Show HN: Learned to code during lockdown and built a Rotten Tomatoes for tech | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Learned to code during lockdown and built a Rotten Tomatoes for tech

recorank.com

19 pointstavistavis10 comments

Is the title a nice marketing story/headline to grab attention?

You "learned to code" and coded a whole product aggregator that crawls product site reviews from unstructured tech site content, learned sql (or some nosql alternative) designed schemas and set up databases, affiliate links, quite professional html layout and built a separate "ai" based site (based on "we" header) in a year?

How did you do all this in a year from zero? If this is true I'm really curious.

Sure. To be clear, I've had experience building websites with Shopify and WordPress - so was familiar with HTML and CSS. I've also had experience scraping using applications like OutWit Hub.

So "learned to code" means learned Node.js, React, Next.js, Algolia, MongoBD, and running cron jobs at the most basic level to pull this off.

I have a marketing/design background, so I feel pretty comfortable making things look professional. Over the past couple of months, a developer friend of mine has been coaching me to improve my understanding of the stack I've been working with.

For reviewr.ai, I've teamed up with two talented developers, so I'm focused mostly on growth with that business.

As someone who loves Rotten Tomates to pick movies and shows to watch, I was surprised when I realized there wasn't anything similar for tech.

Knowing nothing about building web applications, I created this from scratch over many months of self-education.

https://RecoRank.com adds new products and reviews every day, so the content is always fresh.

I've personally found this info useful and I hope you do as well!

Also, it's been a fast leap since this project has come together. I've recently teamed up with the guys from https://BuyForLife.com to help other businesses achieve similar results. It's called https://reviewr.ai if anyone's curious.

Way to go! Sounds like a great use of time during lockdown and looks like you had fun doing it. The website looks very clean and enjoyable to navigate and I agree, it’s frustrating finding genuine scoring for tech items, so the use case sounds great.

To truly make it the rotten tomatoes experience, will there be the ‘experts’ score and a separate end user score?

Ya - definitely want to add end user score. Still trying to figure out how to implement accordingly.

Awesome website What’s the stack you used??

Thanks! Stack is Next.js, Algolia, and MongoDB. Scraper is built using Node.js and ScraperAPI.

This is fantastic! Could use a "report bugs" feature as I found an issue on the first category I looked in, Keyboards:

https://recorank.com/review/drop-entr-mechanical-keyboard

I'm pretty sure that doesn't have a graphics card "NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER / Intel UHD Graphics"

I'm sure you have a good algorithm for determining this, but I'd imagine games would be higher up, as that's something bought often vs something bought once a year (or once over several years) like parts.

Congrats on the launch!

Just out of curiosity

How much are you making from the Amazon affiliate program? Also, how do you plan to get people onto the site?

Thanks! The site's been up for a few months now, so it's been making a bit of coin. I realized that long-tail SEO works really well for user acquisition, because there is a lot of content that can be created with the data. I wrote a blog post about how it's been working for me: https://tavis.cc/long-tail-seo/

Transparently, the site is close to 50K visitors/month now, and resulting in about $10/1K visitors (i.e. $500/month).

So to grow revenue, I need to figure out a combination of increasing SEO performance and monetization, which I guess would be better content (SEO), ads ($$), better affiliate deals ($$), and maybe a subscription of some sort ($$).

The bigger plan is to use the technology we're building for https://reviewr.ai and create a much better version of RecoRank.

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