I want a place to talk about the products I love in a more persistent fashion than a tweet – my favorite notebook, best coffee, preferred blanket and so on.
I want this place to be the equivalent of Instagram/Medium for Products. What does that mean? Templated to make my creation look beautiful.
Mixture of structured information (such as product SKU, etc where appropriate) and free text. I can upload my own photos or select from ones provided by the item’s creator/manufacturer (or submitted by other users a la Unsplash). I want light grouping mechanisms for my posts, maybe similar to Pinterest Boards. They’re all public with addressable URLs.
When I’m browsing other people’s posts, I want purchase information to be available when applicable – either from them or from a retailer – but I don’t want the commerce aspect to overwhelm the presentation format. This is about sharing our favorites with love and care, not just p2p transactions or earning affiliate link credit.
I want light grouping mechanisms for my posts, maybe similar to Pinterest Boards. They’re all public with addressable URLs. This would allow me to create a List of, say, favorite coffees, or ask a question like “What’s your favorite pillow?” and have other users use their own URLs from this platform in response.
There have been various attempts around this format but they’ve all failed to realize their full potential, or focused more on reviews and discussion forums than visual presentation.
People love to talk about the gear and goods they use. There’s so much product talk on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram that just gets lost into the feed ether, destined to simply become targeting criteria for ads engines.
If I had to guess where this product might emerge it’s either Instagram or Pinterest. But I also think there’s a vector for a startup to design something wonderful and independent. If you’re working on something like this – or something unlike this but you want to jam with me on why it’s even better – send me a note – hunter@homebrew.co.