1. What’s the quick origin story of your brand, and what makes your product or positioning genuinely different from other options in your niche?

Ceech Hsu: krazy.deals started from a simple frustration: deal discovery had become noisy. A shopper would see a discount, a coupon code, or a “limited time” banner, but it was often hard to tell whether the deal was real, still active, or actually worth clicking. I built krazy.deals around that gap.

My background is not the usual ecommerce founder path. I am a UC Berkeley EE/CS graduate and a professor of Kinesiology and Dance at four California community colleges. I also operate krazy.deals as a solo founder. That combination has shaped the site. The engineering side pushes me toward systems, data, and automation. The teaching side makes me care about whether the page actually helps a normal person make a better decision.

What makes krazy.deals different is that I do not want it to become another coupon graveyard. The site is built around product pages, deal checks, clearer buying context, and honest handling of expired offers. If a deal is no longer live, the page should not pretend otherwise. If a product looks cheap but has weak long-term value, that matters too. The positioning is practical: help shoppers figure out whether an Amazon deal is current, useful, and worth their time.

2. Since launch, what have been the 1-2 real turning points for your brand-specific decisions, pivots, or experiments that noticeably changed your growth or profitability-and what did you learn from them?

Ceech Hsu: The first turning point was realizing that publishing more deal content was not the same as building a better shopping product. Early on, it is easy to think volume is the answer: more posts, more coupons, more product pages. But in affiliate ecommerce, stale information hurts trust fast. A user who clicks an expired code or lands on a thin product page does not think, “This site had a lot of inventory.” They think, “This site wasted my time.”

That pushed me to treat krazy.deals less like a content treadmill and more like a trust system. Product pages became more important. Expired deal handling became more important. Clearer category structure, cleaner URLs, and better product explanations became more important than chasing every possible keyword.

The second turning point was rebuilding my workflow around AI, but with strict boundaries. I use Codex heavily now for code, internal workflows, research organization, and draft support. That has made me much faster as a solo operator. But I do not let AI invent prices, promo codes, product availability, or product claims. The lesson is that AI is powerful when it speeds up the work around the facts. It becomes dangerous when it starts pretending to be the source of the facts.

3. Which 2-3 channels drive most of your revenue right now (for example SEO, paid social, email, marketplaces, influencers), and what have you learned about making those channels work in your category?

Ceech Hsu: The main channels for krazy.deals are organic search, product-page traffic, and email capture. Since krazy.deals is an Amazon affiliate site, revenue is tied to whether visitors find a useful product page or deal page and then click through when the offer makes sense for them.

Organic search still matters, but I think the old playbook of “publish a lot of keyword content and wait” is weaker than it used to be. In this category, trust and clarity matter more than raw article volume. If a shopper lands on a page and cannot quickly understand the product, the deal status, the caveat, and the next step, the traffic is not very valuable.

Email is the channel I want to keep building because it gives the site a more direct relationship with shoppers. Search traffic can move around because of Google updates, AI summaries, or ranking changes. An email list is slower to build, but it is more durable. The lesson so far is that deal sites need owned attention. You cannot depend only on search engines or social platforms to decide when your best offers get seen.

4. How are you thinking about search in 2026 – Google, AI assistants like ChatGPT, and other discovery platforms? What, if anything, have you changed in your content or site to stay visible as AI search grows?

Ceech Hsu: I think search in 2026 is becoming less about ranking one blue link and more about being understandable to both humans and machines. Google still matters, but AI assistants are changing how people compare products, ask for deal advice, and summarize buying options.

For krazy.deals, that means the product pages have to be cleaner. A page should make it easy to answer basic questions: What is the product? Is the deal active? What kind of shopper is this good for? What is the honest caveat? What should someone check before buying? If a human can scan the page quickly, an AI assistant is also more likely to summarize it accurately.

I have also become more careful about not overbuilding thin blog content. I would rather have fewer useful pages than thousands of low-trust pages that only exist to chase keywords. Expired product pages still matter, but they need to be labeled honestly instead of buried or noindexed just because the offer ended. In affiliate ecommerce, historical product context can still help shoppers, but only if the page is clear about what is live and what is not.

The biggest change is that I now think of SEO as part of a trust loop. Technical SEO helps, but it is not enough. The page has to be good enough that a shopper, a search engine, and an AI assistant can all understand the same thing without guessing.

5. What do you do to turn first‑time buyers into repeat customers and advocates? Are there specific experiences, content, or community touches that work especially well for you?

Ceech Hsu: Because krazy.deals is an affiliate ecommerce site, I do not own the entire buyer relationship the way a DTC brand does. The purchase happens on Amazon, so I think about this question as turning first-time visitors into repeat visitors and subscribers.

The first step is not wasting their time. If someone clicks into a product page and the deal is expired, the page needs to say so clearly. If the offer is live, the path to the product should be obvious. If the product has a drawback, I would rather say it than pretend everything is perfect. That kind of honesty is not flashy, but it is how a deal site earns return visits.

The second step is email capture. I want shoppers to see krazy.deals as a place that can save them time, not just a site they found once through search. The more useful the product pages and deal alerts become, the more natural it is to ask people to subscribe.

The third piece is consistency. I am trying to build the brand around practical product judgment: real deal status, plain-English buying context, and fewer exaggerated claims. If people feel that the site helped them avoid a bad deal as much as it helped them find a good one, they are more likely to come back.

6. If you had to write a short playbook for an ecommerce founder one stage behind you, what would you double down on over the next 12 months – and what would you stop doing entirely?

Ceech Hsu: I would double down on the boring systems that make the business trustworthy. For an ecommerce founder one stage behind me, that means clean product pages, accurate product data, clear email capture, fast site performance, and a simple way to know which pages are actually producing value. It also means building a workflow where you can update or retire bad information quickly.

I would also double down on owned channels. Build the email list earlier. Give people a reason to come back without waiting for Google, Instagram, TikTok, or an AI assistant to send them. Even a small list of people who trust your judgment is more valuable than a random spike of low-intent traffic.

What would I stop doing? I would stop chasing every trend, every keyword, and every possible channel at once. It feels productive, but it spreads a small team too thin. I would also stop treating AI output as finished work. AI can help with drafts, research structure, coding, and analysis, but the founder still has to own the judgment. In ecommerce, especially affiliate ecommerce, a bad recommendation costs trust.

The short playbook is: make fewer promises, verify more details, build the email list, and make every important page easier to trust.