I’ve been really annoyed with the search part of finding gifts.
It’s hard to use keyword search for something when it’s an “I’ll know it when I see it” kind of deal.
So I thought, what if we scraped/indexed TONS of products and then just focused on removing the things we don’t want and then see what’s left to see if there’s anything cool?
I built it in Flutter so it's both iOS and Android but it could be web too.
I’ve only just started the scraping/tagging of products and if anyone has suggestions for bulk tagging images/content I would love to hear them. That’s the current bottleneck.
Any feedback would be welcome!
cvanvlack AT gmail DOT com if you want to discuss 1-on-1.
- EDM knife
- Alcoholic beverage of some kind
- Maybe a first edition of some book they like; Maybe a movie poster they used to own when they were in college
- Boutique mechanical keyboard
- Handmade wallet
- Semi professional/Podcasting microphone
- A bag coffee that has a novelty story attached to it
- A mug that has some kind of dad joke like humor to it
- Fountain pen and a diary (Everyone knows how much HN is into notetaking stuff!)
That's about it really. At the end of the day, give any of these stuff to anyone in HN but try to tell a story behind that. They will be happy. :)
Do you mean an EDC knife? Because EDM means electronic dance music to me …
IDK, an EDM Knife sounds like a cool idea.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EDMKnife
EDC knives are nice too, but they're only produced in Nevada.
Cutting board that is. Chop chop chop chop
This may be particularly hard to gift women, but it can be done. You dont need to gift GCs to women when clothes will do. Just keep the gift receipt and include it just in case. You will get wonderful smiles when she says "I'm going to wear the X you got me today"
I follow my own advice and havent bought one in forever. At least a decade.
This has caused me to be late with at least 1 gift, because sometimes bdays creep on you at the absolutely worst time and life happens...so weight that too. Sometimes a crutch may be necessary
Ahhh, 'gifting people'. Very American-speak.
- Usefulness (can I do something with it?) - Versatility (can I do a variety of things with it?) - Quality (is it well made/going to last?) - Stuff they've asked for (did I actually say I want this?)
I've been gifting cash for a little while now, and the reaction has almost always been better / more fun than with a more traditional gift. I do so this with an extra fun (retro) package though [2] which does add to the fun. (disclaimer, I own this website).
[1] https://www.willpatrick.co.uk/articles/how-to-buy-gifts-that...
Plus, I have young kids who love birthdays/Christmas and the excitement of watching them watch someone else open a gift is WAY less if it's just an envelope with cash or a gift card! Lol
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2011/02/15/131934618/the-...
Edit: I would only recommend trying on a mobile browser. The swiping doesn't work on desktop yet.
As others mentioned, maybe a direct free trial in the browser (even if is just an example with limited capabilities) could be great
I'll put a .gif higher up in the website flow to highlight the point of the app and show a more recent version.
Not sure if I should do a real demo or stick with the office though. It's pretty hard to beet...
I know that with Flutter you can also make web apps so I'll see how hard it is to switch it to a web version to lower the barrier to entry even further.
I had hoped using Flutter would pay off!
I would only recommend trying on a mobile browser. The swiping doesn't work on desktop yet.
Limiting the date of birth to the year of birth might help - although I guess you want to be able to remind me when it's their birthday. Perhaps just don't remind me about that - I don't need that.
Don't know if you can do this already, but being able to set a budget would be good.
I have the “training” part now depends on the thumbs up/thumbs down. As you thumbs up I ask if you want to add those tags. If you thumbs down I ask if you want to stop seeing products with those tags.
My thinking was how can I train something super quick to show me cool stuff and remove crap
I want to see the cost of the gift on the image - even if it's not guaranteed to be exactly correct when I click through. I just need to know this item is $20, $200 or $2000. For me this is critical.
The one thing that caught my eye as a possible gift was out of stock when I clicked through. It would be better to avoid showing it in the first place - although I appreciate that's not an easy problem to solve.
I might actually use this app. Nice.
My gifting strategy is a category in my todo lists. It usually happens that I randomly think of, see, hear about, or am otherwise made aware of something, and I think, "That is something X would never buy themselves, but would really like." Then I write it down, and as some nondenominational gift-giving event approaches, I review the list and make a choice.
This method has worked as long as I've been giving gifts, and doesn't require an account or feeding details into someone else's database.
As I have been talking to people, I have noticed people who are frequently shopping and checking out products are WAY more ahead of the game because they are exposed to more ideas.
I hate shopping so this was my way of trying to quickly get at good ideas while quickly removing bad ideas.
I've been thinking a LOT about the user data collection side. The app is pretty explicit in terms of trying to narrow in on preferences. It's kind of a requirement if you are going to help someone find a unique gift. But it still feels a too much like data harvesting. So how to strike that balance?
Right now I believe I have turned off all ad/app tracking (although I am pretty new at this so maybe I've messed something up. If you know more about this than I do and you see something wrong please let me know). As a user, I only want the information I share to be used for THIS purpose. Not to keep spamming me with more ads.
If I could figure out a way to give you more control over your own data would this still be a flop for you?
For me? Probably not, but you shouldn't target me, I'm pretty out of the mainstream. As far as data use, I would think your best bet is plain language describing what you do with it, and of course complying with relevant law.
Clearly describing your use close to where it is entered would make you more user-respectful than probably 95% of random internet services, and I would think would satisfy nearly everyone.
I really like how text based the input is. As a man, I'm never going to use pinterest or instagram, whereas this is a tool. The only UX clunk for me is around entering tags and my hyper suspicions around privacy - however I really like how PII about your recipients isn't required.
This is valuable to me because my social life means I am a constant houseguest to very different people and finding house gifts is a non-trivial time demand, I also need to send thank-you gifts to volunteers and trades/services, and occasionally give staff recognition for over and above value work. These all mean I can't afford cheap things and tchotchkas, or the time searching for and filtering them. I'm hoping your app makes it easier to be thoughtful. For many years, my reference point for gifts used to be the FT's howtospendit (disclosure: i have written for them) and they may be a useful partnership, but I'd rather keep track of the people than having to know what cool things are.
This is an elegant idea. Thank you. I hope it flies for you.
Agreed on the browser side. I played with it for half a day and it was still buggy so I abandoned it in favor of other items that seemed more useful to people.
1. Surface creators (etsy, fivrr, etc)
2. Provide reminders that take into account the lead times of the above
e.g. If someone's birthday is May 1st, on March 15th you get a notification saying, "If you want something custom from one of these creators, order within the next week!"
Lead time always trips me up.
Shopify stores seem like another big opporunity. It could potentially be the biggest mall in the world and yet I can't find the Shopify stores in my own area to support local.
100% agree on the reminders. I originally had the gift recipients birthday's in there but that was personally identifiable information so I stripped it. People are already too concerned about data collection. I'll likely add a "When do you want to be reminded about this gift giving date" to avoid that whole issue.
For me it's the difference between wanting to outsource and wanting to optimize.
I was never comfortable with the outsourcing because I never felt like it would have been "from me".
Instead I wanted to find a much faster way of winnowing through a category to see if there was something that I thought the other person would like.
while (gift == null)
gift = tryGetAny(giftShop, 1); // bug: programmer might never return ever
Regarding “gift male” I am actually going in the opposite direction. I want to stay away from generic and try to go unique. For instance, a few people have put in “3D Printing” as tags for their husbands so I have been scraping ideas that might be agnostic of the 3D printer model they have. Reddit has been a huge help!
When you are getting a gift that's not for you, you're probably not into "their thing" nearly as much. So product discovery is kind of what you need.
The framing I have been thinking of is search engines/Amazon are great when you have a keyword.
What seems to be missing is a product discovery engine. How do you search for something that you don't know exists?!
I know what they like. I can answer that question.
What I have struggled to answer is what's out there that matches what they like.
However this will require much more integration to make sure I am showing the right size compared to just scraping. I'll put it on the roadmap!
But I figured better to get it out there and if no one cares then why worry about the failure cases?
I think this is more to try to answer questions like "What do you get for the golfer who has everything".
Then focuses on how to remove categories of items you know they have. E.g. "Golf clubs", "Golf balls", "Golf bags", "Golf Clothing".
Then, the intention is to see what's left over to try to find something unique.
How are the data backed up? What happens if I lose my phone?
Technically I am creating an anonymous account using Firebase. I've half built the capabilities to allow people to convert the anonymous account into a real account so that people can use the same account on multiple devices.