archetype

All these product curation websites lately are just - “Top 10 Products For Working Professionals,” without any insight provided as to how those products - and more vitally, their combination - confer real value to its users. Products don’t exist in vacuums, they sit next to each other on your workspace.

Archetype is at once a financial and cultural experiment, built with the intent to stop this thinly-veiled, indiscriminate rehashing of the same hundred-odd products, over and over.

Real curation takes time, it’s slow and methodical. Even within a single archetype, there is a combinatorial explosion of factors. You have serious developers, fitness-enthusiast developers, brutalist developers, on-the-go developers, near-sighted developers. Same for designers, accountants, doctors, musicians, therapists.

The experiment is thus: can an affiliate marketing website built with the goal of thoughtful curation and honest feedback still become a profitable endeavor today? Or is it really about virality and click-farming?

There are a lot of questions.

• Is there enough to cover about the interplay between products to differentiate a site like this?
• Can a much slower content release cycle still hold people’s attentions, when a guiding value for the blog is to not manufacture opinions and not focus unilaterally on what’s trendy?
• Moreover, is there even really such a thing as a “perfect” setup for different kinds of work, or is this entire site based on a false premise? Is perhaps a basic monitor and laptop good enough for 95% of people?

In development.

Also check out Keys, a mechanical keyboard configurator tool.