I'd love to get some feedback from the HN community on a webapp side project I've been working on recently. In the spirit of November launch month, I'd like to offer up PCPartPicker:
http://pcpartpicker.com
PCPartPicker provides computer part selection, compatibility guidance, and multi-part pricing comparisons for DIY PC builders.
I originally created it to solve a problem I had at my day job: quickly pricing out cheap systems for a small cluster I was building. After talking with friends and colleagues it appeared there might be utility for the PC building community. I was encouraged by feedback to a HN comment regarding hard drive prices (here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1546145 ), so I decided to continue on with the concept.
My target audience is DIY PC builders who are building systems of moderate complexity. I think with some work I can target both novice builders as well as more serious builders/gamers. However, I'd like to validate the concept further before investing considerably more time.
Any feedback you have would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks! Philip
The site is simple, clean and easy to use. I noticed that a lot of the small touches of UI which add to the experience were there as well - eg a little tick next to each component when you've selected it and then it does go away again when you click remove. (Sounds straight forward I know, but great attention to detail)
Here is my feedback - I've thought of a fair few things - please don't take that as a negative, it just has lots of potential!
1. Lots of the items you have lots and lots of components, which makes it quite difficult at first to look at. I have a few ideas but don't know if they will help
- RAM - perhaps tabify the interface (eg have tabs of 12GB, 8GB, 6GB, 4GB). You are even listing 256MB ram sticks on there. No-one should be buying 256mb of ram. Educate your users and don't allow anything less than 4GB.
- Hard Disks - you could tabify that by SSD, and then speed perhaps?
- CPU - tabify by number of cores or clock speed?
2. the tag line "Pick your parts. Build your system. Compare and Share" is pretty good - how about "Pick your parts. Build your own PC. Compare and Share" - system is ambigous, PC clarifies what it is, and ties in with your domain better
3. Bring in ratings / reviews from other sites, link to them etc...
4. Have a "E-mail me when this system price drops below $xxx" form
5. I might want to buy all the items from one store - give me a comparison between 'source parts from anywhere' v one store. I don't know if you can get stock status as well, but that would be good.
6. You don't have monitors or software. You could have a "I also need Windows" button or something like that
7. With so many components on the graphs, some of them are grouped together so tightly, that's it almost impossible to distinguish them without a lot of tedious hovering. Not sure how you can improve that
8. Add a Reset / remove all button to the system build page
9. Once I've made my component choice - when looking at the component page, put that clearly at the top of the list - rather than a little box in the right hand side?
10. Fill out with content - suggest enthuiast websites, "Why build a custom PC?" etc etc
11. White label it and sell it to pc component e-stores.
Re: 1: This is becoming a common theme, so it's definitely something I need to address. I like your suggestions on how to break it down into more manageable sub-categories.
Re: 2: Changed it, thanks.
Re: 3, 4, 6, 8, 10: All definitely on the roadmap.
Re: 5: On the System Build page, there's a tab for viewing the price breakdown by merchant. Is that along the lines of what you were thinking? -- http://pcpartpicker.com/parts/partlist/by_merchant/
In fact, I think you should focus on the Featured System thing. I am a casual DIY part picker, and I would rather just browse several community vetted configurations.
Other people are more interested in building a system from scratch, or commenting on other people's configs.
Now, imagine a "fork this configuration" option! So a builder can fork someone else's system but make some slight mods.
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Please add a Disqus thread to the bottom of each page, so people can comment on the configuration or part.
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Also, if you are buying a bunch of parts, you might be able to save money on shipping by ordering parts from fewer distributors. Incorporating shipping cost would be another useful feature, but perhaps tricky to implement.
Disqus was a great idea. I've added it to the bottom of the part list pages. I'll look into adding it to the individual part pages.
It would be an improvement to ajaxify the process so it doesn't refresh every time I choose a product.
Also, start marketing this like, pronto! Open a blog linked to it where you benchmark and review hardware and build a community as fast as you can around it. That way your idea is harder to steal by the big players (and they'll look bad by doing so exponentially), and you'll have a ton more leverage to have an affiliate program going on with the retailers.
Finally, implement user accounts so they can save their systems and configurations, and compare between them in with a spreadsheet like view. This can also go hand in hand with social features and will help create a community around your product.
Good Luck!
As for protecting the idea, I think the only real concern is that one of these merchants hires a contractor to copy the concept. But their version will be fundamentally flawed because it won't have price history (against their interest) and price comparison.
This can become the Google of PC Hardware searches and as such MUST be protected and monetized by means of an affiliate program ASAP!
By the way, not a big fan of the name. Something like PCHardware.com seems like a better fit.
It could also provide more info on individual parts. I do a LOT of spec-reading when I buy hardware. Customer reviews usually factor in as well.
I would like to be able to pick which retailers I want it to use prices from. I only shop a few places, so some of them wouldn't really be the best price for me.
I didn't have any confidence that it matches my CPU and RAM and Motherboard properly because of the warning on the page. I thought that was the main draw, but having to match those things manually defeats the purpose for me.
I didn't see a link to back out of the page for adding a component, for example a hard drive, other than the browser back button of course. Maybe it's there and I'm blind?
1. If you could somehow get ratings on quality/reliability of parts from other sites, that would greatly help in picking individual parts.
2. If you could also make it group the parts into a small set of vendors so that you wouldn't have to buy from more than X (user defined int) companies, that would be nice.
I really loved the Price/performance CPU chart. I do find it hard to believe that the Intel Core i5-661 3.33Ghz Dual-Core Processor is much faster than the AMD Phenom II X6 1055T 2.8GHz 6-Core Processor. But I guess it depends on how TomsHardware, etc. did the benchmarks.
One nitpick, the warning about not having enough slots on the motherboard for the amount of RAM is not visible enough because it's at the bottom of the page and in a gray font.
Are you making money through this via affiliate sales? With a little more polish and popularity, this site could make a ton of cash that way.
Couple ideas: 1) On the CPU and HDD graphs if I just keep my mouse over the dot the tool tip blinks in and out, if I mouse over the tool tip it stops blinking (this is with chrome)
2) I like the review info on CPUs it would be handy to have it for other components (from new egg or amazon ratings perhaps)
3) It would be useful to have more categories for mother boards (e.g. RAID support, USB 3 support, ect...)
4) Adding a social component would be handy. Let people build, share and vote on builds. Basically I would like see the top three builds for a development machine that the rest of community has selected.
5) I would prefer if the filters on the right were defaulted to collapsed if everything is checked in them.
6) It would be nice if the graph resized, If i just select SSD's on the HDD $/Capacity graph all the data points are on the left 1/8th of the screen, it would be nice for the graph to resize based on what data points are being shown.
Great job I will definitely use this to spec out my next build.
I'd also make it much more ajaxy, it's currently too slow! Also, if it's possible, a picture of the computer so far would be cool, and would be a major innovation.
Sometimes it is cheaper to buy a pre built system with all (or most) of the right parts than it is to build it yourself.
Another option would be to let users spec out the system and then let manufacturers bid on delivering a system with those or similar specs.
A manufacturer that buys parts wholesale will be able to give a significant price reduction over buying all of the parts on ebay or amazon or egghead. (And any parts they have sitting around are just wasted capital, so they want to move parts as long as they can make money on them... you could even let them sell excess parts).
You could take a cut of the money saved through the bid process/whoesaling.
From a feature perspective I'd like to see more reviews on parts, price to performance indications, and part hierarchies.
For example, I know what an i7 is - but I don't know what the difference is between an i7 870 and an i7 875k. Once I select an i7 I'd like to see descriptions, a breakdown of reviews, and prices to benchmark performance.
From a business perspective you should start to come up with a business model. This is a really cool site but it's also a lot of work to do right. Do any of these sites have affiliates? If not, you may be able to get merchants or hardware manufacturers to pay for paid messages, but that seems doubtful. So failing that it's possible someone like newegg would want to buy this tool from you, but they'd probably just copy you instead.
Other ways to make money: Show people how much money you saved them via comparing merchants and ask for a donation. Sell premium features to people who buy in batches for companies or local shops. Offer to assemble PCs for people. Maybe you can make some money selling MS software licenses to people.
Along the same lines, it's not so much the parts that should be emphasized, but the whole: combinations of hardware that are known to work well together, and deliver the best value. So perhaps the site name/domain should use terms like "rig," "system," "combo" etc.
There may be copyright issues, but two sources of vetted combinations are the system guides at The Tech Report, and ars technica; would be nice to have those on your site:
http://techreport.com/articles.x/19868
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/guides/2010/09/the-ars-system...
edit: The video card tab is very lacking in attributes. I absolutely need to know how many VGA, DVI and HDMI outputs a card has. (Also, adding the same to the mobo tab would be useful.)
Some vendors in France have this kind of in-house services to build a PC with a subset of parts.
Here some links, so you can see it (it's in french but you should find your way) :
http://www.pcbysurcouf.com/Configurateur/configurateur.aspx?...
For example, when I pick CPUs, I like to compare cache sizes. You already pull those items out in the View section, but they aren't available in the matrix.
This app is incredible. I wished for something like this years ago while building PC's off pricewatch. thanks for making it happen.
Suggestion: it might not be a bad idea to include the age of a certain part.
