It's interesting, seems like a popular space lately (even within YC). Off the top of my head, there's merge.dev, Terra, Kombo, Workato.
Aside from the obvious question of "how are you different/better?" I'm most curious to know why you're going so broad initially. You've got everything from legal to devtools to gaming. Seems like the opposite of a wedge/beachhead approach. Why?
I was somewhat involved in this project. Can't get into details but there were other factors/efforts not mentioned which allowed us to scale this while reducing cost per recommendation. As someone mentioned, I do believe we benefited from a price drop over time.
Regarding the monthly scale mentioned in article–we are way beyond that now.
A lot of really smart people worked on this and it was fun to watch unfold.
My stack is Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, OpenAI APIs. I chose Rails because I'm very fast in it, but I've found the combination of Rails+Sidekiq+ActionCable is really nice for building conversational experiences on the web. If I stick with this, I'll probably need a native iOS app though.
Vendor stack is: GitHub, Heroku (compute), Neon (DB), Loops.so (email), PostHog (analytics), Honeybadger (errors), and Linear.
I mean a single checkout from multiple shopify stores isn't really possible (at least by 3rd parties)
My hypothesis is that, if you could drive traffic to your site and offer a fast checkout experience, there's probably multiple ways to monetize that. Driving the traffic is the hard part.
I built this a couple years ago (now defunct) for the same reason :) The public JSON endpoints on shopify stores make it pretty easy to get the data. You mentioned using Mongo but it sounds expensive. I honestly think you could do this with just elastic or even postgres full text search and save money.
Here's a pro tip + feature you should implement: Shopify has a semi-hidden hack where you can link directly to checkout of a product if you know the variant ID. You could add a BUY NOW button to your site without forcing the user to navigate the original site or checkout flow. Example:
https://hapaboardshop.com/cart/42165521907955
(it also supports quantities and coupon codes)
A word of caution: more products isn't necessarily better. I definitely found there to be a long tail of really bad shopify stores and products. IMO it's better to curate or audit the stores you index–otherwise you risk your site being littered with kitchy t-shirts or drop-shipping garbage.
This is really cool and (I think) unlocks an idea I've had for a long time: moviepass for restaurants (aka a new spin on groupon).
I think you could get consumers to subscribe to discounts/deals at nearby restaurants and I think you could get restaurants to offer discounts one-time or during non-peak days/times. I tried to do this in the past using card issuing services (like Stripe's) but it was clunky with debit cards. The ability to do this via credit would make this a lot easier.
We also did this when we did a layoff last month (announcement was on a wednesday and people had access to email through the week). Agree with your sentiment.
Women on average score higher than men on the dimension of neuroticism in big-5 personality tests (as well as anxiety-related dimensions in other tests). [1]
Couldn't the why be due to (at least in part) these innate gender differences?
Or perhaps require webcam and do eye tracking?