GearScan: Origins and Lessons Learned

GearScan started as a way for me to learn more about the affiliate industry and flex my web development skills. At the time, I was working as a consultant for eBay’s Partner Network and base affiliate program, and I wanted to understand how affiliates actually built websites and drove sales.

Back then, I was in the habit of checking several outdoor gear deal sites every day — Steep and Cheap, Whiskey Militia, and a few others. I built a simple Rails app that tracked those deals on a single page and shared it with some friends. It grew from there. Over the next decade or so, I used Reddit strategies and programmatic SEO to grow the site to millions of page views. It generated hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue over the years and actually funded a couple of other businesses I ran between 2012 and 2014.

Along the way, GearScan taught me a tremendous amount:

• Rails development — how to build and maintain a production Rails app over the long term
• Deployment and operations — deploying to Heroku and keeping things running reliably over time
• Web scraping — screen scraping, reverse engineering private APIs, and building data pipelines to ingest scraped data and third-party feeds
• The affiliate industry — how it works, how money flows, and how to operate within it
• Running a business — setting up and managing an LLC
• Building for users — how to respond to customer feedback and feature requests, and how rewarding it is to build software that people use and enjoy every day

When I finally shut GearScan down, it was a bittersweet moment. I hope that one day I’ll be able to reboot it and bring it back to life.

Visit GearScan →