[danshapiro]

Amusingly I only found this because someone tweeted angrily at posting such self-promotional content to HN.

To the parent: Sparkbuy's secret was that underneath the UI was a data set that was really, really good. Folks at Amazon and Bing confirmed it was orders of magnitude more complete and accurate than anything they had.

I think that opportunity is still there, although I haven't kept up on consumer electronics data quality lately. But if you can produce a real time feed of accurate data about products on the market, I think you'd still find a buyer for that.

The actual business model of running a comparison shopping UI on top of said data feed is much harder, and we never proved it out (because we weren't around long enough).

[clientbiller]

Thanks for the response! I was also curious as to when startups get acquired or acqui-hired - why they don't just come back out and do it all over again to prove it out? I actually did that, lol.

Also, to your point, you never proved it out, so doesn't part of you want to prove it out?