Interview with the founder of Disk Prices

About

Disk Prices is a website that provides a comparison of all hard drives and SSDs available on Amazon, sorted by price per TB. Users can easily compare the prices of different storage devices and make informed decisions based on their storage needs and budget.

In this interview, we have a conversation with the founder of Disk Prices, Jeremy Grosser.

How did you come up with the idea for the business?

I wanted to build a NAS for myself and was trying to find the optimal price/capacity drives. I started building a spreadsheet, but then I remembered that I'm a programmer and wrote a script. I needed to sign up for an affiliate account to get access to Amazon's API and from there it just made sense to build a website.

How did you build the product?

I've worked in tech for quite a while and built many internal tools that make large datasets easier for humans to interpret. I wanted to bring that sort of raw "just show me the data" ethos to a public site. I try to present the data in a way that allows you to find answers to practical questions like "What's the cheapest drive?" followed by, "Ok, but what's the cheapest one from a brand I recognize?" with as few interactions as possible. In most cases, simply scrolling down the page is all you need to do to understand the marketplace. More curious or advanced users can explore further and understand why Blu-ray discs really aren't a cheap backup strategy.

How big was your team when you started?

It's just me.

How did you launch the business?

I tweeted a link, shared it with a few friends, then let word of mouth do the rest.

How have you grown the business since its launch?

I added support for eight other countries' Amazon marketplaces, which has driven further word of mouth as non-US users often feel left out by sites that only focus on domestic pricing. The international stores now account for about half of my revenue.

I did try branching out into another product vertical with batteries (alkaline, NiMH, lithium polymer, etc) on battprices.com for about a year. This drove very few sales and the cheapest batteries are quite concerning from a safety perspective. I chalked this up to a failed experiment and shut it down. It turns out there are relatively few consumer product categories where "price per unit" is a reasonable metric and the prices are high enough for most people to do comparison shopping.

What are the main marketing channels that work out for you?

People link to diskprices.com from blogs, reddit, hacker news, and other forums pretty regularly, which has helped the search ranking. I'm not a fan of paid ads or SEO tricks, so I just let things happen organically.

Which tools do you use most often to help grow your business?

Wise.com has made multi-currency accounting quite a bit easier in recent years. The site is written in Python with Django and SQLite running on AWS. Cloudflare does caching and DNS. I built my own analytics with a focus on user privacy- no cookies, personally identifiable information, or third party processors.

What is the business model (ads/subscription etc)?

All of the links on diskprices.com are Amazon Affiliate Program referrals. Anything a user purchases within the same session is attributed to me with referral rates that vary depending on product category- typically between 3 and 10%.

What do your finances look like?

It varies depending on seasonality and demand. On average, I gross about $5k a month from referral fees. Operating costs are very low.