Tag: carsort

Snapsort Launches New Verticals

Over a Million in a Year

For the past couple years we’ve been working hard at improving snapsort.com, thankfully we’ve had some strong success, the photography community has helped make us the second largest website providing camera gear advice (next to Amazon’s dpreview).  We launched the first full version of our camera site in June 2010, about a year later we’re helping over a million people every month find the right camera. You can celebrate with us and get a chance to win a Nikon D3100 or Canon S95 (donated by the awesome crew at Adorama)

When we started Snapsort we had a simple goal: “help consumers make informed purchasing decisions quickly”.  We had broad goals, we were so incredibly frustrated with how hard it was to find the right product for oneself we wanted to make it easier for every single purchasing decision.  We needed to first prove we could help one group of people before we went off helping a thousand, so we focused on cameras and refined our recommendation platform.

Two years later we’ve developed a mature, stable and extremely helpful recommendation platform that we’re ready to scale out.  Our goal is 20 categories by the end of the year.  We’re hiring super smart engineers if you want to help us reach this goal :-).

Yesterday we launched our new recommendation platform in 3 verticals:

What’s the Big Deal About our new Platform?
It turns out it’s extremely difficult to make it super easy for users to easily find the right product.  Most of our time in the last two years has been spent engineering a scalable solution to:
  • Acquire all the data necessary to make informed decisions in an automated fashion
  • Aggregate from multiple sources and merge it all without errors
  • Understand the data the same way a subject matter expert would
  • Find a way to store subject matter expertise generically
  • Use subject matter expertise to make informed and personalized recommendations
  • Provide a super fast, real-time experience to the user
  • Do all of this in a scalable fashion that lets us add new verticals quickly

What we release today is 1.0 of our platform, we think its the best thing going on the web, so does everyone we talk to.  It probably represents about 5% of what we intend to build so stay tuned for vast improvements.

We sincerely hope you like what we’re doing and if you do you share it with friends, family and co-workers.  The only way we succeed is if we help you make better decisions and you share the experience with others.

Thanks!

 

Snapsort Team