Article

Crowdsourced shopping site sends users on a Hunt

The Hunt boasts 3 million users, who work to help other users find specific products online for purchase.

February 20, 2015 by James Bickers — Editor, Networld Alliance

We've all had that moment when we see an outfit or a particular piece of clothing that we simply must have … but have no idea where to find it. (Yours truly is still looking for Number Six's sportcoat in my size.) Enter The Hunt, launched in 2013 with venture capital funding from the likes of Tyra Banks and Ashton Kutcher, among many others.

The site turns shopping for specific products into a game: Start a "hunt" by posting a picture of what you're looking for, either on the website or via the app, and the community of 3 million members springs into action to help locate the closest match for purchase. More than 50 million hunts have taken place since the site's launch.

We chatted with founder and CEO Tim Weingarten about the ideas behind the site, and why it is proving so popular.

Retail Customer Experience: Tell me about your background, before starting The Hunt. What's your history with retail?

Tim Weingarten: Personally, I’ve always loved shopping. I used to pore over magazines and my briefcase was full of torn out magazine pages that I would take to shops to try to find similar products to achieve similar looks. Professionally, I was in venture capital and then ran a portfolio company in the telecom space. I knew that I wanted to start my own company that combined my expertise in tech with one of my passions — shopping.

RCE: Where did the idea for The Hunt come from, and tell me the story about making it a reality.

TW:I’ve always loved shopping — from the days of tearing out photos of shoes, shirts and glasses and taking them to the store in search of similar to more recently exploring Tumblr, Instagram and Pinterest. But the frustration of “where can I get that” was a recurring theme throughout. Hence, the idea for The Hunt was born. My co-founder and I got to work on building an experience that was focused on people — the community — who would help each other to source the best products. We started building on the web and quickly realized that this was an addictive experience that needed to be mobile-centric. We’ve gotten to where we are today by thinking about each product flow from a mobile-first perspective.

RCE: Why do you think people love it so much — is it more about the product, or more about the game? What does that tell you about your audience?

TW:Shopping is not just about buying something. It’s an experience. It’s about expressing yourself, discovering, exploring, helping and being a part of the creativity involved in trend evolutions. The Hunt encourages this creativity and evolution by fostering community engagement and connecting peers to provide product recommendations that are generated by real-life, like-minded people; not machines or algorithms that return hundreds or thousands of irrelevant results. The whole process allows shoppers to ask a question, give an answer or just come in to browse the latest trends, which they love.

RCE: What's your long view for the future of the company? What's next?

TW: Mobile commerce is growing significantly, and The Hunt is well positioned to directly drive much of this traffic — creating intent to purchase among its more than 3 million primarily female millennial shoppers and channeling them to online and mobile commerce sites globally at a rate similar to search.

A key to this is the growth of importance to consumers for personalization. Unlike the overwhelming and generic results found when searching for items across search engines and e-commerce sites, The Hunt’s community of shoppers find a few specific products that help shoppers buy exactly what they want based on their inspiration and unique needs like size, budget, tastes, etc. In the future, we look forward to continuing to cater The Hunt to meet the personal needs of all of our users.

Consequently, for retailers, this will also result in an ever-more-targeted group of shoppers by capturing intent and funneling shoppers through to retailers at a rate seen only across search. By empowering the community with access to the visual web and thousands of e-commerce sites, The Hunt bridges the gap between inspiration, intent to buy and fulfilling the purchase.

RCE: The whole crowdsourcing thing has taken a bit of a black eye thanks to Uber and some other negativity in the news. What's your take on that?

TW: Crowdsourcing is a powerful tool for the online shopping community. People don’t want a computer telling them what to wear or buy. For example, try typing in “little black dress” into a search engine and you get 158 million results. Good luck with that!

By developing a passionate group of like-minded people, we have created a place for people to shop in whole new way by finding the exact items that are right for them. 

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