Thalasar Ventures

I have been incredibly busy this holiday season. Comparison shopping is my niche and I really try to launch new properties. Last year it was Early Miser. This year I launched quite a few new properties and relaunched some old ones.

The biggest new launch I did is with Shop Sort. Shopsort is very similar to Early Miser with a couple of new features and a whole bunch of features stripped out. One thing I found about Early Miser is that the comprehensive coverage of product shopping on the planet has a price – namely in page size. It’s not uncommon at all for a single product page at Early Miser to be 100k-150K in size. This meant that uptake in Google is far slower than I would have liked. After thinking about this for a while, I completely stripped Early Miser down to the metal. Features like price triggers and feeds while incredibly cool, need to be re-factored to be easier to use. Shop Sort just price comparison with calculations for zip code built into the code. I also stripped out the feeds, user accounts and price triggers, and limited results to a single provider, (Like I said, stripped to the metal). When I was done, the resulting page had a much smaller footprint and as a result has had a great uptake in Google. (Over 800,000 pages on the particular index I am looking at). I acquired Shop Sort when the previous site owner was looking for a small liquidity event. I bought the site and re-launched my project on it. It’s currently average between 200-300 users per day (without advertising). In my quest for the most complete shopping experience, I had forgotten that sometimes speed trumps completeness. In fact speed and completeness of results are trade offs that you need to balance for the optimal user experience.
It has given me a yet another data point for understanding how people use the web for shopping and buying goods on the internet. Of course I didn’t stop there. I also launched Figurine Market, Great Watch Steals and then re-launched a number of sites like Brave New Vinyl and White Outdoor Grills. I am currently working on a killer mobile shopping comparison service called Zestly which will launch in February. So as you can see – I have been so busy I haven’t really had time to post much of anything here. I will keep my readers informed about the latest things I am doing in the space.