There’s got to be some way of getting the prices. Either get stores to publish an API for you, or send your own minions to go snap pictures of all the price tags and barcodes in the store.

I’d love to live in a society where the latter was allowed, but it’s not. They’d shut that shit down. So then it’s a matter of saying “Would you like me to show your prices to people looking to buy this stuff?” and the answer is “of course” and they give you an API.

But then you’ve got to either wrap their API in a wrapper you build just for that store’s API, ie you’re writing a new class for each store you integrate with, or you have to get them to connect to your API.

The question of whether they will take the time to publish to your API then depends on … how much of the local market share you’ve got. How much traffic you’ve got. It becomes more valuable if you’re bigger … ie if you’re google.

Big = evil but big is also attractive for integration.

Now, this gives me the basis for why I’d want to live in a society where it’s allowed to just video all the price tags and import them that way. If stores were less paranoid about legal liability and losing control, they’d just be cool with a little drone of unknown origin zipping around photographing their shelves. They’d assume it’s a good thing as long as the bot isn’t being violent or anything.

Then the barrier to entry is way lower for your kind of app. A few people with good coding skills and a drone or two can open up a little micro market for this kind of thing, cover one neighborhood and only push the app in that neighborhood.

Really, the level of safety and control everyone demands, across the board, puts a lot of barriers in front of bootstrapping startups. You can’t just make a few quesadillas and sell them for a couple bucks apiece at the park, without breaking the law, or having the whole operation be worth thousands. Like, nobody can do business on the scale of $20-$100 in our society, unless it’s art. Damn near everything else runs into safety regs that make minimum startup costs like $5k minimum to go legit.

Ranting. Stopping now. Thank you.