Launch HN: Chums (YC W21) – Shop online with friends
Noah launched the first version of Chums in late 2019. Originally, the app was a platform for users to find and share referral codes. Users could create a profile page and add their favorite brands to it. Soon they started adding products and reviews to the brands on their profile, and it became clear that the social shopping opportunity had much more potential than sharing referral codes.
Noah started digging into the world of ecommerce, social shopping, and affiliate marketing, and a mutual friend introduced him to me (Dick) as a potential advisor. As the fourth employee at Honey, I’ve spent an unreasonable amount of my life thinking about ecommerce. Honey built a product beloved by users, but struggled for a long time to convince investors and partners of the business’s potential. But perception of the browser extension and affiliate business models has shifted a lot in recent years due to the success of companies like Honey.
2020 saw a 50% rise in ecommerce, and while we expect brick and mortar shopping to have a resurgence as the world reopens, online shopping will probably continue to grow. It’s clear, though, that shopping online isn’t nearly as fun as shopping in person with your friends. In addition to being a lonely experience. 90% of millennials make purchase decisions based on recommendations from their friends, but there aren’t any good tools/platforms for those conversations right now. Also, shopping online has risks. You can’t trust reviews on Amazon [1][2]. “Impartial” review sites are often bankrolled (either directly or indirectly) by the brands they’re reviewing [3]. Top 10 gear/gadget lists are impersonal and missing context [4].
We aim to fix these problems. On Chums, you can review and save products to your profile, start group chats, ask questions about purchases you want to make, and recommend products to friends. Our focus is on shopping with your friends and friends-of-friends, with the hypothesis that input from your community will help you have more fun getting the right product. When you buy something, we split our affiliate commission (usually around 4%) with you. What makes Chums unique is that you can’t keep that cash--you have 24 hours to give it to the friends who helped you decide what to buy. We hope that this “pay it forward” mechanic will encourage more fun and genuine recommendations.
Looking forward, our plans include a social mobile app, an upcoming browser extension, and live shopping experiences. Shoot us an email at noah@chums.co or dick@chums.co if you want to start a conversation. You can also join the HN group chat on Chums by opening this link on your phone: https://chums.link/rBQ6. Last thing: we’re looking for a full time design lead and front end engineer. If you or someone you know might be a good fit, please let us know!
We’d love to hear what the HN community thinks! Noah and I will both be in the comments all day.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25581727
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25459434
[3] https://www.vox.com/2017/9/23/13153814/casper-sleepopolis-la...
[4] How do you monetize in a world where affiliate commissions, especially Amazon's are dropping? [1] [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/14/amazon-slashes-commission-ra... Re: monetization, for the short term, we’ve got relationships built through my time at Honey that give us confidence we’ll be able to get above-average affiliate commissions. The costs to run this business are low, and we expect per-user purchase volume to be significantly higher than your average affiliate-driven review site. That said, our end goal is to bypass affiliate altogether and become a marketplace like Amazon, only with more reliable/trustworthy content, and more fun. From there, the monetization possibilities are pretty much endless. What steps if any will Chums take to combat this? [0] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/20/amazon-is-shipping-expired-b... [1] https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/20/tech/amazon-fake-kids-product... Our ultimate goal is to build a sense of community and chase the “good feeling” that you get when a friend takes your recommendation. We hope that the social aspect of the app will keep people accountable and being able to see content from friends or friends-of-friends will make the reviews more trustworthy. 3rd party listings could be shared, but since there's no incentive for users to plug products, the reviews will be more genuine. The community can call out products that they don’t like/trust. But I have no idea what that means. What is cred in this context? Hope this makes sense! Nevertheless, I found the app and signed in - as expected, really well designed and intuitive to use. It was nice to immediately see some recommendations for the hashtags I selected. A lot of my online purchases would fall under one or two hashtags (#climbing and #workfromhome). For climbing gear, my purchases are almost always based on recommendations from friends and great climbers online. If I was executing on this idea, I would seed one of these hashtags more thoroughly, and then go after that specific community - there are many climbing forums where people could really benefit from having something curated like this. I look forward to following your progress! Best of luck to you all. I appreciate the advice to seed a few hashtags more thoroughly. That's absolutely something we intend to start doing over the next few weeks. Again thank you for the kind words! May you go to the moon, and unlike poor Cheems, return home safely. Kidding aside, I installed it and am impressed. One of the smoothest onboarding experiences I've ever seen! And it seems positioned better than most recommendation services to make money. I also wonder how you coded it. Any chance it's a flutter app? Seems like overkill if you have just one client (your app). We're also working on an interactive web version of the app, as well as a chrome extension, so we'll have more clients soon. We’re open to all thoughts and suggestions though, and would love to hear more about your idea and the value you think you could get from it. This is brilliant and looks well executed. It is definitely well positioned to replace the wish list, review list, registry etc. How do you avoid the distraction that comes with solving a problem that can pull you in too many directions? This can easily become a Pinterest, Affiliate shops, Price monitoring, coupon code sharing etc. What are your plans to stay focused while listening to your users? I signed up and sent you guys an email too! PS: You may want to make referral links vs text (we pay per text message in many countries). A link will let up put it on our WhatsApp status etc. Your UI is really nice and I see that you’re hiring. Do you have a job posting up somewhere? I’m looking for new grad opportunities this year. Right now our focus is on a designer and an engineer with a few years of work experience each, but get in touch at dick@chums.co and we'll see if there's a fit. Great website btw! The nitpicks: First panel of Apple App Store listing; would it be better if it said "Help friend[s]" or "Help [a] friend" instead of just "Help friend"? The app appears to "Follow" you to certain users by default other than the "Chums" account; it's not immediately obvious that this is because of tags you've followed. Perhaps an extra tab called "Friends" or simply adding a message to the "is following chums" to say "and 9 tags" or something could help. The issues: There doesn't appear to be a list of supported online shops. Error messages in posts appear to be cryptic ("Oh chum! something went wrong" or something) and non-blocking; actions will silently fail. For example, if a URL is accidentally pasted into the post body, the error banner appears, then disappears with no more indication. Probably too long or illegal characters. If an AliExpress URL is inserted as the product, an error message is shown but the post is submitted as usual, without the product. I assume that's not supported, but it seemed like a popular store online. Searching for products appears to be only suited to items differentiated by only appearance as no price or other information is available or can be sorted by. Other than that, it looks nice and could be quite useful! quick note. may want to clean up the testimonials. all 3 are 5 stars, have 3.4k cred, and were posted 2 hrs ago. coincidence or not, comes across as a bit fake.39 comments
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