Your landing page is absolutely beautiful - simple to digest, no marketing fluff, and intuitive onboarding flow. However, the email to download the app entered my "promotions" category on Gmail (usually this happens for domains that were registered recently). Also the link in the email for "go to chums" was broken.

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.

Thank you! We're fixing the email link now.

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!

This is the closest to "cheems" or the spanish variant "chems" (my name on wormate.io where i've risen to the top ten a few times on Android) I've seen for the name of a YC startup.

May you go to the moon, and unlike poor Cheems, return home safely.

https://youtu.be/YWOZtGMer48

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?

Thanks for the kind words! Our mobile app is built with React Native, website with React, and backend with Node/GraphQL. This is the first time I’ve used GraphQL, and it’s been a dream come true.

Just curious, why GraphQL? I say this as someone who runs a very large Federated Apollo GraphQL architecture at work.

Seems like overkill if you have just one client (your app).

Primarily it was about having a strongly typed and self-documenting API layer. I've tried writing Swagger/OpenAPI specs manually, using frameworks like TSOA or routing-controllers, but never found a solution I liked.

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.

Great Job Noah and Dick!

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.

Thank you so much. The way we've been solving the problem so far is listening to what users want and making changes they ask for (if those changes are in the direction we want it going). I think there is no easy way to do this - it's just talking to tons of users and having a clear internal vision of where we are going with it. We see a big opportunity and have a vision of what it looks like so we're just trying to optimize for that and balance feedback.

My biggest issue with Amazon has been unverified and untrustworthy 3rd party listings, sometimes not meeting minimum safety standards, which Amazon has taken a "lol not our problem" approach to -- e.g. baby food [0] and car seats [1]. (There was an HN thread about it [2].)

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...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17009675

The products that are discoverable through Chums are either directly recommended from friends, or are part of our product catalog. For products that can be found at various merchants, we give users a choice of where they can make that purchase. Users can write reviews of products that call out untrustworthy third-party sellers.

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.

Might be late to the party replying, but I really like the concept. Just tried it out.

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!

How worried are you about “making it” as a “social media” sort of app? I always wonder how startups actually, y’know, get started with that initial user base. Any unique plan/ideas that you can publicly share?

Great website btw!

We think about that a lot. We don’t want it to feel too social media-y. When I launched the first product I just posted in reddit/FB/everywhere until there were a few hundred users. Then I got to know all of them, and then got to know what they wanted from Chums. Same gameplan here! We also expect the tipping model to be a little viral. If you sign up, you’ll see that we give you money to give to your friends right away. The ‘pay it forward’ mechanism has the potential to make this grow quickly, but it might take a few iterations to actually work.

Interesting. I've definitely felt that the SEO-optimized review sites (Wirecutter and Strategist) tend to be lacking in their quality of suggestions.

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...

I have a lot of love for Wirecutter, but I definitely agree with you. Their suggestions are often focused on too broad an audience to be relevant to me.

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.

I'm not lawyer and this isn't legal advice, but...

you may not want to mention the benefits your startup is getting from your previous employment. The company may feel that the relationships were theirs, not yours.

First time seeing an app website where the call to action is not the stores' buttons. I wonder if reserving the name is performing better than a download link.

Damn, I had this idea as well, I had a Trello board with a load of ideas in around this. If the authors want some ideas happy to share with them...

Hey Andy, we'd love to chat. I just sent you an email.

So looking at the screen shots on the site, i see 1.3k cred, 3.4k cred etc list next to profiles...

But I have no idea what that means. What is cred in this context?

Cred (short for credibility) is a feature we’re building like HN/Reddit karma. Users earn cred when a recommendation they make is followed through on or upvoted. We want users in Chums to have credibility when they make recommendations, because the problem we’re trying to solve is to help people really find the right product and make decisions based on ‘credible’ and thoughtful advice.

Hope this makes sense!

Cool. It would be nice to have a feature which can facilitate the logistics of wholesale bulk purchases (example, products from Costco).

We love the idea of group buying as we get a lot of product inspiration from Pinduoduo. We’ve spent a lot of timing thinking how to leverage the fun of group buying without the traditional discount incentive. It’s hard to do! The solution we launched with is ‘buckets’ (and we made an HN group here: https://chums.link/rBQ6). Groups can discuss products to buy together and make decisions together.

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.

Sign up flow on the homepage is pretty awesome!

Are you bringing the PinDuoDuo experience to the US?

haha my first thought when seeing this is "this is pinduoduo but without the team buy button"

Was thinking the same thing!

Yes! Kind-of! We want to take what's working from PDD and bring it to the US in a way that is more dialogue and discovery focused. We get a lot of our inspiration and conviction from them :)

Fun fact: in Quebec French, chum means boyfriend and blonde means girlfriend, regardless of the actual hair colour.

Congrats on the launch, Dick and Noah!

congrats on the launch! this is a really neat implementation and i'm a big fan of honey as well. really slick.

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.

Love the problem you guys are solving. Can't really trust Amazon reviews much.

Thank you so much. We feel the same way.

Do you expect influencers or curators with a large following on here? A lot of the stuff I buy just comes from what’s recommended on a Reddit wiki page. It would be nice to see some kind of FAQ or buying guide for different interests for when I don’t want to do much research. Somewhere to look for a curated list of entry level to high end leaf blowers, for example.

We are focused on peer-to-peer recommendations over influencers. It's the not the best platform for them since they can't directly earn money for the recommendations. I see a possibility of influencers using Chums and curating their favorite stuff on their profile but I don't see it being an influencer driven platform.

No problem. I like the groups idea that was mentioned.

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.

Hey, we've got a formal post up for our design opening here: https://www.workatastartup.com/companies/22566

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.

Very cool. Thanks for replying!