Ask HN: Is an affiliate directory a viable business? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is an affiliate directory a viable business?

2 pointslilouartz10 comments

I have an idea for a web app that I want to build – a supplement search that allows to search every supplement on the market based on their active ingredients, allergens, price, etc. I figured out that I can aggregate most of the data, publish it as a spreadsheet, and try to promote it on Reddit and other social networks. My thinking is that people who are trying to find supplements and want to compare different supplements would use my web app to discover which supplements work the best for them. However, is there is a business in this?

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How many directories do you frequent that you discovered via “promotion“ on Reddit and other social networks?

Do users of Reddit and other social networks enjoy being promoted to?

So, not quite the answer to your question, but the idea came because I saw people create spreadsheets of supplement comparisons on Reddit with each other. and I thought "wow, that's actually very useful, why isn't there an app for this"

I think the value of such a thing is precisely because it's organic (or at least astroturfed, i.e. fake grassroots). If you try to make profit off it, you risk compromising that with ads, sponsored listings, etc... the spreadsheet equivalent of modern Google's SEO spam.

Well, not quiet. At the end of the day, the value that it would provide is a comparison. The links would be to Amazon affiliate program, i.e. I am indifferent which product you end up buying.

The end result would be a website that provides a comparison similar to how this spreadsheet does it for Omega 3 supplement https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1vQcLEAPk5lcg-4YR_dwD...

This is to say that ads and sponsored listings would play little role in something that effectively allows to compare supplements based on their ingredients.

I have no doubt that it would be useful to some people... My bigger concern is if there is a business here worth pursuing. Not exactly cheap to run (would require a lot of manual input and/or AI). Not a lot of defensibility (could be scraped by someone).

I mean, affiliate marketing is the basic business model behind sites like Wirecutter, AlternativeTo.net, RTINGS, right? It's not a new idea, but it's hard to build up enough user trust because there ARE so many of these sites and a lot of them are SEO spam. For the users it's hard to tell which ones are trustworthy and which ones just regurgitate, well, reddit, but add a bunch of ads and paid rankings.

If you do this, I hope you can maintain a clear editorial separation and not be tempted to alter the listings if a manufacturer offers you $10k to move their product up the rankings, for example.

I am giving this a shot.

I have been hacking together the initial prototype. I am going to start by just aggregating the data and at first distributing it as Google Sheets document. I figured, this will be good enough experiment to understand whether people even want this as a service.

Cool, good luck! I run a similar (in concept, not topic) "awesome list" that I'm also in the process of turning into searchable/filterable website... very slowly. In my case I'm not sure about monetization (it's important to me that it remain a good and fair community resource, but if it can buy a beer or two a month, that'd be cool).

Anyway, if you're thinking of going the easy-to-make route for this initial pass, might I suggest giving Airtable a look? It creates better UIs than GSheets does, while being almost as easy (and in some cases easier) to use. Some examples:

https://www.airtable.com/templates/restaurant-field-guide/ex...

https://www.airtable.com/templates/apartment-hunting/expPfTz...

https://www.airtable.com/templates/hiking-trip-bucket-list/e...

Thanks so much for the tip!

Do you happen to know if Airtable documents rank on Google?

One of the reasons for preferring Google Sheets is because I know from experience that I come across many public Google Sheets through Google. I don't recall coming across Airtable documents, but it might be just because there are fewer of them.

I'm actually not sure about that (never thought about it, good question!).

I suppose you could embed it on a page (https://support.airtable.com/docs/creating-airtable-base-sha...) or use a third-party "portal" builder like Pory, Noloco, Softr, Bubble, etc. (can't recommend any, never used any of those, sorry).

Airtable also provides JSON outputs if you want to hook it up to a custom web app: https://airtable.com/developers/web/api/introduction (FYI, GSheets does this too https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/cjn-google-sheets-as-json-...)

If I were doing this myself, I'd probably just put the data in any spreadsheet or DB I like (including Airtable), get the JSON out, and then use something like MUI Datagrid to render it into a nice and simple frontend that I fully control: https://mui.com/x/react-data-grid/

But yeah, gsheets might be simpler then if there's an SEO benefit :)

Ended up dumping it all into a database schema. I realized that in order to do comparison, there is quite a bit processing that needs to be done to normalize data. Things like identifying chemical compounds, nutrients, etc.

This def turned out to be a lot more cost/time consuming than I expected, but I do enjoy the learning process.

Since the data will be in PostgreSQL db, I will be able to slice and dice it however I want to export it later to Airtable or other formats.

Thanks for all the recommendations!

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