Show HN: DealSauce, A visual UI for deal discovery
dealsauce.com
dealsauce.com
I liked the overall look, it's a fairly clean design. The #1 issue I have is that the boxes around each deal are scaling in size with the number of lines of text in the item description. This throws off the next element below so that nothing lines up. It might be an OCD issue on my part but I think it is distracting.
Next big thing I noticed is that your first row of deals is rather stale. The first couple I clicked on were both 2 weeks old. They were both in your highlighted section of the first row. That gives me the impression there isn't a reason to come back any soon. Maybe I just need to refresh a few times....
You should always check out your competition so....
For comparison, slickdeals.net has daily deals and pictures for each of their items, local deals on the sidebar, and a huge variety of items. I think your site needs a better 'hook' than just a 'visual UI for deal discovery'.
Your site seems to be a bit more focused on the social aspect of shopping.(sharing deals with friends) That brings up the old chicken-and-egg problem of socially based websites. You need users for a compelling product but you can't get those users without a compelling product.
I suggest you follow the founders of reddit and fake it.
http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/06/reddit-founders-made...
Yeah, the gaming category is a little bit stale because I've been manually seeding the deals. I figured people on HN would appreciate the category more and that's the only reason I put it there. My goal is to combat that with through automation initially. I recently built out the ability to consume feeds from retailers. I think most of the actual deals are going to come from the merchants themselves and I want to automate that process.
I'm also building out a pretty cool UI that aggregates the merchants and allows you to filter and follow them. The goal is to build a UI that will allow users to follow their favorite merchants or categories and get a personalized visual deal feed as soon as they login.
Like you mentioned, building critical mass will be difficult but I'm hoping that when I have an audience a natural community effort will emerge to identify the best deals and bury the stale or bad ones. The Popular deals link has a simple algorithm that does this already http://www.dealsauce.com/pin/popular I'll probably apply it to all categories instead of using a recency sort.