Launch HN: ReadyKit – Build your emergency kit from the best gear on Amazon

6 points by jfornear 5 years ago | 1 comment

Hey HN, launching my quarantine side project today.

ReadyKit is a community-curated emergency preparedness kit on Amazon. Build your survival kit, first aid kit, and natural disaster kit from the best products on Amazon.

https://readykit.org

How it works so far:

* It's free—everyone from casual preppers to doomsday preppers are invited to build a kit

* Adding new products from Amazon is easy. Simply copy and paste Amazon links and the title, image, and price will be pre-filled

* Earn Amazon affiliate fees on your recommendations by adding your own Amazon Tracking ID under Edit Profile

* Kits are easily shareable with fellow preppers, friends, and family (e.g., https://readykit.org/jesse/survival-kit)

* No spammy emails, paywalls, fake accounts, or notifications!

The idea is that anyone can add recommendations while human curators and a simple algorithm surface a mix of the highest value gear from reputable brands.

E.g., I recommend Big Agnes tents and sleeping bags in my kit because I’ve used them on wilderness backpacking trips and know they are high quality, durable, and have a lifetime warranty. I also recommend Sawyer and Aquamira for filtering and treating water, 3M respirators and Honeywell air purifiers for wildfire smoke, etc.

I would love to get your feedback and ideas for improvements!

For those who are interested, it was built with React, Redux, Python, Django, and hosted on Heroku and AWS (S3 and Cloudfront).

P.S. There's a fun easter egg with CSS3 filters if you create an account and turn on Dark Mode in Settings.

troydavis 5 years ago |

Congrats! I visited on an iPhone. For me, the home page just looked like a list of products, not a way I could build a kit. Then I saw the “Get started” link and thought that might be where the magic was, so I clicked it and got a signup form. My suggestions:

- make the functionality usable while anonymous (and move the signup step to after I’ve made my kit). I probably wouldn’t sign up before seeing the utility on a desktop and I definitely wouldn’t on a phone. After I’d built a kit on a phone, I’d probably either sign up or at least have your site email the kit to me.

- change the home page to that builder or whatever the site functionality is, or at least make it impossible to land on the home page and not realize that something more exists. If I hadn’t been coming from your Show HN description, I’d have thought it was just a (nicely designed!) list of Amazon affiliate links.

Good luck!