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Comment by leesalminen | Hacker News Reader

My first venture gingrapp.com was recently acquired (good kind) and am looking for a new adventure.

curbd.app is a MVP product I’ve been messing around with. Not sure if it’s got legs, though.

Also have this concept app that’s the anti-Amazon app. It’s an app that lists all local stores inventory/pricing that consumers can use to one stop shop brick and mortar. Haven’t built that MVP yet.

If you can’t tell, my passion is helping SMB owners compete with the bigger players. If this is your passion too, I would love to talk.

My info is in my profile.

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the anti-amazon thing has legs, but the angle of attack to get beachhead might be difficult. Open problems:

1) fake review/counterfeit problem 2) support mom and pop

Google Shopping is trying to go after the "amazon prime for the rest of the internet", which seems like a good idea.

On 2), One thing to do would be to do what doordash did, just go to 50 mom and pop retail stores in one region and talk to them. see what their problems actually are.

The fake review/counterfeit goods problem is actually pretty hard to solve, but it's interesting because it's not on amazon's top 3 problems list, so you could disintermediate. Ways to solve it that may be businesses: machine learning, limiting manufacture geo's, relying on video product reviews with trusted influencers, tracking PE acquisitions as a proxy for brand deterioration, reading negative reviews first, etc.

I agree with your assessment and that's basically where I'm at with the idea. There's absolutely _something_ there, but gaining traction is going to require _significant_ effort (money?).

Re: talking to users first - 100%! I am fairly active in my community and talk with local business owners all the time. This is where I got the idea in the first place ;). Agreed though that doing this formally and generating some user stories before any development could help focus MVP.

Negative review is definitely a big problem and I'm not an expert on that topic, at all ;). If such an app were to have a review system it would be imperative to ensure the trust-worthiness of reviews shown to users.

Though, I'm not sure you would need reviews at first, at all. I generally trust most of what I buy from a given shop X... I trust their purchasing and supply chain departments to have done the research for me. I never think twice about buying X electronic from Target, for example, wondering if that night light for my son's room is going to combust. One of the benefits of brick and mortar, I suppose.

Why do you need money? Go to 50 stores, interview managers/owners. If there's a trend in their pain and you can solve it with software or sweat, build it as simply as possible.

Doordash put up menus on a website and started delivering orders by hand.

That’s easy and free, sure.

I guess I was alluding to the needed(?) network effect for such an app to become popular with consumers.

For me to have this app on my phone as a consumer it would have to have 80% of the local shops I frequent listed.

how do you know it's 80%? have you spoken with other local buyers? Maybe the floor is something like 20%?

let's say it is 80, can you imagine a way to get 80% of the supply (stores) onto this platform? Or, could you chart a path to get to x% supply after y weeks?

idea 1: fake it, just list stores and items on a website and find out a way to get users to see it without paying for ads

idea 2: sign stores up one by one, using some interview-derived value proposition, and get your friends to help onboarding new stores, challenge them to sign up x% more stores per week

idea 3: post about it on hn :(

These are all great ideas, appreciate it. It could very well be 20 and I’m the outlier. And could definitely use the fake it til you make it approach for such an app.

I think this all warrants more investigation!

> Also have this concept app that’s the anti-Amazon app. It’s an app that lists all local stores inventory/pricing that consumers can use to one stop shop brick and mortar. Haven’t built that MVP yet.

This has been tried many times here in Germany with little success :(

Yes, I’ve seen many variants tried. It’s so funny, because whenever I talk to brick and mortar SMB they tell me they want it _so_ bad with regularity. Perhaps there’s just not enough hunger on the consumer side?

How would you prevent the Mom-and-Pop business from, eventually, becoming essentially a franchisee of the Not-Amazon system?

If you list everyone's inventory with one-click ordering (assuming that order fulfillment is solved somehow), it is going to be an immediate race to the bottom on pricing, perhaps accelerated by arbitrageurs. Consumers will initially be happy, until service suffers, but vendors will be hit hard on margins.

One niche where I could see such an app succeeding: less-urban areas. In the past year or so, Amazon has neglected my parents' market in the college town of Blacksburg VA. My Dad broke his computer mouse over the weekend; while I could get one in hours via Amazon here in Seattle, the earliest delivery Amazon offered via Prime on Monday was Friday, with no option to pay more for faster delivery. I guarantee that there are hundreds of computer mice in existing store inventory within an hour's drive.

I don’t think the app would do fulfillment in a traditional sense. Consumers would go to the brick and mortar and pay for / collect their item. Maybe there’s a DoorDash type deal where drivers can collect the item from the store and deliver to the consumer. Doordash for consumer goods?

Interesting point on rural areas- I’m also in the same boat. Amazon only delivers USPS, and any package that won’t fit in my mailbox has to be collected at the post office 10+ miles away. It always adds a day of transit and a drive. There are times where I would pay for same day delivery. There are times where I wouldn’t mind driving to shop X in town and picking it up myself.

Thanks for the input!

I think Amazon and covid (semi and full lockdowns, local shops closing etc) have exposed an idea that you touch on, decoupling the last mile shipping from amazon/doordash/etc; a market/depots/etc for peered-powered distributed shipping/delivery. I would guess the bulk cost of shipping is the fist and last few miles.

An analog would be doordash & restaurants, with the added difficulty being brick and mortar retail often don't have great inventory and cataloging. Most restaurants were already doing take out, so hooking that up to a logistics machine (doordash), was easy. Here you need to go in and get stores to take photos of inventory and track said inventory, THEN hook them up to a logistics machine. doable for sure.

This race-to-the-bottom rhetoric seems like a pessimistic view blocking actual opportunity; as we've seen with any marketplace (e.g., amazon, doordash, walmart, shopify) it's a balance...

You’re spot on.

I had 2 ideas to try and overcome the poor inventory system problem::

- at first, SMB would manually input their inventory into the app, kind of like an eBay listing. Eventually, we’d build integrations to common POS.

- alternatively, you could allow consumers to select a category+text box entry of what they’re looking for. When submitted, businesses listed in that category would get pinged. If they have what the customer wants they could click to let them know. Perhaps with 2 way messaging.

Second option looks the more scalable solution. Solves the 'why should I bother inputting all my inventory into this new website' and allows you to handle the problem of not having any inventory to show for a real time search or even any shop partners yet. Have seen this done successfully (including acquired companies) for quotes for services markets.

I think it could work and is superior to manual entry. But when I mention it to my local SMB they mostly scoff. Maybe just too small of a sample size.

Thanks for the input though! Encouraging to hear this has worked for others before.

I can't speak for everyone, but as someone who tries to buy local, I wish that existed. There's a few stores that have reasonable web stores, but most have a single web page that was updated in 2017.

Also helpful would be a browser plugin (or something) that would allow me to find the product on Amazon and see if it's available locally. I do this with books all the time (find on Amazon, find the ISBN number, and the go put it into the local bookstore website). The local bookstore also does local deliveries.

I also enjoy supporting my local shops, but detest browsing 5 websites in an attempt to see if they have what I’m looking for. Usually their website site is awful and I have to call. That’s usually when I give up and buy on Amazon.

I like the idea of doing it as a browser extension, definitely useful to nudge people out of their naughty Amazon habit ;).

Thanks for the input!

what were the reasons it didn't work in Germany?

I've recently started working on a similar mission: https://giverrang.com

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