[anself]

I don’t think there’s zero demand recommendation apps, a lot of founders choose this because it’s a problem they want to solve for themselves, and there are a few success stories out there. It’s just that it’s a super-hard problem

[petesergeant]

> It’s just that it’s a super-hard problem

I spent 2024 building an awesome TV series recommendation platform. It worked by matching you to professional critics who shared your tastes, by basically crawling Rotten Tomatoes and getting an LLM to grade the reviews out of ten. The recommendations were awesome, and having a personalized Rotten Tomatoes where you could read about and research the show using reviews by people who felt the same way as you did about stuff was freakin' cool.

However, getting people to actually sign up and use the app without a massive marketing budget was very, very difficult. The stickiness to get people to go back to it is difficult. Asking people to input their preferences in the first place is hard. People also simply didn't believe the recommendations, and wouldn't take chances on shows; the computer can recommend The Detectorists to as many people as it wants, but there's a high number of people who would love the show but will dismiss it looking at the cover image and having a quick read of the synopsis.

The recommendation part isn't super hard, the getting people to use a B2C app is super hard.

[plastic3169]

I think sign up for anything is a tall order. To use a recommendation site I would need it to just start asking me questions and immediatly also start the process of visually narrowing down content suitable for me. How many ratings from me would you need to do a good rec? Is there diminishing returns after certain amount of data from the user? There should be zero barriers of entry to this kind of thing. Like quirky website you click for few minutes. You can always provide ”save your answers” button and have the sign-in flow there, although I would appreciate unique link I can bookmark more.

[quibono]

Interesting. I wonder if this is the right way though. Firstly because the RT critic score was gamified a while ago, and secondly because there's often a big gap between what the critics think and what the audience thinks. (One of the things I like to do is find movies on RT where the difference between the two is the biggest) Even if you ignore the fact that some reviews will be sponsored and not made entirely in good faith this is assuming that critics' judgment is a good signal in the first place.

[immibis]

Now, if you were Netflix (or Popcorn Time), you could just show them the series directly in the app and people would come to your app to watch the series, and also get the recommendations. They'd come back more often if you had good recommendations. People just don't want standalone recommendations.

[saulpw]

"It's a problem they want to solve for themselves", but note that they haven't tried all the alternative recommendation services and are only creating one as a last resort. They want to solve the problem, which is a different drive from wanting a recommendation app.

Now, if someone made a "Recommendation-Engine-in-a-Box", where someone who wanted to make a recommendation app for themselves would supply the content and could tweak the algorithm and the design, I could see that being successful in this market :)

[fc417fc802]

> I could see that being successful in this market

I guess SaaS aimed primarily at founders makes it a meta startup? The snake is eating its tail.

[bee_rider]

What’s a recommendation app? Like, I’d like to watch this movie, can you tell me if it is streaming on anything?

[fc417fc802]

Do you think we've made it to the point that a broker for streaming services would be viable? You pay a 10% premium and they connect you with the media you want to watch without you needing to maintain a monthly subscription to 15 different services.

Would probably be worth it even if just to have a consistent UI across services.

[stevage]

Yeah, what was Zomato if not this?