
Apply HN: Better than Google - 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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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&#x2F;besure.io<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;besure.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;besure.io&#x2F;</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;2016&#x2F;apr&#x2F;13&#x2F;facebook-army-chatbots-messenger-news-sports" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;2016&#x2F;apr&#x2F;13&#x2F;facebook-...</a>
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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.

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krumhausen
Conversational commerce is still in its very early days so we're not sure
whether it would work or not. Conversational commerce does, however, have
certain benefits over the traditional web experience. Because of the ongoing
interaction with the user, the service will be able to offer extreme
personalisation, and shorten the purchase flow radically.

Today on the web, we have created a destination mentality, where brands
convince consumers to go to their site and stay there. Conversational or
social commerce is more like the real world were you walk past something, you
do something else and then perhaps you chat about it and even purchase it
later. The real world is more chaotic and conversational commerce havs the
potential to reflect that better than the traditional web.

That being said, we do not believe the future of conversational commerce is a
simple chatbot reflecting the old-school terminal. As you mentioned, pure text
is not great for discoverability and comparisons. We believe the future of
conversational commerce belongs to the hybrid interface, bringing that GUI and
command line paradigms together.

One final note is that as AI gets more and more sophisticated, the need for
browsing through the endless products on Pinterest might disappear, as the
service will be able to offer recommendations that fit exactly to the users’
needs. The service could present three products based on user needs, allowing
the user to make a more informed decision.

More reading: \- [http://www.psfk.com/2016/04/layer-messaging-app-
developers-u...](http://www.psfk.com/2016/04/layer-messaging-app-developers-
user-interfaces.html) \- [https://medium.com/chris-messina/2016-will-be-the-
year-of-co...](https://medium.com/chris-messina/2016-will-be-the-year-of-
conversational-commerce-1586e85e3991#.ptgjj17hd)

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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!

~~~
jurajpal
Hey Anthony, thanks for your nice words! We indeed make sure all the places
are double checked, we do this also by working with bigger organisations and
travel boards in some cities. We also keep an eye on all the places to make
sure they offer the experience we promise (being open for business is a good
start). We're about quality over quantity.

As for your preferences, Sure is you best friend who doesn't just know all the
great spots in a city but also know you and your preferences. So if you're for
example vegan or always prefer a specific diet, Sure will remember this and
create a profile for you. This happens without the pain of you having to check
boxes. It's all conversational and personal, so that you won't even notice it.

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hybrid11
Sounds like a good idea, looking forward to seeing the evolution of it!

~~~
jurajpal
Many thanks for your support!

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Swipes_Team
Well done @jurajpal! I tried breaking it by asking tougher questions but it
figured it out and still made a recommendation. I like this touch!
[https://infinit.io/_/37edMhy](https://infinit.io/_/37edMhy)

~~~
jurajpal
Thanks guys! Means a lot but still a long way to go! :)

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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.

~~~
krumhausen
Yes, that is a good idea. We are building out a list of criteria that we will
use to evaluate sustainable products and services. Using those keywords we
could potentially analyse existing data and use that as a first wave to find
new products and services. A human expert would probably still be needed to
vet the products before adding them to our Sure database.

We just have to be careful which sites or services we would crawl as we don’t
want to infringe on anyones copyrights.

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tim333
Quite a nice concept though you'll need a larger database of places

~~~
jurajpal
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?

~~~
tim333
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...](https://www.tripadvisor.com.ph/Search?q=sustainable&geo=60763&pid=3825&typeaheadRedirect=true&redirect=&startTime=1460720553812&uiOrigin=MASTHEAD&returnTo=https%253A__2F____2F__www__2E__tripadvisor__2E__com__2E__ph__2F__Restaurants__2D__g60763__2D__New__5F__York__5F__City__5F__New__5F__York__2E__html&searchSessionId=464CC11AEBD211C5652AF0804AA248D01460724136713ssid)

~~~
krumhausen
Building a chatbot that would search or even crawl through listings on Yelp,
TripAdvisor and Google Maps would probably allow us to build the database
faster - and there are other chatbots out there leveraging existing databases.
However, consumers accustomed to services like Airbnb and Etsy are looking for
authentic connections to local, and social­-good businesses.

We believe that one of the key value propositions of our product is to provide
a highly curated list of high quality and more personalised results. While
Google and others are competing on speed and quantity, our key value
propositions is to provide users with high quality and more personalised
results that they normally would spend hours researching online.

Do these assumptions match your learnings from building a similar experience?

~~~
tim333
I didn't progress much further with my bar app but how I would probably
proceed with that or your project is to start with the data out there and then
either curate it manually or try to get feedback from your users as to whether
the places are good.

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sofisitha
This is really what we need! All the best guys! I'm sure you will make
sustainability the next big thing.

We are super excited to follow your journey.

~~~
jurajpal
Thank you Sofi!

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rpedela
How do you make money?

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krumhausen
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

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mjmashka
Guys I believe in you! Go ahead and make it even better!

~~~
jurajpal
Thank you so much!

