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Apply HN: Better than Google

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Apply HN: Better than Google

#1

Post by jurajpal »

Problem: Today, people spend hours searching for sustainable products and services. They end up browsing through apps, blogs and online reviews. Existing services such as Yelp and Google Maps offer little guidance and users end up with information overload.

We started Sure to make this process easier. Interviewing our target users validated our key assumption: finding sustainable options should be as easy as finding the closest McDonalds. The market in Europe alone is 56.8M, and with more than 75% willing to pay more for sustainable goods, the need we’re meeting is both prominent and growing.

Solution: Sure is a Facebook Messenger chatbot for finding and buying sustainable products and services. Powered by human assisted AI and using data capture and machine learning, Sure provides personalised recommendations for sustainable consumption curated from a crowdsourced database.

Why YCF: In March, our MVP had a monthly growth rate of 64% and with F8 earlier this week, we’ve tripled our number of active users and received over 1,500 messages just in 1 day. As The Guardian put it, Sure is one of the earliest chatbots on Messenger that actually manages to achieve the conversational UI but we need to expand to other cities and add product lines fast enough to keep up with the demand.

We would love to hear your feedback here and will be happy to answer any questions. Before that, go ahead and try Sure at m.me/besure.io

http://besure.io/

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/13/facebook-...

Re: Apply HN: Better than Google

#3

Post by jurajpal »

tim333 wrote: post #2

Quite a nice concept though you'll need a larger database of places

That's a valid point Tim! At the moment, we're only live in Copenhagen and San Francisco where we have crowdsourced the database mostly from local bloggers. We need to grow the database faster but want to avoid just copying stuff from Yelp as the reviews are too abstract in our opinion and we rather want to curate quality content. Do you have any thoughts here?

Re: Apply HN: Better than Google

#4

Post by uptownfunk »

How about building out a predictive model to assist you in the sourcing of sustainable products and services. You already have humans curating the content, why not use that as your training set and let that inform your search.

Re: Apply HN: Better than Google

#6

Post by krumhausen »

rpedela wrote: post #5

How do you make money?

Very good question. We are not monetising right now, but want to explore two revenue streams:

1. Commission on transactions made in chat. We might expand this by helping users find sustainable products and services.

2. Freemium model where larger businesses and franchises pay for sponsored content and user feedback

Re: Apply HN: Better than Google

#7

Post by ryporter »

Why is a chatbot the best medium for your service? When I'm doing product comparison, I like to browse through products with pictures and to see tables comparing different products along different dimensions. I understand that you are trying to prevent information overload, but a curated website can provide this. Reducing it down to a chatbot strikes me as information underload.

Re: Apply HN: Better than Google

#8

Post by anthonymonori »

How do you plan to maintain the data in Sure? You mentioned that you crowd-sourced the current data in SF and Copenhagen from local bloggers, but did you had somebody double check these places? What happens if one of these places do get shut down or closed? Having a chatbot on Messenger means that people are placing trust on you - and will be hard to gain back once it's lost or given a bad choice of place. Will people be able to flag places as closed within the conversation? What about preferences? E.g. If I don't want to be recommended the same place again next time I talk to Sure?

All this aside, great job guys! Try to surf the ride and do not fall down!

Re: Apply HN: Better than Google

#9

Post by jurajpal »

ryporter wrote: post #7

Why is a chatbot the best medium for your service? When I'm doing product comparison, I like to browse through products with pictures and to see tables comparing different products along different dimensions. I understand that you are trying to prevent information overload, but a curated website can provide this. Reducing it down to a chatbot strikes me as information underload.

Thanks for your feedback! We chose chatbot as the medium only after carefully talking to our target audience and testing some prototypes with them last summer. They loved it because Sure gave them 2-3 curated recommendations, rather than an endless list of Google search results. At the same time, you can always ask for more options and start comparing them.

We believe that even navigating between product comparison tables can be simplified with a simple conversation. Sure aims to be so personal that you can ask the bot to compare different options for you along the dimensions that matter to you.

And when it comes to product and even restaurant recommendations, I completely agree with you that images matter and we're really excited about what the new chatbot UI on Facebook Messenger allows us to do and this is just the beginning.

Re: Apply HN: Better than Google

#10

Post by tim333 »

jurajpal wrote: post #3
tim333 wrote: post #2

Quite a nice concept though you'll need a larger database of places

That's a valid point Tim! At the moment, we're only live in Copenhagen and San Francisco where we have crowdsourced the database mostly from local bloggers. We need to grow the database faster but want to avoid just copying stuff from Yelp as the reviews are too abstract in our opinion and we rather want to curate quality content. Do you have any thoughts here?

I'm not sure. I made an app for late drinking and got the data from Google and Foursquare APIs. But I don't think they'd have sustainability in the database.

If you search Tripadvisor with sustainable as a search term it gives quite good data and then you could glance at it manually? eg for NY cafes:

https://www.tripadvisor.com.ph/Search?q=sustainable&geo=6076...

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