I have a project that I've been weekend working since the start of the year. And while I think it's a fine project (IMHO) to scratch an itch, I've always doubted its startup potential.
However, as they say with many eyeballs all startup ideas are shallow, I mean obvious.
The goal is simple, "Provide an alternate means of finding a good Kindle book to read." The competition is limited to Amazon itself, Google Books, Apple iBooks, Barns and Noble, Borders et al. I mean, heck I've never even heard of these guys. Just a bunch of lumbering behemoth dot-com has beens. Practically shooting fish in a barrel here.
My "trick" is to facilitate fast, fast, fast, easy as pie browsing. In essence, allow the customer to disposition as many books as possible in the shortest time. Way too much endless clicking around on Amazon to just browse for books (product). Try browsing deeper than say 100 books on Amazon in the Scifi genre for example. Then transition the customer onto Amazon for the affiliate fee.
My edge is they have (thanks a bunch MS) to deal with IE 6+ while I can basically keep iterating on what would eventually be a decent alternative interface in HTML5 (Chrome/FF/Opera and god willing a maybe IE9). At the end of the day it just needs to be a better front-end to Amazon than Amazon's for a decent minority of people.
My "secret" is a kind of math-y means for product classification and navigation, though the current project doesn't do it justice at all. 80% of effort to date is below the surface of the basic UI effort so far.
FWIW, I'm not limited to books, I could for example do the same for gluten free foods or some such.
Given the dearth of quality competition in the online book retail space I thought I'd give it shot first.
However, as they say with many eyeballs all startup ideas are shallow, I mean obvious.
The goal is simple, "Provide an alternate means of finding a good Kindle book to read." The competition is limited to Amazon itself, Google Books, Apple iBooks, Barns and Noble, Borders et al. I mean, heck I've never even heard of these guys. Just a bunch of lumbering behemoth dot-com has beens. Practically shooting fish in a barrel here.
My "trick" is to facilitate fast, fast, fast, easy as pie browsing. In essence, allow the customer to disposition as many books as possible in the shortest time. Way too much endless clicking around on Amazon to just browse for books (product). Try browsing deeper than say 100 books on Amazon in the Scifi genre for example. Then transition the customer onto Amazon for the affiliate fee.
My edge is they have (thanks a bunch MS) to deal with IE 6+ while I can basically keep iterating on what would eventually be a decent alternative interface in HTML5 (Chrome/FF/Opera and god willing a maybe IE9). At the end of the day it just needs to be a better front-end to Amazon than Amazon's for a decent minority of people.
My "secret" is a kind of math-y means for product classification and navigation, though the current project doesn't do it justice at all. 80% of effort to date is below the surface of the basic UI effort so far.
FWIW, I'm not limited to books, I could for example do the same for gluten free foods or some such.
Given the dearth of quality competition in the online book retail space I thought I'd give it shot first.
All feedback welcome. Requires Chrome.
http://goo.gl/tPPJz