I have a webapp that suffers from the chicken and the egg problem, people may not know they need it until they discover what it does. I know it's a bit off topic, but I would like to know if anyone 'would pay for that' ... the webapp is http://www.organizemysearch.com
I developed organizemysearch.com after being tired of keeping tons of car ads and notes all over the place while I was looking for a used car a few years ago. I wanted an application that will let me enter all the data I wanted to keep track of when searching for something (eg. color, miles, make) and later be able to quickly and easily sort through everything so I can compare things based on my priorities.
The idea is to let you compare properties of items you are considering buying across multiple websites. It's a shopping comparison tool
The official definition from the website is this:
"organizemysearch.com helps you organize your searches, keep track of them, and provide you quick tools to sort and display all the information your are considering when making a final decision. In other words it helps you manage searching for information in the real world, regardless of what you are actually searching for."
The project is public but I have been caught up with other projects recently and didn't get around to market it (part of it being that the app falls into the caregory of 'people don't know it's useful until they use it'.
Yeah. The parsing works for websites that are 'monitored' by organizemysearch.com (and more will be added as the website grows). So if you paste in a car ad url from cars.com it will parse the basic info for you (eg. mileage, price, make, model, etc).
The advantage here is the user can add their own fields which they think are relevant to a car search. So someone could add something like "my comfort level in the backseat" and anytime they add another car ad they could specify something like 'good','average','bad' which will be associated with that car ad so in the end they can sort things very easily and weigh their options better.
As for your alert idea, I can see that being an add-on product perhaps. However I know that most of the major new/used car websites provide alerting capabilities based on certain criteria, so that functionality may already exist.
Thanks for pointing that out. I have rushed a bit through the css part in order to get it out there, otherwise bugs and ideas keep piling up and you never release (even small apps like this).
I have planned to switch to Blueprint css framework to simplify the design part (design is not my strong point).
"Excuse my buzz word but I think the only way you can make it spread is to embed a virus".
I guess I can't take that as a compliment, but will acknowledge much room for improvement of the website :)
As for SEO, I'm not just looking to optimize it for SEO as the main method of 'putting it out there', but rather looking to figure out ways to market it and place it in it's niche (which I'm still not sure of).
The idea of this webapp however is to do things more than that. You could say some people prefer using even bookmarks or in my case sometimes I used to use notepad for keeping track of car ads for example.
But the websites has some advantages.
1) It parses out data for you automatically [unlike excel or notepad], like car mileage, color, price, etc (or in the case of other types of searches - parses out relevant information like monthly rent, number of bedrooms,etc) (which allows the user to really sort and compare all the options)
2) With future enhancements it will automatically detect ads which have expired from everything you saved (not easily done with bookmarks)
3) Also it can be accessed anywhere, being a web application
4) But most importantly it saves one time to look through everything, eg. all options.
For people who really take their time to make decisions when buying certain items like a used car, an apartment rental, or something else, it would be useful to be able to really compare everything you found for things like best price or lowest mileage across all ads you found from different websites.
Try doing that in notepad or with bookmarks and it quickly sucks up your time (which was one of my main personal motivations for creating it).
I would suggest making the description of what the site does a little longer (not too long though). Example:
"Supplement face-to-face classes with a HootCourse and get to know each other faster." ... add another sentence or two here so I don't have to click around too much to get a little more info on this sentence.