Mike Fridgen

Buying electronics can be a time-consuming process, but a new startup is looking to make the process a little less painful.

Decide.com launched in June after a lengthy stealth period. The website allows consumers to check prices on electronics from hundreds of sellers and predicts when it’s the best time to buy. Just in time for the holiday season, Decide released an iPhone app to compare prices on the go.

I recently spoke with Decide.com President and CEO Mike Fridgen to find out how Decide is making shopping easier.

What is Decide.com and what do you do? We’re on the mission to eliminate buyer’s remorse. With the rapid pace of technology products coming out, it’s tough to decide when to buy. Price volatility is also high. Twenty percent of the time, prices will change on the same day. Decide helps consumers decide if prices will drop or a new product will come out. We have a database of historical data, news from around the web and price mining technology.

You have experience with price prediction in the travel world with Farecast. How does that help with Decide? Farecast was acquired by Microsoft in 2008, and part of that team came to decide. It’s a crew that has a lot of experience working together. Our co-founder was the co-founder of Farecast, so it adds a lot of value to what we’re doing at the site.

How have you been funded? We’ve raised $8.5 million. Our Series A round was $2.5 million and led by Madrona. The Series B round was $6 million and led by Maveron. We also have a handful of angel investors including Rich Barton and Ram Shriram, one of the Google investors. We’re not looking for funding now.

How many employees do you have? Are you hiring? We have 25 employees, mostly technologists. We’re always on the lookout for engineers and data mining talent. Over 70 percent of our team has University of Washington degrees.

What’s your background? The last 15 years I spent building consumer internet companies. I ran marketing and product for Farecast then ran travel globally for Bing at Microsoft. My first startup was in my 20s back in the late 1990s, and that was also backed by Madrona, called Triphub. Decide is my third venture startup.

What’s your competition like? A lot of sites let consumers compare prices. There are plenty of comparison sites and user reviews, but nobody is answering the when-to-buy question like Decide is doing. Buying the wrong product at the wrong time can be massively painful. Imagine if you just bought an iPhone 4 as the iPhone 4S was released.

What does the future look like? We’re excited about the progress we’ve made. In the short term, we’ll expand the categories we’re in and expand into mobile. Longer term, we’ll look at answering the “what to buy” and “where to buy” questions. There will be new features coming out soon, but we’re not ready to talk about that yet. Our focus now is when to buy, but we want to go bigger and broader.