Good/Bad Idea?

mrkp · 2013-01-16T21:03:17.000Z

Hey everyone, I wanted to run an idea past you guys to see if you would find it useful. I have developed a service that runs every fifteen minutes on my computer and checks whether every non-retired LEGO set is available. If not available, it changes my database to reflect that and sends a text message and an email to me to alert me of the retirement. It has been working well and accurately for the last 4 months (when I first developed it). I was curious as to whether anyone else on this forum uses a similar technique and whether you guys think this is a good idea for a program. Also, the obvious bottom line question is whether anyone thinks this kind of idea is worth any money. I was considering having some sort of subscription that I could have people buy to be added to the distribution list. My service runs every 15 minutes, so when it finds retired sets, it sends an email/text to everyone on the distribution list. By being on the distribution list, you are guaranteed to know within 15 minutes of when a set goes EOL. You then have the advantage of being one of the first people to hop on Amazon/Ebay and buy up the remaining stock wherever available. So the real reason behind the program is to get an advantage over other collectors by receiving alerts before they do. Let me know what you guys think moving forward. I also was curious as to whether there was anything like this out there already or whether mine is the first to be brought forward. Thanks, mrkp