About · The Editor
One person runs these sites, and this page says exactly how
What we test, what we do not, who writes it, and where the money comes from. If you only read one page before trusting a recommendation from any site in this portfolio, read this one.
01 — Who Runs This
I am Michael W., and that is the whole masthead
There is no editorial board here, no pool of freelancers, and no anonymous “expert team.” I am the hands-on owner behind The First Buyer. I decide which categories the sites cover, I do the buying and the using, and I write or edit what goes out. When a recommendation on one of these sites turns out to be wrong, there is exactly one person who got it wrong, and you know who he is.
I started this because of how much of the product-advice internet is built to avoid that. It is genuinely difficult, on most large review sites, to find out whether a human being touched the thing being recommended. The byline is a brand. The methodology page describes a process in the passive voice. Nobody is on the hook. That structure is not an accident — it is what lets a site publish at volume without ever being accountable for a single pick.
Running everything through one named person costs me scale. I publish less than a network does, and more slowly. What it buys you is the ability to check. You can email me about any recommendation on any site in this portfolio and get an answer from the person who made it.
The Editor
Michael W.
Owner & Editor
Michael W. is the hands-on owner behind The First Buyer. He runs the sites in the portfolio and sets the standards they follow — buying and using what he can, and saying plainly when he hasn't.
02 — Coverage
What the portfolio covers
The First Buyer publishes independent product review sites, each one built around a single category rather than trying to cover everything. A site that only looks at one kind of product can actually get good at it: you learn which specs matter and which are marketing, which brands quietly changed a component between model years, and what the failure modes are a year in. A site that reviews everything learns none of that.
Categories get picked on one test: is there a real question a buyer is stuck on, and can I get close enough to the products to answer it honestly? If the answer to either part is no, the site does not get made. That rules out plenty of high-traffic categories, which is the point — the traffic is high precisely because everyone is publishing thin advice into them.
Right now nothing is live. The portfolio page lists every site as it launches, with what it covers and a link straight to it. Publishing the standards before the sites exist is deliberate: you get to judge the rules before there is anything for me to sell you on.
03 — Standards
How picks are chosen
The short version: hands-on where possible, and a plain statement on the page when it is not.
Every review starts with the question a buyer is actually asking, not with a list of products. I work out what separates a good answer from a bad one in that category — the two or three things that genuinely decide whether you will still be happy in a year — and everything after that is in service of those criteria. Specs that do not affect the decision do not make the page, however impressive they look on a box.
Then the shortlist. Candidates come from what is actually available to a normal buyer, not from whatever has the best affiliate terms. I read the long-run owner reports, not just the launch coverage, because most products fail in ways that only show up after the review cycle has moved on.
Then the part most sites are vague about. Where I can get my hands on the product, I do, and the review says what I did with it and for how long. Where I cannot — and in any category with expensive or slow-to-arrive gear, there will be products I cannot — the page says so directly, in the same type size as everything else. It tells you what the pick is based on instead: specification comparison against the criteria above, the documented experience of people who have owned it, and where the manufacturer’s claims can and cannot be checked.
That admission is the point, not a caveat buried at the bottom. A site that implies it tested everything is making a claim you have no way to verify and that is almost never true. A site that tells you exactly which picks it handled and which it did not is giving you something you can actually use to weigh the advice.
When a manufacturer supplies a product rather than my buying it, the review says that too. Being sent something does not earn it a place in the list, and it never earns a better one.
The Standard
04 — Disclosure
How the sites make money
The sites in this portfolio earn affiliate commissions. When a reader clicks a link to a retailer and buys something, the site may receive a small percentage of that sale from the retailer. It does not change the price you pay, and it is the only way these sites make money.
An affiliate disclosure is a plain statement that the publisher stands to earn something if you buy through its links. The point of making it is that you get to factor it in. So here is the part that matters more than the disclosure itself: commission rates play no part in which product wins. I do not know, and deliberately do not check, which of the candidates in a shortlist pays better before the pick is made. A product that pays nothing at all can and does win.
No brand can buy a placement, a rating, a mention, or a review on any site in this portfolio. There is no sponsored content and no “partner” tier. If that ever changes, it will be written on this page before it happens, not after.
This hub carries no affiliate links at all. thefirstbuyer.com exists to tell you who publishes the sites and what rules they follow. It sells nothing and earns nothing.
If you want the regulator’s version rather than mine, the FTC publishes its endorsement guides in plain-language Q&A form, and its rule on consumer reviews and testimonials sets out what is prohibited outright. Both are worth knowing before you trust any review site, this one included.
05 — Corrections
Independence, and what happens when we get it wrong
We will get things wrong. A product gets revised without the model number changing. A manufacturer quietly swaps a component. Something that tested well develops a fault at eighteen months that nobody could have seen at launch. None of that is avoidable by being careful; it is a property of writing about physical objects over time.
What is avoidable is leaving it wrong. If you find an error on any site in this portfolio — a spec, a price claim, a pick that no longer holds up — email contact@thefirstbuyer.com and it comes to me. Factual errors get fixed on the page. If a correction changes the recommendation rather than just a detail, the page says what changed and when, instead of quietly becoming a different article.
The same address takes questions about how a pick was made. If a review does not make its reasoning clear enough for you to disagree with it, that is a flaw in the review, and I would rather hear about it.