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Ask/Show HN: Low margin B2C product in a crowded market. What to do?

https://bookmadeforyou.com
2•warrenronsiek•5h ago

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warrenronsiek•5h ago
I've created an AI children's storybook creator. I believe that I have the best product in the space, and by a wide margin. However, I'm concerned that product quality doesn't matter, and I'm looking for advice on what to do with the product.

There are many issues with this as a business: 1. Zero barriers to entry. 2. Low margins. 3. Repeat/subscription revenue is low or non-existent.

The margins on the business are too low to make ads make sense. New entrants constantly coming into the space and buying up keywords. You have to compete with them for SEO ranking even if their product is worse. By the time the customer has realized that the first ad/link they clicked on results in a sub-par book, they already made the purchase or gave up on the impulse. I've tried Facebook/Youtube/TikTok. My ads (according to FB) had above average performance, but even so CAC was WAY bigger than per-sale margin.

My current plan is an affiliate marketing system where I recruit influencers to link to books that they create and give them all of the profit in exchange for, effectively, 0 CAC traffic that I convert into an upsell. However, this has various difficulties as well. The influencers I've contacted all want upfront payment, often thousands of dollars, to create a single reel that will get a few thousand views.

Deeper issue is I don't understand how B2C products/marketing is supposed to break even. Somehow people are able to make money/businesses selling single-sale products via advertising, but all my experiments in doing this have negative ROI.

Thoughts? Am I missing something? What should I do?

Burdened by Tech, Gen Z Is Flocking to DVDs and VHS [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UqoTO9kO6c
1•hackerbeat•21s ago•0 comments

Opus 4.6 solved one of Donald Knuth's conjectures [pdf]

https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/%7Eknuth/papers/claude-cycles.pdf
1•peterjliu•30s ago•0 comments

I'm not consulting an LLM

https://lr0.org/blog/p/gpt/
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Tim Sweeney signed away his right to criticize Google's app store until 2032

https://www.theverge.com/news/889595/tim-sweeney-signed-away-his-right-to-criticize-google-until-...
1•CharlesW•2m ago•0 comments

Show HN: I wrote an LLM inference engine in pure Go – 48 tok/s zero dependencies

https://github.com/computerex/dlgo/tree/main
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I built the "Strava for Developers" because I'm tired of being a bar on a chart

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61% of interview cheaters passed detection

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2•gurachek•3m ago•0 comments

Analysis Suggests School Was Hit Amid U.S. Strikes on Iranian Naval Base

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/05/world/middleeast/iran-school-us-strikes-naval-base.html
3•abdelhousni•5m ago•1 comments

Do we still need docstrings?

1•alnah•7m ago•0 comments

Use Cursor Automations for Agentic Stale Feature Flag Removal

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6WS7rsaDBE
2•royalfig•8m ago•0 comments

Fork Off: Surveillance States Need to Fork Linux Themselves

https://blog.devrupt.io/posts/fork-off-california-linux/
1•ddtaylor•10m ago•0 comments

SlayTheText – A Text Based Copy of Slay the Spire Played in the Shell

https://github.com/Difio3333/slaythetext
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Unbundling GIS into thousands of browser based tools

https://www.quickmaptools.com/
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Telemetry data analysis for any AI product

https://atheon-inc.com/
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An Automated Company 2.5M ARR

https://polsia.com/live
2•stoniejohnson•13m ago•1 comments

The Deadliest Design Mistakes in History [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFbxUPbZovM
1•dp-hackernews•14m ago•0 comments

Show HN: FOSS Lightroom alternative with video support (macOS)

https://github.com/AlexW00/Kino
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An Agent ever delete something important to you

https://coasty.ai:443/
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The Dutch Revolt Was Europe's First Bourgeois Revolution

https://jacobin.com/2026/03/dutch-revolt-bourgeois-revolutions-netherlands-reformation/
4•PaulHoule•20m ago•0 comments

Show HN: CodeTrackr – open-source WakaTime alternative with real-time stats

https://github.com/livrasand/CodeTrackr
2•livrasand•22m ago•0 comments

Fosdemflix

https://fosdemflix.netlify.app/
1•todsacerdoti•23m ago•0 comments

Game about Data of America

https://americaindata.com/
2•fidicen•23m ago•0 comments

New ThinkPad T14 is a repairable laptop with LPCAMM2 RAM

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1•heresie-dabord•23m ago•0 comments

Ion Drift is an Asteroids-style roguelite web game using assets from Endless Sky

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Show HN: OpenEHR-CLI – CLI and MCP server for working with openEHR artifacts

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Looking for testers for a location-based AI experiment

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We're Training Students to Write Worse and to Use AI to Prove They're Not Robots

https://www.techdirt.com/2026/03/06/were-training-students-to-write-worse-to-prove-theyre-not-rob...
2•hn_acker•29m ago•3 comments

Show HN: We're on Women's Day Sale. Sign Up to Playtest Shop Crush

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2961120/Shop_Crush/
1•hollowlimb•30m ago•0 comments

Huawei PanguLM [pdf]

https://support.huaweicloud.com/intl/en-us/productdesc-pangulm/PanguLM%20Service_Service%20Overvi...
1•zlu•32m ago•0 comments

What's the deal with "age verification" and computers?

https://rudd-o.com/linux-and-free-software/what-is-going-on-with-age-verification-in-computers
1•Magnusmaster•33m ago•0 comments