Ask HN: Built a new aggregated search engine for shopping
by debrajpal | 2025-07-24 17:15:12+00:00
I'll give you the main details. Personally, I don't like unnecessary distributedness. With shopping, that exists - cos every day there is a great new shopping app coming out for different things. They all have wishlists, a cart, order lists. For me, this was not good. For brands I realised, it's even worse. They keep spending on this marketing and that marketing, including but not limited to hiring, SEO, ads, influencers, cashbacks etc.The shopping space was crowded. Crowded is not convenient. In my mind, it felt like there was space in the domain - to unify it all. For simplicity, which I am a big fan of.

I had read a bunch of startup books by then, so I knew I had to validate this. Released a google form, got 250 responses, turns out people mostly shop from the big big platforms (small brand issue kinda validated), and other people did have some issues with distributedness (not a major major issue though, so this one was only half validated)

I had to build it. In my mind, this was a smoother experience. It was beautiful. Whether you want to discover, or you want to compare prices or products, or you just want utility, all of it. The platform I imagined would solve for it and would provide for it.

Fast forward a few months, Minar is launched (6 days ago). And it's good. We have 200 sites on it right now, the search takes 5-10 seconds (slow because of real time retrieval and my lack of expertise in backend). Whoever has used it has spoken about how simple it makes shopping and how interesting it is to see a product from all the major + smaller sites in one place, cos of different prices, discounts, specifications, and how it allowed them to find colours + sizes easily without manually navigating to 10 apps or 10 sites.

But - I am a builder. I studied statistics and some maths and a lot of ML and RL. That stuff, can do.

But, problem: I do not know absolutely anything about distribution. We have 700 unique users till now, and we have between 30-60 unique users per day. It is too soon to say of course, but I fear without paid ads this might not have great retention or enough users.

The other issues and why the above are actual issues are this - I am a 24 year old solo founder completely bootstrapping this through my earnings of 2 years at max. So yeah, at some point I will need to go for funding. I know how to make money - affiliates and partnerships. The first is bad because it anyway requires critical user mass and even then 90% of sites don't offer affiliate programs or have discontinued them (it's supposed to be really bad in India - the affiliate scene). The second method is probably a good way to make money, but that too requires critical user mass and traction and a bunch of time and effort put into it. As a solo founder handling tech + marketing that makes it harder, but ofc, because it is a priority it will be done.

I started writing because I needed to vent, there's hardly anyone who actually understands this. I've been determined for so long - 9 months, 12-16 hours every day almost because I realised at some point it is only sheer force of will that gets something great and good done, and also changes existing behaviour (especially when current behaviour is dominated by the likes of Amazon and Google).

But I will end this with a few question though (all the same essentially): how do I carry on? how do I know I should? how do I handle distribution (before running out of juice)? what do you think of the idea?

URL to the webapp: https://www.theminarnet.com