1 blank cheque, 2 unusual co-founders: here’s how this Tinder-like shopping app came to be

With ecommerce companies like Tokopedia and Alibaba seeing big bucks in 2014, the competition is heating up rapidly, and correspondingly, many big brands are also trying to join the party by building their online presence. Unfortunately, their idea of competing online often ends up going something like this: setting up a Facebook page and Twitter account, buying some advertisements on Google, and creating their own mobile app.

On the receiving end, consumers end up having to contend with a mess of store apps on their smartphone screens. Chief marketer and co-founder of online store aggregator app Shoppr Sylvia Yin and her college friends realized this about a year ago when they found themselves “downloading many apps which took up screen space and memory.”

To make things worse, these apps were just plain bad. Yin compares the user experience as akin to having an insistent sales assistant follow you around in a store. “In the same way, we didn’t want an app which constantly tries to push us products to buy,” she says. “Most of the time, we just want to window browse.”

With this in mind, founder Kendrick Wong decided to pull a team together to create a “light and fun” shopping app catered to the masses.

The Tinder of shopping

Shoppr draws heavily from dating app Tinder’s swipe-to-discover methodology. Once you have logged in via Facebook, the app uses what Yin calls “a social clustering algorithm” to show you the products you might like based on your page likes and personal bio. Thereafter, it’s a simple matter of swiping left if you like it, and right if you don’t, a la Tinder.

“The more they swipe, the better our recommendations get as we attach attributes to each products and get a better sense of what they want at what time of the day,” Yin elaborates.

Users are also able to search and buy whatever they want directly via the app, which means no more time wasted being re-directed to the respective brands’ stores to checkout. Notifications whenever any discounts are released by brands also mean that users will never miss out on a good deal.

According to Yin, their target market consists of tech-savvy females aged 18 to 32. “They are fashion forward, trendy, and love browsing and purchasing clothes online,” she explains. “They are familiar with sourcing outfit inspiration from mobile apps such as Instagram. Mobile phones play a huge part in their life – from simple everyday tasks like deciding which restaurant to dine in to researching a product before purchasing.”

It started with a cheque

The app is simple enough, but how the story of how the Shoppr team came together is a little more complex. It all started when Wong helped a Malaysian angel investor to work on the back end architecture for her startup. At that point of time, he was still studying in the UK, and was considering staying there to pursue two businesses he had started up.

A month before his graduation, the angel investor gave Wong a surprise proposal in the form of a blank cheque, in return for a small equity stake in the latter’s future company. This would turn out to be Shoppr. The catch: Wong had to return to Malaysia and start his business there instead. According to a blog post, Wong was taken aback, to say the least:

Financially the offer was worse than what I would have got from my backer in the UK, but I could feel an insurmountable amount of trust behind it […] For the first time in 21 years I had met someone in Malaysia who dared to take a risk on someone she had never met before. That took a tremendous leap of faith and trust, and her insistence on Malaysia as the destination was overwhelmingly convincing. She believed in change, in mobile tech, and in startups – and that was all I needed. I agreed.

That was in May this year. Then came the task of pulling the founding team together. Having failed to convince an old friend to join him, Wong turned to a fellow college student, Yin, who had also recently graduated. Yin was the very epitome of a model student, nailing straight As in school and with dreams of landing a comfortable job as a management consultant in a large firm.

As such, he initially had his reservations on whether he would be able to convince her to, as he puts it, “throw hell to her plans and join me in building a high-risk start-up with a low chance of success.”

Little did Wong know that Yin was going through a personal crisis, and was feeling jaded with the system. She recounts:

Over the years, I became a product of societal standards and a creature of comfort. I believed As and a degree from a reputable university is the perfect way to landing a cushy job with a good salary […] Because I have been so comfortable operating in this mode of thoughts, I continued on despite knowing very well deep down something isn’t right. Am I happy? No. In fact, I was fearful – fearful of ‘failures’. I was shackled and I never really got to explore my creativity because I’m so afraid of falling off the conventional path of success. Worse of all, I have stopped listening to what I truly want to do and dwarfed my own potential.

So when Wong approached her, Yin was perfectly willing to listen. “I had plans to take a year out, deepen my practice in yoga, and basically read and learn anything and everything I wanted,” she says. “So when Kendrick came along asking me to build Shoppr together, he really did catch me at the right time.”

Two weeks later, Yin came on as co-founder number one at Shoppr. Not long after, Wong and Yin joined forces to convince one of the top designers in Malaysia, Nikolai Prettner – who Wong described as a “skinny hippie Austrian with purple and green-spiked hair” – to join them, and it was on.

The journey so far

The team has so far won a handful of startup competitions, such as AngelHack Kuala Lumpur and the MYDD AT&T Hackathon, and feedback has been “overwhelmingly positive,” according to Wong. “We’re still in a quiet beta launch, and looking to get our Android beta out in the middle of next month,” he adds.

Yin tells Tech in Asia that the team has ambitions to become the leader of mobile fashion discovery and shopping in Southeast Asia, and is currently raising a round of funding to achieve just that. Within just two weeks of opening the round, they already have a couple of offers from VCs in line, and Wong is hoping to seal the deal soon.

See: Meet Pozee, the anti-Tinder inspired by an ancient Hawaiian custom

This post 1 blank cheque, 2 unusual co-founders: here’s how this Tinder-like shopping app came to be appeared first on Tech in Asia.

1 blank cheque, 2 unusual co-founders: here’s how this Tinder-like shopping app came to be