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Show HN: My kid choked on a toy, so I built this

133 pointsby heelhookabout 10 years ago

42 comments

orkjabout 10 years ago
I really like the landing page, but I feel I have to point out one obvious thing:<p>Your sign-up page[0] not only resembles the one of Basecamp[1], but you chose to actually copy (not like copy from it, but _copy_) the graphics from it? And the graphics features a dude wearing a Basecamp sweater?<p>I can see why you want to find design inspiration in Basecamp, but for me that stuff is just too close to the original ;)<p>As I said. Just a friendly pointer. You might want to change that. Other than that I wish you the best of luck, and this looks like a great start and an interesting idea!<p>[0]<a href="http://www.recallbee.com/account/start" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.recallbee.com&#x2F;account&#x2F;start</a><p>[1]<a href="https://basecamp.com/start" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;basecamp.com&#x2F;start</a>
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fishnchipsabout 10 years ago
Beautiful execution but I find the purpose misguided. I am a parent too so maybe that&#x27;s a cultural difference (EU vs US?) but if my kid choked on a toy I would pay closer attention to toys going forward rather than look for toy vendors to do my parenting for me.
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twrobelabout 10 years ago
If you&#x27;re letting people enter in their credit card information at any point for any reason you <i>MUST</i> get an SSL certificate and force people to use a TLS secured connection.<p>Infosec 101
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Blahahabout 10 years ago
Beautiful idea and execution.<p>Seems to me that you could monetise this by selling to businesses. For example, you say in the comments that amazon still sells some toys that have been recalled. This is illegal and could land them in some trouble. So you can approach them with a price for recall updates matched to their product listings, so they can suspend sales. If you word the licensing right you can then give the service to concerned parents as cheaply as you like, while charging companies for saving them a legal hassle.
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joshstrangeabout 10 years ago
Really cool idea but how do you plan for this to pay for itself? I imagine the time commitment is pretty high to have to go through all toy recalls and&#x2F;or safety hazards. It&#x27;s one thing to only need to pay for servers but a humans time? Maybe you could use Mechanical Turk and then just feed donation into a bank account linked to it.<p>I love these little one-off sites but I worry that in a few years time they will all be graveyards.
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kazinatorabout 10 years ago
I don&#x27;t see the back story anywhere on the site, but I hope your child is okay!
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slapshotabout 10 years ago
This model seems to come up every few years but never quite makes it. Here&#x27;s a version from 2000 with uglier graphics and more shouty copy, but the same idea: <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20001018093126/http://www.safetyagent.com/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20001018093126&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.safety...</a> . I remember another version where you scanned your household goods to get recall updates.<p>Of course, previous failure doesn&#x27;t mean the model is doomed (see grocery delivery in 2014 vs 2000) but there may be a piece missing --- is this a service that Amazon or Toys-R-Us could provide as a value add? Otherwise I&#x27;m not sure how you get CAC below LTV at a scale to cover overhead.
jared314about 10 years ago
Is this a front end on top of the current government provided resources [1] [2] [3], or does this include other sources?<p>[1] <a href="http://www.recalls.gov/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.recalls.gov&#x2F;</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.cpsc.gov/en/Recalls/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cpsc.gov&#x2F;en&#x2F;Recalls&#x2F;</a><p>[3] <a href="http://www.saferproducts.gov/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.saferproducts.gov&#x2F;</a>
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benologistabout 10 years ago
Your site says in 2013 one toy was recalled every three days, and you mention 37,000 toys being monitored but have sent alerts about only 1% of them. To me this says by default the recalls are so rare I may never buy an affected product just by chance, I think you need something more if you want $$ every month.<p>Maybe this would be a better service for kindergartens, schools, daycares etc rather than parents.
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muppetmanabout 10 years ago
This looks really good, but like so many sites I find on here, it makes no mention of country. So I assume you&#x27;re just monitoring toys recalled in America?<p>i.e. It&#x27;s probably not worth me in New Zealand signing up?
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zarothabout 10 years ago
Thanks for sharing. I think you have a lot of bases covered very well. Landing Page | How It Works | Pricing is a great start. Free trial offer, and choose your own price to boot, is an interesting approach.<p>I understand your product. I&#x27;m not sure I&#x27;m up for the requisite effort to keep you informed of my kids toys, nor am I personally all that concerned with recalls, so for me it wasn&#x27;t worth signing up. Car seat, stroller, bigger items, <i>those</i> I would want to know about recalls, but those aren&#x27;t &quot;toys&quot;. If you&#x27;re going to do kid-safety, I think you have to cast a wider net.<p>I went to &#x27;How it Works&#x27; and clicked continue. Entered a fake name and clicked continue. Left email blank and clicked continue... I just wanted to see the actual product, you know?<p>So then I see &#x27;Example&#x27;s Toys... All toys safe&#x27; so I click &#x27;What toys am I tracking&#x27; and the screen flickers and now says &#x27;Attention required... some safety concerns.&#x27; So something is wrong there, I wasn&#x27;t able to actually demo your product.<p>Maybe instead of &#x27;Sign Up&#x27; and making me jump through hoops, flip the model around. Start as an anonymous user, fill in some toys, see if there are issues, then to get the alerts and save your toy list, then you can click to sign-up. If someone puts real toys into the list, they are almost certain to want to save it instead of throw the list away.<p>Also, you might not even need to make the user create an account with a password. The alternative, more old-school Craigslist model, is just collect the email. If you ever send an alert, include a link which lets the user login. In the welcome email, include a link to edit your toy list. Once in a while, ping to ask for new toys to be added, and include an auto-login link. Just something to consider.<p>Also, this is probably asking too much, but can you please share the scatter plot of what people are choosing to pay for pricing? That would be incredibly interesting.
austenallredabout 10 years ago
My main concern would be that I have to input all of the toys my kids are using. I&#x27;m just not sure that I would ever do that. But looks cool.<p>Also, the right side of the site doesn&#x27;t seem to be constrained; I can scroll way over - <a href="http://take.ms/P4CZQ" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;take.ms&#x2F;P4CZQ</a>
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mkarrabout 10 years ago
What happens when you (somehow) fail to set the status of a toy you track to &quot;recalled&quot; during some part of the recall period, and then one of your subscriber&#x27;s kid harms themselves with said toy? Have you anticipated how to protect yourself from your subscriber in such a case?
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kybernetikosabout 10 years ago
Once you have a database of toys that parents have, there are other ways you might usefully use the data, like allowing parents to join toy swap or library groups, provide purchase recommendations based on similar toy choices (you could perhaps even monetise via affiliate sales of toys), etc.
marcusgarveyabout 10 years ago
Please reconsider describing your newsletter as &quot;high value&quot;, which is corporate jargon and doesn&#x27;t seem suited to your audience. Instead explain what someone signing up will get from it.
pbhjpbhjabout 10 years ago
I can&#x27;t see me listing all the stuff I bought (not much!) for the kids on your site&#x2F;app or whatever - this is increasingly an issue.<p>Perhaps you can sell a service to Walmart&#x2F;Amazon&#x2F;etc. whereby you maintain a list of recalled toys and then monitor their products (and eg Amazon marketplace) to make sure the toys&#x27;re not being sold there?<p>Also supermarkets and other retailers have histories of goods purchased seems that there should be some way to use that to gather the ownership data rather than have users enter it themselves.
breakingcupsabout 10 years ago
Congrats on building this. One thing that struck me (and possibly others) as odd is this sentence: &quot;Did you know that in 2013 alone one toy was recalled every three days?&quot;.<p>It doesn&#x27;t seem to make sense, either you say &quot;Did you know that in 2013 alone 121 toys were recalled?&quot; or &quot;Did you know that in 2013 one toy was recalled every three days?&quot;.<p>The world &quot;alone&quot; to me only makes sense when talking about totals, not avg. per day&#x2F;month&#x2F;etc.
bbcbasicabout 10 years ago
I think there is a good idea in this, but as presented I wouldn&#x27;t use it.<p>I am a parent. There are lots of toys around the house. Some are mainstream so I will probably find them on your site, but some are boutique. Some I don&#x27;t have the box for so I can&#x27;t list them if I don&#x27;t remember the name.<p>So it is quite a hassle to list them all, and I can&#x27;t be bothered.<p>Because most danger to children isn&#x27;t toys IMHO but things like drowning, choking on small objects (not necessarily from a toy, could be a coin), falling, curtain cords and roads. I would rather concentrate on minimizing those risks.<p>A way you could present this so at least I would use it is just an email address. No need to list your toys, and get weekly or monthly product recall updates for mainstream toys.<p>It could have the recalls for that month, plus anything super-dangerous in the last 6 months as a reminder. Then there is no need to enter toys and therefore it becomes a no brainer to enter your email address and get the alerts.<p>In addition there could be information or links to articles about other generic dangers such as those small button batteries that can cause serious harm or death to a child. Or similarly curtain cords. Road safety etc. etc.
jmlucjavabout 10 years ago
I contracted for a company with the same idea (I built the matching engine from incoming alerts to products in the db). It went under, that was 3 years ago. They were not focused on toys, though. There is some traces of their android app here: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Cyberellum-LLC-Recall-Alarm/dp/B007MCKO9G" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Cyberellum-LLC-Recall-Alarm&#x2F;dp&#x2F;B007MCK...</a>
nowarninglabelabout 10 years ago
That&#x27;s a great idea and really focuses on the do one thing and do it well approach. Are you going to have some app where they could scan the barcode of the toy and get the info or is it all manually input?
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pccampbellabout 10 years ago
I think this is awesome in terms of a product. Could be interesting to expand to other types of recalls (just go through the Ralph Nader list). Most of this information is publicly available, but in such shitty databases that it&#x27;s not even worth pursuing. If I was a parent, I&#x27;d definitely sign up and probably pay a low amount.<p>Also, if you want some free help tracking your subscription metrics for Stripe, feel free to check out profitwell.com (completely free). Would love your feedback on that as well, if you don&#x27;t mind. :)
alexcabreraabout 10 years ago
Great idea, caught a couple grammar problems:<p>&gt; When a safety issue is raised on one of your kid toys we send you immediate alerts to make sure you are in the known.<p>should be...<p>&gt; When a safety issue is raised on one of your kid&#x27;s toys we send you immediate alerts to make sure you are in the know.<p>The `kid&#x27;s` part can also be `kids&#x27;`, I think. Maybe. I&#x27;m terrible at plural possession.
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scottmcdotabout 10 years ago
A good starting point would be our Nanny State&#x27;s Australian Competition and Consumer Commission list of banned toys:<p><a href="https://www.productsafety.gov.au/content/index.phtml/tag/bans#toc3" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.productsafety.gov.au&#x2F;content&#x2F;index.phtml&#x2F;tag&#x2F;ban...</a>
easydabout 10 years ago
Seems like you already posted this 6 months ago [1] without getting any upvotes or comments. Wondering if it&#x27;s just the new title or a new landing page. Any idea?<p>[1]<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8273325" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8273325</a>
stephengillieabout 10 years ago
Do you have any concerns that the system could be abused? Maybe a someone would start paying some Amazon Turkers to make complaints about a competing product?<p>What do you think about expanding this to 3d-printed stuff? Analyze blueprints for child safety before printing?
Backlash85about 10 years ago
That&#x27;s how true startups are born. Building a solution to an ever ongoing problem. This company will sustain itself as usually passion comes with success, how much more passionate can you be after your kid has choked on a toy? Kudos to the op
h_oabout 10 years ago
Hey, DEV here just a quick question about stripe integration.<p>Your website is http, so does for instance supplying my credit card details over http not have some security risk?<p>edit: oh I just saw you have https. So why is this not enforced?
stickhandleabout 10 years ago
I can only think of the value of your list of active customers. That&#x27;s a targeted bunch ... and you already what they have and, perhaps more importantly, what they don&#x27;t have. Press on!
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gamerDudeabout 10 years ago
I had the idea to do the same thing for drugs and medicine you are taking.<p>Obviously this is a big task, perhaps v2, but have you thought about monitoring every toy, so that I could look up a toy before I buy it?
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kiluagankabout 10 years ago
Would love to see a demo, if you have video how your service works, that would be awesome. i would not subscribe to something that I have no idea bout it. Video would be great
Noelkdabout 10 years ago
There are two newsletter sign up options at the end of the page.
kendallparkabout 10 years ago
How did you decide upon the pay-what-you-want pricing model?
LordHumungousabout 10 years ago
Is your kid ok?
hspakabout 10 years ago
FYI, there doesn&#x27;t appear to be any input validation for the &quot;How It Works&quot; interaction.
masweweabout 10 years ago
<a href="http://www.dreamfemale.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dreamfemale.com</a>
bonzoTabout 10 years ago
Hmm. When I read the headline, I thought this had some angle with a lawsuit type service. If &quot;my kid choked on a toy&quot; and was injured, I would use a lawyer. So perhaps, you could build some sort of class action feature for peoples kids who were injured to file together and split the compensation. And maybe the site takes a fee as a percentage.
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lordbusinessabout 10 years ago
Bravo! This is a brilliant idea, and quite well executed. I wish you every success.<p>Thank you.
m3rvabout 10 years ago
just shut the computer and watch your kid. Eh, fcuking nerds
nickodellabout 10 years ago
You&#x27;ve got a typo on the main page.<p>know -&gt; known
hpritch5about 10 years ago
Bootstrap favicon? :)
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accountmakerabout 10 years ago
login: test@test.com password: asdf<p>is usable to check it out
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foxyladabout 10 years ago
Clicked link hoping to see a muzzle for babies. Was disappointed.