BabyFiesta

This is an extended version of a thread I posted on Twitter: https://twitter.com/IvanInTech/status/1620116869834477568

A few months ago, I launched a price and availability aggregator for European baby formula - BabyFiesta. I solved a problem I was facing myself, made a product out of it, and learned a few things along the way.

The basic functionality of the site is crawling a bunch of online stores for a particular formula product and then aggregating prices and availability for the user with purchase links. Monetization is done via affiliate links where I get a % of each purchase users make.

Here are the things that I learned:

1. Affiliate programs are flaky and unreliable. In theory, you can get nice commissions of 5-10%, but in practice... half of the online stores don't list an affiliate program and are unresponsive to contact forms, others can have your account rejected or perpetually stuck in review.

Moreover, when they fail to attribute purchases to you, you have zero recourse. I personally have run into this issue multiple times and tried contacting the stores, but... crickets. Who knows, maybe it's different for large accounts.

2. SEO is an uphill battle for pricing aggregators. Thematic blogs are not incentivized to give you backlinks because they might as well link directly to a store and get that juicy commission. You can post it on Reddit and other forums, but links from there are valued much less by the ranker.

3. If the aggregator is niche, it helps to have a community. In my case, the community of "parents in the US who feed their babies Euro formula" seems vanishingly small. For example, I posted on the biggest infant parent Reddit and barely got any traffic.

4. It is hard to make a profit with paid traffic when relying on affiliate commissions for revenue. My CPC was ~$0.80, so assuming a conversion rate of 2%, I would need $40 in commission on avg to break even (>$400 purchase). Plus, only a few stores on the list have functioning affiliate programs, so making money becomes unrealistic.

5. The only way to be profitable with ads/affiliate is to have a stable source of near-free, high quality traffic and eventually get enough recurring users to self-sustain. I will need to look into content marketing next. Another possible way is to release a mobile app and try to take advantage of app store distribution engines.

Takeaways for next project:

1. charge customers directly, no more affiliate business
2. get customers before investing a lot of time into building
3. make sure there is a community in the niche

Hope these insights can be useful for someone else ✌️

If you feed your children European formula - make sure to check out BabyFiesta at https://babyfiesta.co 🍼👶