How often are you out somewhere, spot something you like, make a mental note or whip out your phone and take a picture, but then when you get back to it, you can’t remember the details.
“Amazingly, you can’t name pictures with your camera phone, so unfortunately, you take hundreds of pictures of things you see but can’t remember what they are days or even hours later,” said Trace Cohen, cofounder of SPOT, a new mobile product curation platform that makes sure that every product can be found, shared and discovered. “I’ve been attending CES for seven years now and have thousands of pictures of products – and I can’t remember what 99% of them are.”
The SPOT app curates products from the top sites around the world, creating a single destination to find the coolest, geekiest and very latest and greatest products in a single feed. With its intuitive swiping gestures, users can easily add products into three lists (Ehhh, Cool and Want) based on their interests. And it’s available on both for iOS and Android.
SPOT is also building a mobile social network with a community of active Spotters whom you can follow. After all, they’re the ones who’ll be taking pictures of all the cool products they see in their everyday lives. So if you’re trying to buy friends gifts for their birthdays or the holidays, just go to their SPOT lists, see what they want, and buy it!
That would make your holiday shopping a lot easier, what, eh?
SPOT currently is curating the best products from Cool hunting, Dude I Want That, Etsy, Fancy, Jackthreads, This Is Why I’m Broke, Touch of Modern, and Uncrate. With more to come.
The SPOT app is free to download in the Apple App Store and Google Play with no in-app purchases or affiliate sales, to make sure the user experience is seamless and uninterrupted.
Tell us about the product.
SPOT is a new tinder like app for cool, geeky products that just launched for iOS and Android at the same time (!) using the cutting-edge Famo.us framework. SPOT is the best way to discover the newest and coolest products by easily swiping through product cards that we curate and that your friends spot to let everyone know how you feel about each one (Ehhh, Cool, Want)
How is it different?
There is no other app currently that pulls from all of these sites into a single feed that focuses on techie, geeky products. Most shopping apps are for women, admittedly because they do shop more than us, so I wanted to build an app that I could use to find things I would be interested in buying.
What market are you attacking and how big is it?
We’re going after the techie, geeky product market that is over $50B, especially during the holiday times when people are looking for gifts to buy for family and friends.
What’s the coolest thing you’ve spotted, so far?
I love bacon, so it would have to be the bacon scarf!
What is the business model?
Currently we are not generating revenue but we would like to do affiliate sales, featured products and trending feeds as we grow our community of spotters
What are the milestones that you plan to achieve within six months?
We hope to have a million products swipes to show traction that there is a need for our app, to ensure people can discover amazing products to buy and drive visibility to the products in the app.
If you could be put in touch with one investor in the New York community who would it be and why?
I would want to meet with Ben Lerer of Lerer Hippeau Ventures as he built Thrillist and Jackthreads, two amazing companies that I use. He also has an expertise is products, ecommerce and has built an amazing community, which will be what makes SPOT an app people want to use.
Why did you launch in New York?
Born and raised here, build my other companies here, friends and family – I can’t get enough of NYC. There are so many amazing companies, products and ideas come out of here, we wanted to tackle the biggest market first and expand from there.
What’s the coolest bar you’ve spotted in NYC lately?
I was actually at Maysville last night because I love Whiskey and they have a huge selection, so I randomly tried a few delicious ones. The food was amazing as well.
