How I got Started on BuyReddit, the Ultimate AI-Powered Product Guide
Hey everyone, I’m excited to share my journey of building a (barely ramen) profitable AI product (https://www.buyreddit.com/) with you. It all started with a simple frustration that turned into a life-changing venture. If you’ve ever found yourself lost in the endless sea of online reviews, you’ll understand where I’m coming from.
Naturally, I turn to Reddit for all things, especially product reviews. What I find though is an overwhelming number of threads, each with hundreds of comments. It's possible to sift through all the opinions, but it takes time. Also, lots of my friends didn't know the value of such recommendations from Reddit. That’s when the idea hit me: what if there was a way to aggregate all these comments and pull out the most helpful ones to share with everyone?
Fueled by this idea, I decided to create BuyReddit. The initial version was super basic—a simple script that scraped Reddit comments and sorted them by upvotes. It wasn’t perfect, but it was enough to show the potential. Encouraged by the positive feedback from my friends, I decided to take it a step further.
Building BuyReddit hasn't been smooth sailing. There's been a number of fun challenges but one particular one we've enjoyed solving (alongside AI's help) has been the nuance of language. Reddit comments can be full of slang, sarcasm, and inside jokes, making them difficult for AI to get 100% always correct.
Another significant challenge was keeping our data up-to-date. Product trends change rapidly, and we needed our recommendations to reflect the latest information. We integrated with Amazon's API to automatically update product prices and reviews daily, ensuring our users always had access to current data.
To monetize BuyReddit, we earn commissions on referred sales. We also added features like a “Deals” section, which highlighted products that were on sale, adding extra value for our users.
We're happy to be ramen profitable and hope to continue growing and providing the best products for our users! Let me know if you have questions in the comments.
Check it out here: https://www.buyreddit.com/! The best part of building it has been that it has solved my own problem!!
I would like to say that the site is very useful and useful for daily use. I am one of those who impatiently waits for Turkish language support to arrive. Can you list the most suitable options in the price performance category?
Hi Fvuar, thank you for the kind words. I am sorry to say that language support will likely not be a priority anytime soon (as I'm still looking to first grow the US userbase). But, I think you can use a variety of tools online (check out google translate's website translator: https://www-buyreddit-com.translate.goog/categories/airpurifier?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp)
Let me know if you have any questions!
I'm sorry to hear that, if you need any help regarding the translation, I would like to let you know that I will be happy to translate it into Turkish. Google translate translates the site fine, but it also restricts some basic functions on the site, so it is a feature I will never use, but thank you anyway.
This is awesome! It's really cool to see how you got started with BuyReddit. An AI-powered product guide sounds super handy, especially with the endless amount of stuff on Reddit. It's amazing how AI can simplify things and make navigating content so much easier. Kudos on the innovation and thanks for sharing your journey!
Ha, is this chat gpt ;)
Hello David, congrats on reaching ramen profitability on your product, it's always a huge milestone!
I've been using it for a bit now, and I really like the core idea!
Here's my few cents: What I'd like to see is a bunch of quotes from redditors' comments on a product (maybe when expanded), for more authenticity. The design seems unintuitive, and the copy seems kinda confusing (it looks like you're selling a saas). It feels like you're trying to "sell" the product too much, when you could just "show" it to people by displaying the latest products on your homepage (right now it's buried behind a bunch of buttons).
My unsolicited advice would be to keep it simple: a short text section explaining your product and the core benefits, a category list, and then all the latest products on the bottom. Kinda like an e commerce site.
Oh and since I'm a newsletter guy (your site is going in there btw), my other advice would be to have more pronounced email section (and probably make it pop up when the user are browsing your products), since that's the best way to retain your users. Oh and also tell me exactly what I'm getting, maybe daily, weekly, or monthly roundups, instead of saying "we don't spam". Every time I see "we don't spam" I just automatically assume that this site is going to spam me :).
Good luck. This looks like a cool site that I might actually use often, so I hope you'll succeed with it!
Peter, I appreciate your feedback so much! I am going to go in depth through each point, adjust my site, and get back to you here. Appreciate it!!
Hope it helped. I look forward to using your site a lot more!
This is great! What approach / resources did you take to building and training the AI - did you hire a team?
Thank you Amira! We are using OpenAI/Gemini depending on what fits the use case better for a particular task. It's currently just me and my cofounder, so no team yet!
Awesome story, @davidmayh
How did you get your first users? Just reaching out to friends?
Thats right! Our network first, and now reaching out to communities and groups online like on Facebook :)
Check out our sales page and upgrade your lifestyle mate! https://www.buyreddit.com/sale
Love it, @davidmayh. Would be great to have you on my podcast, Free Founders, where we share actionable lessons from successful, under-the-radar solopreneurs & small business owners.
If you're interested, just book a time slot for July/August and I'll send through next steps:
https://calendly.com/henry_latham/podcast