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74 points by jurajpal ↗ HN
Problem: Today, people spend hours searching for sustainable products and services. They end up browsing through apps, blogs and online reviews. Existing services such as Yelp and Google Maps offer little guidance and users end up with information overload.

We started Sure to make this process easier. Interviewing our target users validated our key assumption: finding sustainable options should be as easy as finding the closest McDonalds. The market in Europe alone is 56.8M, and with more than 75% willing to pay more for sustainable goods, the need we’re meeting is both prominent and growing.

Solution: Sure is a Facebook Messenger chatbot for finding and buying sustainable products and services. Powered by human assisted AI and using data capture and machine learning, Sure provides personalised recommendations for sustainable consumption curated from a crowdsourced database.

Why YCF: In March, our MVP had a monthly growth rate of 64% and with F8 earlier this week, we’ve tripled our number of active users and received over 1,500 messages just in 1 day. As The Guardian put it, Sure is one of the earliest chatbots on Messenger that actually manages to achieve the conversational UI but we need to expand to other cities and add product lines fast enough to keep up with the demand.

We would love to hear your feedback here and will be happy to answer any questions. Before that, go ahead and try Sure at m.me/besure.io

http://besure.io/

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/13/facebook-...

25 comments

[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 50.6 ms ] thread
tim333
Quite a nice concept though you'll need a larger database of places
jurajpal
That's a valid point Tim! At the moment, we're only live in Copenhagen and San Francisco where we have crowdsourced the database mostly from local bloggers. We need to grow the database faster but want to avoid just copying stuff from Yelp as the reviews are too abstract in our opinion and we rather want to curate quality content. Do you have any thoughts here?
tim333
I'm not sure. I made an app for late drinking and got the data from Google and Foursquare APIs. But I don't think they'd have sustainability in the database.

If you search Tripadvisor with sustainable as a search term it gives quite good data and then you could glance at it manually? eg for NY cafes:

https://www.tripadvisor.com.ph/Search?q=sustainable&geo=6076...

krumhausen
Building a chatbot that would search or even crawl through listings on Yelp, TripAdvisor and Google Maps would probably allow us to build the database faster - and there are other chatbots out there leveraging existing databases. However, consumers accustomed to services like Airbnb and Etsy are looking for authentic connections to local, and social­-good businesses.

We believe that one of the key value propositions of our product is to provide a highly curated list of high quality and more personalised results. While Google and others are competing on speed and quantity, our key value propositions is to provide users with high quality and more personalised results that they normally would spend hours researching online.

Do these assumptions match your learnings from building a similar experience?

tim333
I didn't progress much further with my bar app but how I would probably proceed with that or your project is to start with the data out there and then either curate it manually or try to get feedback from your users as to whether the places are good.
uptownfunk
How about building out a predictive model to assist you in the sourcing of sustainable products and services. You already have humans curating the content, why not use that as your training set and let that inform your search.
krumhausen
Yes, that is a good idea. We are building out a list of criteria that we will use to evaluate sustainable products and services. Using those keywords we could potentially analyse existing data and use that as a first wave to find new products and services. A human expert would probably still be needed to vet the products before adding them to our Sure database.

We just have to be careful which sites or services we would crawl as we don’t want to infringe on anyones copyrights.

rpedela
How do you make money?
krumhausen
Very good question. We are not monetising right now, but want to explore two revenue streams:

1. Commission on transactions made in chat. We might expand this by helping users find sustainable products and services.

2. Freemium model where larger businesses and franchises pay for sponsored content and user feedback

ryporter
Why is a chatbot the best medium for your service? When I'm doing product comparison, I like to browse through products with pictures and to see tables comparing different products along different dimensions. I understand that you are trying to prevent information overload, but a curated website can provide this. Reducing it down to a chatbot strikes me as information underload.
jurajpal
Thanks for your feedback! We chose chatbot as the medium only after carefully talking to our target audience and testing some prototypes with them last summer. They loved it because Sure gave them 2-3 curated recommendations, rather than an endless list of Google search results. At the same time, you can always ask for more options and start comparing them.

We believe that even navigating between product comparison tables can be simplified with a simple conversation. Sure aims to be so personal that you can ask the bot to compare different options for you along the dimensions that matter to you.

And when it comes to product and even restaurant recommendations, I completely agree with you that images matter and we're really excited about what the new chatbot UI on Facebook Messenger allows us to do and this is just the beginning.

krumhausen
Conversational commerce is still in its very early days so we're not sure whether it would work or not. Conversational commerce does, however, have certain benefits over the traditional web experience. Because of the ongoing interaction with the user, the service will be able to offer extreme personalisation, and shorten the purchase flow radically.

Today on the web, we have created a destination mentality, where brands convince consumers to go to their site and stay there. Conversational or social commerce is more like the real world were you walk past something, you do something else and then perhaps you chat about it and even purchase it later. The real world is more chaotic and conversational commerce havs the potential to reflect that better than the traditional web.

That being said, we do not believe the future of conversational commerce is a simple chatbot reflecting the old-school terminal. As you mentioned, pure text is not great for discoverability and comparisons. We believe the future of conversational commerce belongs to the hybrid interface, bringing that GUI and command line paradigms together.

One final note is that as AI gets more and more sophisticated, the need for browsing through the endless products on Pinterest might disappear, as the service will be able to offer recommendations that fit exactly to the users’ needs. The service could present three products based on user needs, allowing the user to make a more informed decision.

More reading: - http://www.psfk.com/2016/04/layer-messaging-app-developers-u... - https://medium.com/chris-messina/2016-will-be-the-year-of-co...

anthonymonori
How do you plan to maintain the data in Sure? You mentioned that you crowd-sourced the current data in SF and Copenhagen from local bloggers, but did you had somebody double check these places? What happens if one of these places do get shut down or closed? Having a chatbot on Messenger means that people are placing trust on you - and will be hard to gain back once it's lost or given a bad choice of place. Will people be able to flag places as closed within the conversation? What about preferences? E.g. If I don't want to be recommended the same place again next time I talk to Sure?

All this aside, great job guys! Try to surf the ride and do not fall down!

jurajpal
Hey Anthony, thanks for your nice words! We indeed make sure all the places are double checked, we do this also by working with bigger organisations and travel boards in some cities. We also keep an eye on all the places to make sure they offer the experience we promise (being open for business is a good start). We're about quality over quantity.

As for your preferences, Sure is you best friend who doesn't just know all the great spots in a city but also know you and your preferences. So if you're for example vegan or always prefer a specific diet, Sure will remember this and create a profile for you. This happens without the pain of you having to check boxes. It's all conversational and personal, so that you won't even notice it.

sofisitha
This is really what we need! All the best guys! I'm sure you will make sustainability the next big thing.

We are super excited to follow your journey.

jurajpal
Thank you Sofi!
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mjmashka
Guys I believe in you! Go ahead and make it even better!
Swipes_Team
Well done @jurajpal! I tried breaking it by asking tougher questions but it figured it out and still made a recommendation. I like this touch! https://infinit.io/_/37edMhy
jurajpal
Thanks guys! Means a lot but still a long way to go! :)
hybrid11
Sounds like a good idea, looking forward to seeing the evolution of it!
jurajpal
Many thanks for your support!