Kenja Needfinding

Kenja Needfinding

We believe a strong tailwind exists in better AI-enabled search for discovering and recommending new products. However, we're still debating between two GTM motions.

General Trends and Tailwinds

In sum, our market is all of online shopping, which has an $850 billion TAM (as of 2022) and is growing at a CAGR of 15%. There are over 265 million digital buyers worldwide, with over 26.5 million e-commerce websites.

In terms of our approach to tackling the market, we’re a big fan of “doing things that don’t scale” and tackling specific niches of products first before expanding into a more general shopping experience. Regarding the types of products, we believe that high-margin products that people buy online – not just search up and buy in-store – are the right products to focus on and perfect discovery for. We also plan to approach the market without ignoring other broader tailwinds, such as the rise of influence marketing and social shopping and the ability to integrate such media into our recommendations and overall user experience. We believe that through this focused approach, we can build a product that a certain community of folks love and easily use that traction to expand into other product areas.

B2C Angle

From a B2C angle, we would try to build out the "Perplexity for shopping." This would require a more generalist algorithm capable of scraping the web and would mean a business model similar to sites like Wirecutter, where we become affiliates. The idea here would be economies of scale—once you have enough traffic and enough conversions for people to buy your products, then the amount of money you make selling a product will be more than the cost of both customer acquisition and a single search query.

B2B Angle

The other angle is going directly to businesses, namely e-commerce businesses, who could hook up their database to our algorithm and get, in return, an API endpoint they could call when users search. This would largely keep our "find and filter" algorithm intact, while our business model would be on a per-API-call basis rather than based on users loving the product. The sale would help increase conversion and create a shopping experience that is more personalized.

Next Steps

The next steps are to take some time during finals week and clearly define our initial customer profile. Then we can all take time to reach out to at least 10-15 candidates, getting as many interviews as possible and then trying to sign on design partners to try out our platform.