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Priceonomics Raises $1.5 MM, Users Unfazed

123 points| omarish | 14 years ago |blog.priceonomics.com | reply

60 comments

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[+] ajju|14 years ago|reply
This is probably the best funding announcement I have ever seen: self deprecating, funny and actually useful to the reader.

Congrats guys, rock on!

[+] mitchellh|14 years ago|reply
Congrats.

I'm sure they're aware, but for others here: decide.com does a fantastic job at price predicting products, and is founded by the same person behind the price prediction algorithm purchased by Bing ("Farecast") and he is also a tenured professor at the University of Washington specializing in machine learning. Pretty steep competition both from an engineering and business standpoint.

[+] zissou|14 years ago|reply
The economic (consumer choice) problem that Priceonomics is aimed at solving is the "when to buy a product" problem. Plenty of products already exist to aid consumers with the "where to buy" and "what/which to buy" problems. This paper at Microsoft Research goes through the theory:

http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=1483...

[+] rjb|14 years ago|reply
Decide seems fine for new items, specifically electronics and appliances which is probably why the service highlights their price drop alerts.

Priceonomics really impressed me when it was able to price a Leica M4P and a set of P90 pickups. Decide had neither in their system.

[+] joshu|14 years ago|reply
I actually met Oren at TED. Super sharp guy.
[+] wensing|14 years ago|reply
I'm pretty sure my reaction to this is due to being outside YC & SV, but ...

We raised $1.5 million in 10 days and pretty much the whole time we didn’t feel very good.

Ten days? Didn't feel very good? That's fundraising? Wow. What can I even say to that? Congrats guys.

[+] mixonic|14 years ago|reply
https://skitch.com/matthewbeale/82y5t/car-used-price-850

Admittedly, searching for "car" is vague, but this is just too funny of a result to not share :-)

Exciting!

[+] midas|14 years ago|reply
Ha!

How did you get that result? The javascript should autocomplete to our cars guide if you type in "car": http://cl.ly/0x0z2F393U20383s3b2G

You can manually override if you want to, but if it's not doing it by default that's a bug.

[+] nknight|14 years ago|reply
... What is that "car" in the picture?
[+] DTrejo|14 years ago|reply
[+] jasonshen|14 years ago|reply
Did you read the article? Here's the important point:

From this perspective, comparison shopping may focus consumers' attention on differences between available options, leading them to overestimate the hedonic impact of selecting a more versus less desirable option. To the extent that the process of comparison shopping focuses attention on hedonically irrelevant attributes, comparison shopping may even lead people to choose a less desirable option over a more desirable option.

Pricenomics helps you get the best/fair price for an existing thing you were already going to buy. It is purely about making a more informed decision about one item, not comparing between somewhat different products and making the wrong decision.

[+] jabiko|14 years ago|reply
Raising venture capital seems not to require building a secure product:

http://tinyurl.com/7pad22b (Click the search bar to execute the code)

[+] omarish|14 years ago|reply
Good catch -- fixing now.
[+] Destroyer661|14 years ago|reply
It would be nice if they tailored the searches a bit more to geo-location. I search for things and end up getting craigslist results for SF even though I'm in Canada.
[+] sherm8n|14 years ago|reply
Congrats! I just gave about 30 electronic items to someone on TaskRabbit to sell for me. Used ebay to correctly price them, but priceonomics was spot on when verifying them!
[+] jansen|14 years ago|reply
Congrats on the round and really great post, guys!
[+] fscof|14 years ago|reply
Big congrats guys! I feel assured knowing we won't be eating top ramen all summer.
[+] midas|14 years ago|reply
Thanks Forrest! We'll now be upgrading to pasta and red sauce.
[+] joshu|14 years ago|reply
Misspelled my last name. :(
[+] rohin|14 years ago|reply
My bad:(

Fixed:)