Following up on a previous post (had a bit of a hug of death) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46255827

Have made a lot of improvements to make it actually useful and move to a stable domain (desktop still best, but it at least works now on mobile):

Butcher list - Lots more butchers added to the scraper.

Browse by Cut - This is the big one. Instead of scrolling through 1000+ individual products, you can now browse by standardised cut (Ribeye, Brisket, Lamb Leg, etc). I've mapped products from a selection of popular butchers to ~154 canonical cuts. Click a cut and see every matching product across all sites, sorted by price/kg. Looking to improve taxonomy over time with ongoing missed matches/remaps where the automation was wrong.

90-day price ratings - I've been collecting price data for a while now, so the site can tell you if a product is at its lowest price in 90 days () or within 5% of that low (). Handy for spotting whether a "sale" is actually a good deal.

Fresh vs Frozen indicators - Shows up on both the cut list and product detail pages. Filter by storage type if you only want one or the other.

Table layout - Ditched the card grid for a proper table. Much easier to scan prices when everything's lined up in columns. Sortable by name, protein, type, price, number of options, or number of sites stocking it.

Full row click - Click anywhere on the row, not just the tiny product name link. Small thing but it was annoying me.

Looking for as much feedback as I can get, please share!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46964750

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

UK only for now, and very much a “solves my problem” side project, but easily scalable to other countries of the need is there!

https://meat.offer-spider.com

Long time lurker, thought I would contribute back something to the community (at least the meat eaters in the UK). One thing that's been a pain for me to get a good understanding of is what the best price is for online butchers based around the UK. I like high quality meat (including some of the bigger cuts for kamado/bbq), and I'm willing to pay a premium however there isn't a single resource that would let me get an overview of what's available and price movements over time.

For my Xmas meat I didn't want to start building out a spreadsheet so I built a price tracker with quite a few convenience features to make it easy to search for certain cuts of meat across commonly mentioned butchers on Reddit and other communities.

If you find it useful let me know if there are any features that could help to make it even easier to find the cuts of meat that you're looking for!

Here's the tracker: https://offer-spider.onrender.com

Hosted on Render, built with Nextjs and SQLite. Spidering various custom e-com sites (WooCommerce, Shopify) on a daily basis.

My current TODOs: - Search is currently free-text OR. Add AND to allow focussing down a search, and select from facets/categories/taxonomy - Common search terms to pre-fill - Exposing price over time metrics - Further consolidation of SKUs to an internal taxonomy - More butchers - Expanding to other use cases outside of meat!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46255827

Points: 16

# Comments: 8

Previously I contracted as a full stack developer bringing in other developers on projects as and when the project timescales wouldn't have been achievable with just me. Running a software consultancy alone, dealing with all of the usual rigmarole of a business and performing proper client outreach was stressful, but financially and personally very rewarding (especially when you close a big deal completely on your own).

In order to get involved in my current startup, which at the outset was comprised of a designer, biz dev (CEO) and myself as CTO I had to cut off ties with my previous clients and dedicate all of my available time to the new startup. I had leveraged myself quite a bit running the previous consultancy as billings were growing year on year, so my VAT/Corporation tax accounts were generally paid out of job fees towards the end of the year rather than set aside throughout the year, leaving me in a negative cash flow position when stopping work for existing clients. Luckily there were some ongoing payments that didn't require development resource, so the small admin time required to invoice and chase up was all that was required, and enabled me to setup payment arrangements with HMRC to settle these liabilities over a period of time, out of this cashflow. Setting up these arrangements was very stressful, and I would strongly advise anyone coming into a startup to fully evaluate their financial situation before committing even if the opportunity seems huge.

Initial salaries in the new start-up were minimal (£1000 p/m approx), and it took a solid three years, extremely long working days, almost unmanageable personal stress and around £0.5m of funding before we're now up to an above average average salary, £1m ARR, a team of 15 and strong growth projected for the coming year.

Success is a subjective term and occasionally I have to refocus to see the light at the end of the tunnel, but with enough grit, luck and determination, it’s possible to tip the balance to a point where success is now more likely than not.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10399878

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Writes off £50k of your SEIS allowance as a business, which as I'm sure you know is like gold dust for the first £150k, as 50% of the investment can be written off against investors income tax, then a further 30% if the company fails.

If the company succeeds, the investors pay no capital gains on sale of shares.

In the process of negotiating terms, it was slipped into conversation that the accelerator actually invests double the amount requested into the business (artificially inflating the business valuation and potentially creating some pretty big burnrate questions for future investors), which is paid directly to the accelerator on receipt of funds as a service charge.

This service charge is apparently there to facilitate the other "free" mentorship, office space and introductions that the accelerator offers.

It seems like this is a bit of a tax fiddle from an SEIS (Seed Enterprise Investment Fund) perspective, as all they are doing is draining the fund to essentially pay themselves, exposing very little risk, but obtaining a decent equity share in a new start up business. This also eats into the £150k of available SEIS funding, as a chunk of it is not invested at all, just leaving through the backdoor to pay the accelerator.

Is this commonplace and is anyone aware of other accelerators doing the same thing?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9190485

Points: 35

# Comments: 23