think of the value of your list of active customers. That's a targeted bunch ... and you already what they have and, perhaps more importantly, what they don't have. Press on!

codingdave• 11 years ago

That feels like a betrayal of trust. If you sign up for a service that is intended to protect your children, that is not a business relationship, it is personal. It needs to be treated as a personal relationship. Breaking that trust would be not only bad business, but just all around badness.

stickhandle2• 11 years ago

Really? I think it would all be down to the execution.

zaroth• 11 years ago

Thanks for sharing. I think you have a lot of bases covered very well. Landing Page | How It Works | Pricing is a great start. Free trial offer, and choose your own price to boot, is an interesting approach.

I understand your product. I'm not sure I'm up for the requisite effort to keep you informed of my kids toys, nor am I personally all that concerned with recalls, so for me it wasn't worth signing up. Car seat, stroller, bigger items, those I would want to know about recalls, but those aren't "toys". If you're going to do kid-safety, I think you have to cast a wider net.

I went to 'How it Works' and clicked continue. Entered a fake name and clicked continue. Left email blank and clicked continue... I just wanted to see the actual product, you know?

So then I see 'Example's Toys... All toys safe' so I click 'What toys am I tracking' and the screen flickers and now says 'Attention required... some safety concerns.' So something is wrong there, I wasn't able to actually demo your product.

Maybe instead of 'Sign Up' and making me jump through hoops, flip the model around. Start as an anonymous user, fill in some toys, see if there are issues, then to get the alerts and save your toy list, then you can click to sign-up. If someone puts real toys into the list, they are almost certain to want to save it instead of throw the list away.

Also, you might not even need to make the user create an account with a password. The alternative, more old-school Craigslist model, is just collect the email. If you ever send an alert, include a link which lets the user login. In the welcome email, include a link to edit your toy list. Once in a while, ping to ask for new toys to be added, and include an auto-login link. Just something to consider.

Also, this is probably asking too much, but can you please share the scatter plot of what people are choosing to pay for pricing? That would be incredibly interesting.

easyd• 11 years ago

Seems like you already posted this 6 months ago [1] without getting any upvotes or comments. Wondering if it's just the new title or a new landing page. Any idea?

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8273325

bbcbasic• 11 years ago

I think there is a good idea in this, but as presented I wouldn't use it.

I am a parent. There are lots of toys around the house. Some are mainstream so I will probably find them on your site, but some are boutique. Some I don't have the box for so I can't list them if I don't remember the name.

So it is quite a hassle to list them all, and I can't be bothered.

Because most danger to children isn't toys IMHO but things like drowning, choking on small objects (not necessarily from a toy, could be a coin), falling, curtain cords and roads. I would rather concentrate on minimizing those risks.

A way you could present this so at least I would use it is just an email address. No need to list your toys, and get weekly or monthly product recall updates for mainstream toys.

It could have the recalls for that month, plus anything super-dangerous in the last 6 months as a reminder. Then there is no need to enter toys and therefore it becomes a no brainer to enter your email address and get the alerts.

In addition there could be information or links to articles about other generic dangers such as those small button batteries that can cause serious harm or death to a child. Or similarly curtain cords. Road safety etc. etc.

m3rv• 11 years ago

just shut the computer and watch your kid. Eh, fcuking nerds

scottmcdot• 11 years ago

A good starting point would be our Nanny State's Australian Competition and Consumer Commission list of banned toys:

https://www.productsafety.gov.au/content/index.phtml/tag/ban...

maswewe• 11 years ago

http://www.dreamfemale.com

h_o• 11 years ago

Hey, DEV here just a quick question about stripe integration.

Your website is http, so does for instance supplying my credit card details over http not have some security risk?

edit: oh I just saw you have https. So why is this not enforced?

breakingcups• 11 years ago

Congrats on building this. One thing that struck me (and possibly others) as odd is this sentence: "Did you know that in 2013 alone one toy was recalled every three days?".

It doesn't seem to make sense, either you say "Did you know that in 2013 alone 121 toys were recalled?" or "Did you know that in 2013 one toy was recalled every three days?".

The world "alone" to me only makes sense when talking about totals, not avg. per day/month/etc.

Show HN: My kid choked on a toy, so I built this

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