Launch HN: Global Belly (YC W20) – Helping influencers launch their own products
Ankita and I met in 2014, while she was completing her MBA at NYU Stern and I was working at The Food Network. Ankita came from an engineering background and had previously worked at Apple, while my experience was in media production, but we connected immediately and started working on a few projects together at the intersection of food and tech and launched our own DTC food brand that would feature products to help people cook more global cuisines at home, hence the name Global Belly.
We developed our own e-commerce platform with all the bells and whistles, set up operations with co-packers and food distributors, and even started working with a fulfillment partner to manage delivery logistics. When we began exploring influencer partnerships, we started hearing the same thing from all of them: “I’ve always wanted to launch my own line of products like these but I just don’t have the time and resources”. This really resonated with us, we knew first-hand the challenges of launching your own brand, and we knew this would be nearly impossible for them while maintaining aggressive content calendars. After speaking with 100 different food influencers we learnt not only how well-positioned they were to launch their own products but how eager they were to do it. The solution became obvious to us, we had the tech, analytics and operational expertise to help them launch both physical and virtual product lines quickly. Influencers could continue to do what they do best, create amazing content and connect with their audience and we would take care of the rest for them.
So this is how it works: Once influencers are onboarded we look at their audience data and help them create a product portfolio that is best suited for their fans. We design all of these products, set up their custom store on Global Belly and manage the production and fulfillment logistics of the whole store as well. Influencers share their custom products to their fans and followers via their store on Global Belly and they start earning revenue for each product sold from day 1.
We have currently launched 17 influencers in the food vertical and shipped thousands of products so far. One of our largest influencers is SweetAmbs, who is a pastry chef specializing in cookie decorating. Through her beautifully crafted videos she has built an audience of 3M across her social media platforms. We helped her launch her own line of DIY cookie kits, signature cookie mixes, books, and e-tutorials via her Global Belly store (https://globalbelly.com/collections/sweetambs) She is just one of the millions of content creators we believe will be the future of commerce as they begin to capitalize on their own brand instead of pushing others.
Though the majority of our launches have been in the last 3 months, we have already started learning some interesting things. The size of ...
41 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 98.3 ms ] threadI feel like "influencer" is too broad of a term for this. From what I know about influencers, a lot of them are just a pretty face that brands can slap their name onto.
I think this is the most common understanding of the term, as well.
To me "influencer" is no different than the "brand representatives" that used to be known as "booth babes" that are bussed in to conventions and trade shows to draw eyes while they stand next to products.
I'd be careful assuming that. My understanding is much closer to what the main post describes, as is most of the college students I know. It's definitely just a broad term for people with an online presence, typically through Instagram, who use their online popularity for advertising on behalf of companies.
Influencers often have a bit more depth than just "booth babes", like you described. Their popularity comes from a high level of expertise in something or a great online persona.
Consider your mum having a baking Instagram. She blows up in popularity, and then starts advertising, and potentially taking more care to cultivate her audience. She is definitely an influencer, but far from what you've described.
Small thing but with white text on light background sometimes it's a bit washed out, there's a couple spots on the site.
Little thing, continue to shipping is shown when entering shipping address, kind of confusing. Maybe just "Next"?
Plus -- it doesn't allude to anything having to do with "influencers".
I'm not saying there isn't a better name out there - naming things is hard - and finding a .com for whatever name you come up with makes it that much harder.
I don't think their business customers are finding them with SEO - likely direct sales over Instagram and email. Their consumer customers are getting sold to directly by the Influencers so again the SEO and naming is not all that important.
My general experience is that feedback from people who aren't in the target market has negative value. When entrepreneur friends ask me for hot takes, I used to just tell them whatever came to mind. Now, though, I refuse to that unless a) I have a lot of experience on the topic, or b) I'm in the target market.
I think that's especially true with branding and other style-related choices. A brand needs to work well for the people it's aimed at. But it's fine if it doesn't work for other people. Indeed, that's often better. E.g., nobody should ask me my opinion on branding youth fashion. If they make their product more appealing to me, it will almost certainly be less appealing to their actual customers.
I'm sure the majority of people on "Hacker News" wouldn't fit into the archetype of an "influencer" using this platform as a publisher. If you frame the question more fairly: Would I be on the consumption end of this platform as a customer? Perhaps, but I don't know about quality control.
With Goldbelly, I can trust that the restaurants have been vetted by public health agencies. Likes and follower counts don't entice me to ingest some muffins from some random Instagram "influencer".
Why do you think you aren't allowed to ship product from your home under the California cottage law?
It's really important for startups to focus relentlessly on the people who make the early purchasing decisions. If those people don't get on board, no other potential audiences matter.
Few suggestions, yes there will be strong initial push from influencer. Then need help in continuing to drive traffic after the initial boost.
I think most of the media narrative is too negative on influencers with few bad apples. 90% + of them have dedicated audience, close relationships, honest and overall pretty smart.
One example publisher is Kelly in the City. I know she drives sales from past projects I've done with her. https://www.instagram.com/kellyinthecity/
Plus shes using her platform to share the importance of staying at home right now with stories of nurses/DRs in the hospitals right now.
Are you using Shopify for the ecommerce sales? The URL patterns are similar if not the same so just wondering!
At this point not sure why you'd need to develop your own ecommerce platform. Most of the value seems to be in the relationship and partnerships, not the tech.
Congrats on the launch!
On the homepage, the white text over the large images is very difficult to read. Might want to change the text color, outline, or grab different images?
What I'm seeing: https://imgur.com/apb1lVS https://imgur.com/8CpJnCo
Seems hard to scale, which isn't necessarily a problem, but I'm wondering:
1) How are you accessing audience data? Is this by scraping their insta or youtube or something or are you directly accessing accounts? Given an account is literally an influencer's livelihood, I can imagine that would be especially risky for them?
2) How do you relate audience products to data? Are you saying, for example, that if an audience is 50% metropolitan females aged 18-24 then it is likely they would purchase beauty products? Or do you go more in depth?
3) And then as a result...how do you intend to scale that? Machine learning?
Anyway...love it!
1) Influencers give us access to thei accounts directly so we can look at their audience data and create a product portfolio that works best for them! So far they have not had any concerns in giving us permissions to access that data.
2) We use both audience data (income level, age, etc) + market research (for pricing as an eg.) + previous product launches (that we did for other influencers in the cake category as an eg.) in a category to create an ideal product portfolio for a given influencer.
3) Yes, we are doing a lot of this manually at the moment - trying to understand the winning sauce. But AI/Machine Learning to scale this in the future!
Recently I've been playing around making leather goods, so that took me into rabbit hole of seeing who is selling their stuff and what is working. Ultimately, I came to the conclusions that in any commodity physical product market, brand is the only "network effect" that you can build some kind of a differentiation around.
I think "celebrities" will be looking at extending their financial opportunities of their fame (as it doesn't last forever) beyond the existing endorsement model (that are sometimes just transactional) so having your own line of product and gathering ongoing additional revenues from it will appeal to many of them. It's possible the product gathers enough distribution that the product line itself can help the longevity of the "influencer".
Ultimately, like Etsy, it might become a saturated market. We might be far from that today, but the interesting question is, what happens when every celebrity is selling their own soap, glasses, bags (assuming a parity in observable quality among these products), etc.
Does it then just come down to continual relationship building between the influencer and the buyers and that is what will continue fueling the market differentiation.
What's the hardest thing to scale in this?