There is a huge amount of pent-up demand there.
Take the extreme but famous example of when one of those books, Lisp in Small Pieces, was mispriced for $13 including shipping at amazon.ca in 2007 -- it became the #1 seller, on a book that I imagine sells maybe a thousand copies in a year.
Nobody actually got their book (the publisher probably didn't have that many) and $13 is ridiculously cheap, but it's a fascinating story. Clearly, a lot of people had that book on their "someday wishlist" (a fantastic market for deal sites) or just appreciate a seemingly one-time deal on that kind of item.
If you can package books together, app-bundle style, or sell them out of season with the academic calendar, it would offer a good opportunity for price discrimination.
Also, although academic publishers are super-wary about the used book market, they also know that their textbooks are being torrented left and right. Maybe this would be a channel they could have more control in.
When the Pragmatic Bookshelf had their huge Thanksgiving sale last year, I dropped $300 dollars on books, which is pretty close to my usually yearly tech book spend.
What do you think?
Personally, I think there's a more interesting market opportunity in helping developers monetize from the daily deals space, rather than making a daily deals product meant for developers as end-users.
That having been said, I'm still a hacker and I'm still interested in good deals. Too bad you don't have a field for survey takers to provide our e-mails so you can inform us of when we can use your service.
Things like a marketplace for matching deals to sites or a "Shopify" for coupon sites?
Unfortunately, sites like Groupon have draconian developer terms of service (http://www.groupon.com/pages/api-terms-of-use). Basically, what they're saying is that you can show Groupon deals to end-users, but you can't do anything else.
However, DealsForHackers would focus on a wider range of offerings, beyond just software. Think discounted conference tickets, hardware discounts, hacker food (whatever that means), etc.
* manpacks.com
A technology-focused Groupon is something that I would love to see.
Disclosure: I'm a designer at Tippr. If you want to learn more, I can get you in touch with one of the business people.
In the survey you offered time with Investors. This is something that I am sure would be in massive demand because this isn't something readily available to most people and could add tremendous value to any start up.
Other things to consider along the same lines would be a service less focused on regular deals but more on opportunities. We have access to Consultants who do x,y, or z. They could be investors, marketers, hackers, business develop folks or any other high value service. You would make those people available to a business for say 1 hour to discuss anything you care to. Now that would exciting!
Fantastic idea!
This is so flippin' easy to build that it comes down to this - are you passionate about it?
If you are, and you can dedicate a year to seeing it through, you will build a nice business out of it.
If you expand your "hacker" definition to include the audience that buys gifts @ ThinkGeek.com you could be on to something big.
When I say this is easy here's what I mean:
a) The tech is a piece of cake.
b) The design is linear and lots of examples for inspiration in this space.
c) You will make it or break it based on the strength of the deals, just like everybody else competing in this space.
For instance if you found a way to convince ThinkGeek to provide you with a 5% off or something from them (plus a comission to you) in exchange for long-term featured advertising you would essentially be in front of every major "geek" audience from slashdot to reddit to etc in no time.
Plus the company that owns ThinkGeek owns Slashdot and you'd be a perfect aquisition if you expanded your market, aggregated an incredible list of geeks with credit cards.
So go out there and get it done! I want my 5% off ThinkGeek by Christmas.
Noah from http://appsumo.com here.
Super interesting comments and a bit surprised / flattered so many of you guys know about us.
We're focused mostly on web software, generally web apps / content that help startups succeed.
What kind of specific stuff is it for hackers that we aren't providing today?
Ps. We have an HN Special - free Thinkgeek.com coupon ($10 off $40)
Email me: hn at appsumo dot com
This is a concept I'm taking a pure Customer Development approach with - if I get enough people to say that they'd be interested in the concept, I'll move forward to the prototyping / initial deal gathering phase.
Why the new / anonymous account? My boss and co-workers read HackerNews constantly, and I'd prefer that they don't know I'm thinking about starting my own thing.
I'd love to know what the community thinks about this!
When did "hacker" come to mean, "someone who wants dinner with moneymen and books on success"?
What would be cool, personally, is have the site feature products which for one reason or another are known to be hackable.
Things such as the Girltech IM-Me which can be flashed into a spectrum analyzer, Open-WRT compatible routers, KisMac compatible wifi cards, the Breville BKE820XL hot water kettle which has a non-mechanical switch so it can be hacked to be controlled from your phone and send you push notifications when the water is boiled, remote control power outlets from AliBaba, Hot Air reflow stations, Emotiv's EEG, Quadrocopter kits to deploy some of the UPenn GRASP code, and so on.
++EDIT++
What I realize now, thinking about it some more, is a site like this might actually be ideal for hacker ore. Apple would never think to let their merchandise go on Woot, but something like a Samsung TS-H943 as shipped is in every sense of the word, mediocre - the one special thing about it is it let's one install custom firmware to read non-standard DVD's - it's only a matter of selection for digging up more deals like this that manufacturers would be happy to let go on bantler.com like sites...
We built The Evolyte Store in 14 days, spent 1 day marketing, and received nearly 18,000 pageviews and $30,000 in reserved sales.
We were selling a 32GB Wi-Fi iPad at up to $100 off and the business model was like Groupon + Woot had a superhero baby (a little corny, we know :)
You can read our case studies detailing every aspect of the design, development, and marketing process (what my firm specializes in) here:
http://evolyte.posterous.com/pages/the-evolyte-store-case-st...
We're currently trying to figure out what we're going to do with this Store going forward as we only built it to market our professional services, and not to be an eCommerce competitor.
AppSumo can definitely move into this space as it's related.
There should be plenty of room in this niche as they seem to be the only player.
Would love to see what you can do in terms of defensibility and innovation.
However, if you could pull off something like they do here at Bonktown: http://www.bonktown.com/
I might pay attention from time to time.
Let me know if you have any questions: stevenj134@gmail.com
