📰 What does Expedia, Glassdoor, and Zillow have in common?

In 1975, the pet rock sold 1.5 million units at $3.95 a pop. And even though it was a fad that lasted only 6 months, it made the inventor, Gary Dahl, a millionaire overnight.

It’s one of those ideas so simple you think, “Man, why couldn’t I have come up with that?!?!”

Most people will chalk up the runaway success of the pet rock as luck. But if you go beneath the surface, you can learn valuable business lessons that are still relevant for entrepreneurs today.

And once you apply these lessons, you can start charging premium prices and make your business stand out from the competition — even in the most competitive markets. So let’s dig into the brilliance behind the pet rock.

… Naturally, I turn to Reddit for all things, especially product reviews. What I find though is an overwhelming number of threads, each with hundreds of comments. It's possible to sift through all the opinions, but it takes time. Also, lots of my friends didn't know the value of such recommendations from Reddit. That’s when the idea hit me: what if there was a way to aggregate all these comments and pull out the most helpful ones to share with everyone?

Fueled by this idea, I decided to create BuyReddit. The initial version was super basic—a simple script that scraped Reddit comments and sorted them by upvotes. It wasn’t perfect, but it was enough to show the potential. Encouraged by the positive feedback from my friends, I decided to take it a step further.

Building BuyReddit hasn't been smooth sailing. There's been a number of fun challenges but one particular one we've enjoyed solving (alongside AI's help) has been the nuance of language. Reddit comments can be full of slang, sarcasm, and inside jokes, making them difficult for AI to get 100% always correct.

Understanding Hacker News

First, you need to understand Hacker News. I’m not a developer. Hacker News had never been my jam. Before posting, I needed to understand what worked for the HN crowd.

You’ll find out that the HN crowd is not the easiest. The people on HN will literally slay you if your stuff is not 100% on point. Also, don’t even try to dump your semi-interesting blog posts on HN, let alone promote your product.

Competition is fierce, and only a certain amount of articles will get that front-page spot.

But after spending many hours trying to understand HN, its users, and the content that is doing well, I identified a pattern.

Your content needs to be either:

Newsworthy Investigative (research)

Two examples:

Investigative: “Fingerprinting is worse than I thought”

If you check the link, you will see a few things that are important here:

Someone did research and found something interesting. The writer actually put in the work. It's written without corporate bs No self-promotion or any CTA’s in the text It screams value.

Newsworthy: “Apple wins antitrust court battle with Epic Games, appeals court rules”

There is only one reason this ranks on the front page of HN. It's news that is relevant for the HN community.

One of the best books I have read in the last few years is The Elephant in the Brain by Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler.

The book makes two main arguments:

a) Most of our everyday actions can be traced back to some form of signaling or status seeking

b) Our brains deliberately hide this fact from us and others (self deception)

So we think and say that we do something for a specific reason, but in reality, there’s a hidden, selfish motive: to show off and increase our social status.

For the last 7 years, we’ve seen this classic picture of the attack on Craigslist. Spark Capital analysts Andrew Parker and David Haber did a great job with this unbundling chart.

Power to the People: Disintermediating Industries with Data Content Loops

Barton career can be summed up by his mantra “Power to the People”. His companies take power from the incumbents and give it to consumers. Instead of trying to hoard information, they are on the side of consumers and giving them more data transparency.

Glassdoor revealed how employees really felt about companies. Zillow shed light on what any house was worth. Expedia let people see the prices and availability of flights and hotels without talking to an agent. These were knowable things that people have always talked about with each other. There are few topics adults love gossiping about more than work, real estate, or travel. And few categories as core to their net worth.

Rich Barton took these whispered conversations and made them public for everyone to see. Afterwards, everyone wondered why they were ever private.

Part of the reason was that companies benefited from this credibility through obscurity. Real estate brokers have access to significantly more data about the specific houses and the general market via a set of data sources called the MLS. Historically, only brokers had access to MLS data, which gave them leverage over their customers and entrenched their importance as market makers. Similarly, lack of visibility into companies allowed bad ones to put on a good face until prospective employees had already joined. And only large companies could pay for data from compensation research providers, giving them advantage over the potential hires they negotiated with. Many incumbents are able to intermediate their markets and unfairly gain an edge from people’s lack of knowledge. And it’s scary to be the first to buck this trend on your own.