I remember my brother and me discussing building a search engine for all digital products available on different websites back in 2015.

I started building it using Laravel, VueJS, Algolia, and Scrapy.

Here is a sample screenshot –

The expectation was to crawl data from different websites like Envato Market, Creative Market, TemplateMonster, w.org, etc, and show relevant stats like the number of reviews, sales, and so on. Then put all links in the sitemap, Google will do its job and I will be rich with affiliates income. So simple right, Nah!

I started getting page views but the content was still copied from original source.

I tried creating automated listicles for the best X items in the Y category. That didn’t work either.

I shut down the project in 2017 because priorities changed and I basically didn’t know how to monetize ThemesHound.

When I look back now, it was a great product what lacked was how I positioned it. Maybe I will work on something similar in the future or maybe not but I definitely enjoyed the time when I built it.

Thanks.