Ask HN: Tell me about your failed startup.

Re:Ask HN: Tell me about your failed startup. by NathanKP on Monday January 10, 2011 @10:54AM (#2088771)

My first startup was a JavaScript wrapper for the Amazon product advertisement. My idea was that bloggers and others might appreciate a way to embed dynamic, location aware product ads. In other words they could just embed a script that looked like this:

    <script src='http://affiliate-script.com/adBuilder.php?q=iPod></script>

The script used the IP address of the requesting visitor to determine which Amazon store to show products from. (US visitors saw products from the US Amazon store, Great Britain visitors saw products from the GB Amazon store.)

Additionally the ad builder always showed the most current and popular products, so the iPod query would always return the latest and greatest best selling Apple MP3 player.

The startup worked fairly well. It served more than ten million ad requests, and made about 500 dollars. I eventually abandoned it due to lack of interest. The only active users of the system were my own blogs and websites.

I recycled the code to form http://bookflavor.com, my new and current startup.

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Re:Ask HN: Tell me about your failed startup. by revorad on Monday January 10, 2011 @03:34PM (#2089645)

Bookflavor is nicely designed. Are you not detecting visitor location there? I'm in the UK but I get links to Amazon US.

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Re:Ask HN: Tell me about your failed startup. by NathanKP on Monday January 10, 2011 @05:59PM (#2090060)

No, I actually did not use the visitor location code for Bookflavor because it involved an expensive commercial database of IP addresses that cost several hundred dollars a year. Additionally, 95% of the visitors were US, so the amount of money gained via the database was less than the amount of money spent.

Perhaps with thousands of visits a day it will make sense, but for now I'm trying to keep expenses low.

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Re:Ask HN: Tell me about your failed startup. by shadowpwner on Tuesday January 11, 2011 @01:38AM (#2091175)

You're might be aware of this, but Maxmind has a free database for geolocating IPs down to the city level. It's also open source. http://www.maxmind.com/app/geolitecity

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Re:Ask HN: Tell me about your failed startup. by poincare on Saturday January 15, 2011 @10:29PM (#2108561)

From where are you getting the large images of the book covers?

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