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Comment by rmac | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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!

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