Ask HN: Please Review My Startup: BeBefore

My initial reaction was "spam" (Im still not comfortable about the whole site!).

But the content is actually reasonably useful if your researching a product. If it's a serious site then it definitely needs a much better interface and description!

(edit: I say that last bit as someone who gets so annoyed when browsing Amazon/Ebuyer etc. and the product specs are incomplete or completely missing - this looks pretty complete for a lot of products. I'd be interested to know where the data came from?)

The layout is neat, but the purpose of the site is not obvious at first. Is it a review site? A shopping site? It's only after clicking around a bit that one can understand what the site does (present a selection of products in a cleanly organized manner, and provide links for purchase on Amazon.com). The name of the site is a bit misleading (bebefore? I thought it was something about how things were "before").

I agree with most of the comments here that it's not obvious what the site is supposed to do when you first land on it. Really, a simple "Be Before! gives you information on such and such in a way that no other site does..yada yada. <a href="/about">Read more about Be Before!...</a>" would be extremely helpful.

Any chance you could list a price on the page somewhere? I looked and looked, but couldn't find price range estimates anywhere. Pretty hard to evaluate a laptop if you don't know how much it costs, in my opinion.

What does it do?

It seems like it could be useful and has a nice clean layout, big pictures, vids and useful links. I sort of agree with the "spam" feeling though, something doesn't feel right about it, maybe the lack of text, maybe with nothing but pics on the front-page it just looks like a big ad for random products.

One functional problem though: I tried to search for an olympus camera and typing Olympus and it completes correctly, I see that there are Olympus Exx models in the list and i continue to write Olympus E to fetch just those and look them over, but then suddently at Olympus E it switches the autocomplete to say "BenQ ..." which is obviously just wrong.

It tooks me few seconds to figure out what was the purpose of this website. No complete review, just a list of product with affiliate link. No About Page, no information about how to use the website. Not sure if it can be valuable since you can simply do a Google on the product and find more information. I think you need to get more review of product and to add on the interface more data. Like some one pointed out, at first the website look like "spam" and I got the same feeling. Keep the work on it, might be something useful later.

So, it's an affiliate site with info scraped from various sources?

This might come off as a little harsh, but you've seen http://www.google.com/products before, right?

At first, I thought that the site was going to be a cool place for information on the latest gadgets in a nice, clean layout. I inferred from the name that "Be Before" meant something like "Be before your friends" After playing for a few seconds, though, it just feels like one of those old pop-under ads.

Hmm, big pictures and video. Useful.