Why I killed a "simple" business idea

I thought it would be easy. The idea was straightforward: Build a deal app for luxury products. Since I had already built sth. similar I thought this was a no-brainer. It sounded simple. Find discounted items. Monetize through affiliate links. No complex app. No complicated backend. Just aggregation and aarbitrage on attention.

My assumption:

• Deals already exist, I just have to surface them.

• Affiliate programs are easy to join.

• Even small commissions would stack.

It looked like a clean, low-friction model.

Reality

Like I had expected, building the app was no problem at all, but getting reliable deal data was unreasonably challenging.

There’s no clean, structured source for this kind of information. Most sites aren’t built to be scraped properly, and even when they are, the data isn’t consistent.

What I thought would be a quick setup turned into a long process of:

• searching for usable sources

• testing what can actually be fetched

• dealing with incomplete or outdated listings

Then came monetization and it got even worse.

Most retailers redirected to affiliate platforms, so I went through the often very time-consuming on-boarding process, just to find out that retailers

• weren't active on the platform anymore

• information was misleading or outdated

• wouldn't accept my application

The biggest friction was getting rejected, just because I was only starting out, so I didn’t have traffic or promising stats yet.

No audience → no approval

No approval → no monetization

And on top of all this, retailers don’t make becoming a partner so difficult, because they pay +50% commission. In fact, most commissions were in the 2–5% range.

Huge effort on sourcing and high dependency on external platforms for deals as well as monetization with very low margin made it fairly easy for me to kill and bury the complete business idea.

Breakdown

“Death” of the idea wasn't caused by the product itself, but the dependency on external data sources and difficult affiliate systems broke its neck.

Adjustment

I dropped it. Completely. Didn't pause. Didn't put on hold for “maybe later”. Decided it wasn't worth the time and dropped it.

Takeaway

Some ideas look simple because they hide their constraints. I learned a lot in the process.

• I adjusted the way I validate ideas

• my workflow was improved

• I try to keep dependencies to a minimum