Unearth

I left my job to build a social shopping marketplace to meet a growing demand from Gen-Z and Millennial consumers to (i) shop in more socially connected ways, and (ii) to buy more responsibly, i.e. from smaller, non-mainstream brands.

I experimented with Figma, Sharetribe, and Webflow, before finally settling on Bubble (a no code development platform) to build the MVP by myself. As the short Loom below shows, users can create accounts, browse and search products, add items to their public curation and private wishlists, and browse other users' curations (and follow their favourite users).

Over the course of the last couple of years in my job, I had built up a database of about 800 brands that I had identified as matching the criteria (quality design, luxury price point, between 10k and 300k followers on Instagram). I had stored various information about these brands in AirTable, so it was easy enough to run the URLs through a Shopify scraper a friend built for me to retrieve product images and data.

As I built this myself, the tech was relatively unsophisticated, so products needed manually updating for any new drops and  out-of-stocks. With a basic Excel sheet, I was able to automate the process as much as possible.

Ultimately I stopped working on this when I realised that long-term, to make the business model / economics work, the CAC would need to be almost zero - which is a very difficult thing to achieve in ecommerce. I do believe that social shopping is the future of lowering CAC - empowering consumers, influencers and celebrities to earn money from promoting the products they care about (= authentic) rather than affiliate marketing as it exists currently (= inauthentic).