Chums (YC W21) – Shop online with friends

Hey HN, we’re Noah and Dick. We founded Chums (https://www.chums.co) to help you recommend products to your friends and have more fun shopping online. A lot of people ask their friends for advice when they're shopping. We think this can be more fun and we think your friends can help you find the right product, especially during COVID when we're stuck at home.

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 [email protected] or [email protected] 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] https://onezero.medium.com/the-problem-with-relying-on-wirec...