Alice.com in closed beta | Hacker News Reader

Alice.com in closed beta

alice.com

7 pointstimf8 comments

I was thinking of doing this about a couple years ago. The advantage for an independent company is you have more product and cost flexibility, thus getting your subscribers better deals. Also amazon's version is unflexible with the time periods which can cause problems. Fine tuning the delivery periods would be advantageous.

However, anyone I mentioned it to (all males, one female incidentally) thought it was silly.

I still think it has potential though.

I could see this appealing to women and mothers more than Amazon. I think it's a good idea but it's probably no different than the Amazon S&S. It's all about the branding and setup here.

It's hard to tell without more information. On their blog it was directly asked what the difference was and the response is "I hope you see the enhanced value in what we’ve come up with at Alice." [1]

If they are trying to simply win a branding war with Amazon... yikes.

[1] - http://flywheelblog.com/2008/11/the-3-advantages-of-a-start-...

That blog is sometimes a revealing read. Evidently they offered +$200k for the dot-com name of a small, mythical, woodland creature. They also: budget $15-20k for patent filings, defend Jellyfish's use of PR firms, detail Alice.com's pre-launch strategy, explain why they see every employee as an animal, and reveal why they'll never hire anyone from Michigan State.

Is this web van 2.0?

or kozmo.com ;)

what is this?

It is like Amazon Subscribe & Save [1] (actually, I don't know how it is any different yet...). My family uses Amazon S&S and so I am curious about it.

Started by the jellyfish.com people, they got some $4m funding recently (Jellyfish was sold and morphed into Microsoft's Live Search cashback program).

[1] - http://www.amazon.com/gp/subscribe-and-save/details/index.ht...

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