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Really interesting concept! One of those "how has this not been done before?!" idea!

Seems hard to scale, which isn't necessarily a problem, but I'm wondering:

1) How are you accessing audience data? Is this by scraping their insta or youtube or something or are you directly accessing accounts? Given an account is literally an influencer's livelihood, I can imagine that would be especially risky for them?

2) How do you relate audience products to data? Are you saying, for example, that if an audience is 50% metropolitan females aged 18-24 then it is likely they would purchase beauty products? Or do you go more in depth?

3) And then as a result...how do you intend to scale that? Machine learning?

Anyway...love it!

Hi Nilef - thanks and great questions!

1) Influencers give us access to thei accounts directly so we can look at their audience data and create a product portfolio that works best for them! So far they have not had any concerns in giving us permissions to access that data.

2) We use both audience data (income level, age, etc) + market research (for pricing as an eg.) + previous product launches (that we did for other influencers in the cake category as an eg.) in a category to create an ideal product portfolio for a given influencer.

3) Yes, we are doing a lot of this manually at the moment - trying to understand the winning sauce. But AI/Machine Learning to scale this in the future!

I have helped Thrive Market, Shopbop and Skillshare with managing outreach with influencers and programs, would love to chat. rob@glohbal.com

Few suggestions, yes there will be strong initial push from influencer. Then need help in continuing to drive traffic after the initial boost.

I think most of the media narrative is too negative on influencers with few bad apples. 90% + of them have dedicated audience, close relationships, honest and overall pretty smart.

One example publisher is Kelly in the City. I know she drives sales from past projects I've done with her. https://www.instagram.com/kellyinthecity/

Plus shes using her platform to share the importance of staying at home right now with stories of nurses/DRs in the hospitals right now.

Thanks for the contact, will reach out. We would love to learn more about your experience. Kelly in the City is a great example.

Completely agree with you! With their own brand of products,the content can be more organic rather than "salesy" which makes it easier for them to showcase these products on a much more frequent basis as compared to #ads. So they can continue to drive traffic to their store on an ongoing basis more easily. Also, every new product offering they add to their stores gives them a new reason to share content and send traffic.

Congrats on the launch. Are you shipping through a third party, does that add cost? And how long does that take? I see later in the flow it says 2-5 day free shipping, but might be good to reassure people on the landing page.

Small thing but with white text on light background sometimes it's a bit washed out, there's a couple spots on the site.

Little thing, continue to shipping is shown when entering shipping address, kind of confusing. Maybe just "Next"?

Thanks for the feedback on the website - we are working on it right now! Yes - we ship through a 3PL (3rd party logistics company) and we build that cost into our pricing. This actually helps us save money since we don't have to invest into our our facilities. The 3PL ships every order that comes in within 12 hours. Right now shipping is 2-5 business days as we only use 1 warehouse. As we leverage multiple warehouses from the the 3PL across the country, our shipping time will come down to 2 days.

> We developed our own e-commerce platform with all the bells and whistles, set up operations with co-packers and food distributors, and even started working with a fulfillment partner to manage delivery logistics.

Are you using Shopify for the ecommerce sales? The URL patterns are similar if not the same so just wondering!

At this point not sure why you'd need to develop your own ecommerce platform. Most of the value seems to be in the relationship and partnerships, not the tech.

Congrats on the launch!

Exactly, we leverage Shopify which helps us spin up new stores very quickly. As we further build out the platform and learn more we can always look into a custom build but as you said, our priority is launching many successful stores in a short amount of time.

>By 'influencers' we mean creators who have loyal and engaged audiences on social media that they have grown through their own content. They are usually experts in a particular skill, like cookie decorating, vegan baking, or fitness and nutrition

I feel like "influencer" is too broad of a term for this. From what I know about influencers, a lot of them are just a pretty face that brands can slap their name onto.

Influencers is a "broad" term. Right now we work with influencers who are culinary experts and have built a brand using original content in their own field of expertise. Additionally, they represent a gateway to an audience of 50K to several millions, who are interested in their type of content. Their audience has its own characteristics of age, income level, interests and preferences etc. that is relevant for us to understand, as we launch products catered just to that audience

For the type of influencer you are referring to I prefer to use the words "product endorser". Because that's really what it boils down to. Of course influencers are not a fan of that term.

What about "sentient billboard"?

Agreed. This seems pretty well targeted to people who are more "indie solo creators".

From what I know about influencers, a lot of them are just a pretty face that brands can slap their name onto.

I think this is the most common understanding of the term, as well.

To me "influencer" is no different than the "brand representatives" that used to be known as "booth babes" that are bussed in to conventions and trade shows to draw eyes while they stand next to products.

> I think this is the most common understanding of the term, as well.

I'd be careful assuming that. My understanding is much closer to what the main post describes, as is most of the college students I know. It's definitely just a broad term for people with an online presence, typically through Instagram, who use their online popularity for advertising on behalf of companies.

Influencers often have a bit more depth than just "booth babes", like you described. Their popularity comes from a high level of expertise in something or a great online persona.

Consider your mum having a baking Instagram. She blows up in popularity, and then starts advertising, and potentially taking more care to cultivate her audience. She is definitely an influencer, but far from what you've described.

Some constructive criticism:

On the homepage, the white text over the large images is very difficult to read. Might want to change the text color, outline, or grab different images?

What I'm seeing: https://imgur.com/apb1lVS https://imgur.com/8CpJnCo

This, a slight shadow on the text can help a lot!

hi, this sounds quite interesting. My sister is in tech and is very creative when it comes to cooking at home. She sends food photos to a close group of friends on watsapp as she's not really on social media (not even fb). She has a lot of food ideas. What would you suggest to someone like her if she wanted to launch her own food product but doesn't have a ready-made audience?

While we are already seeing a lot of mixed carts indicating that a two-sided effect is achievable, our current model assumes that creators will funnel in the majority of traffic to their own stores. The creators we work with have already build a direct channel with a fairly large and unique set of people (anywhere from 50K-millions). Size and other parameters of their audience is what determines whether this is a suitable fit for them. Since we rely on data to make that decision, a strong social media presence is necessary at the moment.

Great concept. how many products do you guys ship every month?

What's the hardest thing to scale in this?

What a fantastic idea! Much needed. Tired of vanilla products from big brands. Looking forward to more custom products from influencers I follow. Wonder how big the opportunity is and role of technology in scaling. Food must be a massive category in of itself

Why? To buy an off-the-shelf personality?

So you're Shopify with more handholding? What's to stop them from moving to Shopify directly and remove you as the middleman after they've proven traction?

Reminds me of https://www.stackcommerce.com/ which seems to do something similar for publishers.

That's a great parallel. The one key difference though is that influencers products are their "own" products vs. promoting a variation of an existing product

That was also my first impression. Not to devaluate the value of any type of handholding. I think the hardest part in this process is becoming an "influencer".

Recently I've been playing around making leather goods, so that took me into rabbit hole of seeing who is selling their stuff and what is working. Ultimately, I came to the conclusions that in any commodity physical product market, brand is the only "network effect" that you can build some kind of a differentiation around.

I think "celebrities" will be looking at extending their financial opportunities of their fame (as it doesn't last forever) beyond the existing endorsement model (that are sometimes just transactional) so having your own line of product and gathering ongoing additional revenues from it will appeal to many of them. It's possible the product gathers enough distribution that the product line itself can help the longevity of the "influencer".

Ultimately, like Etsy, it might become a saturated market. We might be far from that today, but the interesting question is, what happens when every celebrity is selling their own soap, glasses, bags (assuming a parity in observable quality among these products), etc.

Does it then just come down to continual relationship building between the influencer and the buyers and that is what will continue fueling the market differentiation.

As a potential customer: nothing but people don't know what they want to buy, so a site that aggregates and rates new offerings is really useful.

How is this different than Etsy? Influencers already sell their goods on it and the marketplace helps with discovery.

Etsy and Shopify are great e-commerce platforms, but creators still would have to do all the work of understanding what products will work with their audience and that is data that we will be able to provide based on our current and future portfolios on our marketplace. We also solve the rest of the equation for them, translating their culinary content into commercial products through in-house R&D, packaging design and we physically manufacture all products and manage delivery and customer service as well. So for them it is as simple as signing a contract with us and then earning revenue within a few weeks.

Why are you using the `belly` suffix? Goldbelly has existed for > 10 years.

Most of what they ship is food... guessing belly is just a stomach/food reference. I don't see any confusion between the two companies. There are plenty of other companies that use belly. Potbelly and Jelly Belly come to mind

Jelly Belly has been around for YEARS and was named after Lead Belly (a musician). I've never heard of Potbelly, but that's a pre-existing noun (potbelly pig). If anything, they should have chosen something more unique given the abundance of "-belly" names.

Plus -- it doesn't allude to anything having to do with "influencers".

Global would allude to influencers and belly to food. So food influencers.

I'm not saying there isn't a better name out there - naming things is hard - and finding a .com for whatever name you come up with makes it that much harder.

I don't think their business customers are finding them with SEO - likely direct sales over Instagram and email. Their consumer customers are getting sold to directly by the Influencers so again the SEO and naming is not all that important.

I'm providing free feedback from a current non-customer. They can use what they want with it.

To help with the understanding around the name, as we mentioned above, we actually launched Global Belly with a different concept. It was our own food brand, direct to consumer food products to help you make global cuisines at home. We pivoted over the last 6-8 months into this current model and we felt that the name still worked but it could be something to explore in the future.

Thanks for the extra info! Curious how you are reaching the influencers - Instagram DMs and emails must be a black hole for accounts that size and I am sure a lot of them have a team actually managing inboxes for them.

Emails were our preferred channel in the beginning, and that's what we still use if we want to reach out to someone. However, now having launched close to 20 inlfuencers, our inbox is flooded with inbound requests with influencers reaching out to us to understand how they can work with us and what will it require from them to have them join the GB platform. So we don't do much outreach anymore.

Are you a likely customer? That is, are you a current influencer looking for a platform to sell things?

My general experience is that feedback from people who aren't in the target market has negative value. When entrepreneur friends ask me for hot takes, I used to just tell them whatever came to mind. Now, though, I refuse to that unless a) I have a lot of experience on the topic, or b) I'm in the target market.

I think that's especially true with branding and other style-related choices. A brand needs to work well for the people it's aimed at. But it's fine if it doesn't work for other people. Indeed, that's often better. E.g., nobody should ask me my opinion on branding youth fashion. If they make their product more appealing to me, it will almost certainly be less appealing to their actual customers.

> Are you a likely customer? That is, are you a current influencer looking for a platform to sell things?

I'm sure the majority of people on "Hacker News" wouldn't fit into the archetype of an "influencer" using this platform as a publisher. If you frame the question more fairly: Would I be on the consumption end of this platform as a customer? Perhaps, but I don't know about quality control.

With Goldbelly, I can trust that the restaurants have been vetted by public health agencies. Likes and follower counts don't entice me to ingest some muffins from some random Instagram "influencer".

Why do you think you aren't allowed to ship product from your home under the California cottage law?

No, I asked the question I asked for a reason. The people choosing this are the influencers, so it's their reaction to the brand that matters the most. For people buying influencer stuff, their reaction is at best secondary, and may be almost irrelevant if they only ever see it on a packing receipt or a credit card statement.

It's really important for startups to focus relentlessly on the people who make the early purchasing decisions. If those people don't get on board, no other potential audiences matter.

Launch HN: Global Belly (YC W20) – Helping influencers launch their own products