My Side-project was Side-lined by an Influencer
If you go on Amazon right now and search for a product, you might notice a pattern: hundreds of unrecognizable brands with alphabet soup names, many carrying the exact same product. Why is this? Well, people found that hit products on amazon are insanely lucrative, so thousands have flocked to add cheap products to get a share of the wealth. More details here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Bq-6GeRhys.
Is it actually a problem? You might be skeptical - why should I care if my cheap athletic shorts come branded adidas or generic? But brand loyalty is a real phenomenon, and many conscious consumers want to know with as little uncertainty as possible that the products they buy are up to regulation, meet a certain quality, or come with warranty/protection. The other dimension is: when every product looks the same, how do you even browse efficiently? Looking at furniture, the exact table below is sold from dozens of brands with different thumbnails (sometimes).
The consumer frustration is real. At the start of last month, I built a small website to tackle this exact issue. Utilizing a little known fact about amazon search that you can pre-filter to a list of brands by supplying them in the URL, I built out a small ML system to perform query -> brand list matching, and started nightly agentic runs to build out lists of brands with real histories, independent websites, and at least modest media coverage. I posted to reddit, and while I was expecting downvotes, users on subs like BuyItForLife and AmazonPrime loved it, before the posts were removed by mods that is. The only existing tools for the same problems were outdated and extension based, and while an extension seems like the natural way to filter a search, people hate downloading them. Secondly, you can't monetize them. At least not with an affiliate link. So website it was.
Within the first month, merely from those initial reddit posts and a handful of forum replies, I was surprised to see my traffic continue to climb to a few shoppers a day. It doesn't sound like much, but soon the site had paid for its own hosting and domain name. I had the slightest taste of a profit, had just submitted to a handful of launch sites, when every product builder's nightmare happened.
I woke up on July 9 and suddenly everyone was talking about this niche problem I'd been working on - what people started referring to as amazon "knockoff" brands. What happened? Just as I was starting to get excited about this kooky little site I built, an influencer came up with an open source solution to the same problem. It went viral - over 20MM views and over 25k installs. While I was focused on integrating ops tools & tweaking my design to work around affiliate guidelines, he built a more intuitive version, an extension, that doesn't make money at all.
Cue me, frantically trying to ride the press wave. Didn't work. I hadn't spent time building up a following on LinkedIn or Twitter. I'd been focused on the product itself and trying to fit a real problem into a mold where it didn't quite fit. The open source project is the clear winner here on UX and design.
I'm not totally abandoning the project, but my potential niche just found an objectively good solution which everyone now knows about.
Here's what I'm taking away from this experience:
- Trust your instincts and community signals when you see a problem. I had a hunch based on my own experience, and Reddit validated me about the same problem which went viral a few weeks later.
- Reach matters, a lot. You can build a perfect product, but if nobody knows about it, it will not take off. If you're not spending money on marketing, you need to procure a following.
- Reach matters more than speed. I'd built a working site a month before the influencer extension, but not enough people knew about it.
- I spent too much time building for the future, and not enough time building for the present. The site is a bit clunky. The UX is a bit confusing. But instead of focusing on perfecting those elements, I let my future ideas for my site get in my own way. I built features which nobody used or asked for, like community-made brand-lists and a Wal-Mart vertical. I made lists for value-based shopping like environmentally friendly brands. And I started building for scale, hoping for a viral moment rather than keeping things simple enough for the present.
At the end of the day, it's been a fun ride, I've learned a lot, I've made enough to buy myself a nice dinner, and I'm excited to build something new.
https://mytrustedbrands.com/