hubraumhugo 3 days ago

I'm having a bit of a deja-vu with this since I tried to build the same a few years ago, see my Show HN from back then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24707407

Some challenges I faced:

- Warranties have many nuances depending on the country and the fine print

- Monetizing this is hard. I see your using affiliate links, but this will hurt the trust of your users.

- Only very few users are willing to write valuable in-depth reviews. I tried to collect data on how products perform over their lifetime (https://www.looria.com/reviews), but never reached a critical mass.

- Astroturfing is a major issue. I aggregated many reviews from Reddit, but even there it's getting worse.

Happy to chat or help out with data if you're interested :)

  • buyitforlife 3 days ago

    wow, thanks for the feedback. Really cool to see your response here after seeing you had such a successful Show HN. I did come across your website at some point before when looking to see if this existed. I think the main difference is you were doing UGC.

    -Definitely. IMO a 'lifetime warranty' isn't required for a BIFL product, it's nice to have though. However; some products absolutely depend on a lifetime warranty to make it BIFL, for example Husky Tools. I mostly included warranty info to help buyers be informed.

    -I agree. Affiliate links have a bad wrap IMO. I made sure that I only used affiliate links to Amazon so there is no bias with specific brands paying out higher percentages. I have a lot of products where I don't use any affiliate links (Patagonia for example).

    -I agree. User generated content would be nice but it's not realistic (at least not yet) I plan to continue to buy and test products myself before including them on my list. Eventually I'd like to have a team and would love to have a UGC component but all of that depends on how successful the site is.

    -Astrotrufing is one of the main reasons I made the website! Reddit has become a cesspool of bots and you cannot trust much on there anymore.

    Again it's super cool to see your feedback!

maalber 2 days ago

Good idea, more focus on buy for life type products would definitely be a good change. I wonder what your criteria are for including products? Are there different categories/scales of how bfl certain products are? A little bit more info in this direction I think would be a good addition

  • buyitforlife 2 days ago

    Right now the criteria is a combination of historical opinions (Think Reddit / Forums before they were heavily astroturfed) and my own use case.

    There is a lot of discussion in the community on what should be considered BIFL. Some think it's items that will literally last a lifetime, some think it's items that last as long as possible for that specific category.

    I personally lean towards the 2nd option because if it was just items that lasted a literal lifetime all we would be talking about is cast iron.

    Appreciate the feedback! Any other thoughts?