VillageHunt

Community driven product reviews

In 2016 I quit my corporate job at Expedia to venture upon my startup dream. And even though this dream turned out to be the hardest time in my professional career, I have absolutely zero regrets. For building my own startup has taught me a great deal, more than I could ever have imagined. Despite the many challenges — probably, in fact, because of them — I have improved immensely as a designer. I wrote more about what I learned here and here.

VillageHunt is a place where new moms can share recommendations and useful information about products, and help each other with purchasing decisions.

  • Company of 2 co-founders, 3 employees. I was co-founder and Head of Design.

  • Our Private Beta grew 25% MoM in the first 6 months.

  • Of the 2K moms that were in our private beta, 54% rated, reviewed and recommended products (compared to 1% in online commerce).

  • This data enables personalized product search based on what worked or didn’t work for a mom, for her friends, and for other moms like her.

The Problem: How do you know which product to buy?

Shopping for a product that is new to you is extremely hard and time consuming. Any product search brings back tons of options and information. And for new moms it’s especially hard because they shop for so many products that are new to them in a short period of time, and it’s not like they have time!

Now, product reviews haven’t changed in more than 15 years. Back then smartphones were barely mass market, social media was a fraction of its current size, and ecommerce was not as crowded and overwhelming as it is today. Despite the changes over the years, we still read product reviews that are long, not personalized, and without knowing who wrote them or why.

The vision: Community driven product reviews

Research

Reaching out to people to talk about their pain points wasn’t easy for me in the beginning. I had to ask people for their time without being able to pay them, and without anyone knowing who we were. It took many tries to tell the right story. I learned how the same idea can be described in a bland, uninspiring way that leaves people wondering “what’s the point?” or be presented in a compelling way that gets people yelling “I need this, how can I help?”

MVP

To validate the magnitude of the problem, we launched a Minimum Viable Product. We invited moms from Seattle to join. The idea was very simple - rate products you’re familiar with to help others, see top products among moms in Seattle.

The goal of the MVP was to check two assumptions:

  1. That moms will come to this kind of content.

  2. That moms will share from their own experience.

We made 6 posts in mom groups on Facebook and within one week, we had 400 users, 69% of them rated products and 47% wrote reviews. By the end of that week a mom in Seattle could read 627 recommendations for baby products from other moms in Seattle!

Private Beta

After getting validation from the MVP we built a private beta for moms in Seattle, a place for them to share product recommendations, help each other and discover great products based on what worked or didn’t work for them, for their friends and for other moms like them.