
Launch HN: Global Belly (YC W20) – Helping influencers launch their own products - madhuri_gb
Ankita and Madhuri here from Global Belly (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;globalbelly.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;globalbelly.com&#x2F;</a>). We built a platform that helps influencers launch their own custom line of products. By &#x27;influencers&#x27; 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. Right now the primary way they make money is through promoting third party brands in their content. While they have all the necessary creative skills to connect with a large audience they do not have expertise in product design, tech, and operations to launch and sell their own products. We help these talented individuals launch their own e-commerce brand and start turning their fans into customers. We take care of everything for them -- from product design and tech to operations and delivery -- so influencers can create and start selling their physical and virtual products in a matter of days.<p>Ankita and I met in 2014, while she was completing her MBA at NYU Stern and I was working at The Food Network. Ankita came from an engineering background and had previously worked at Apple, while my experience was in media production, but we connected immediately and started working on a few projects together at the intersection of food and tech and launched our own DTC food brand that would feature products to help people cook more global cuisines at home, hence the name Global Belly.<p>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. When we began exploring influencer partnerships, we started hearing the same thing from all of them: “I’ve always wanted to launch my own line of products like these but I just don’t have the time and resources”. This really resonated with us, we knew first-hand the challenges of launching your own brand, and we knew this would be nearly impossible for them while maintaining aggressive content calendars. After speaking with 100 different food influencers we learnt not only how well-positioned they were to launch their own products but how eager they were to do it. The solution became obvious to us, we had the tech, analytics and operational expertise to help them launch both physical and virtual product lines quickly. Influencers could continue to do what they do best, create amazing content and connect with their audience and we would take care of the rest for them.<p>So this is how it works: Once influencers are onboarded we look at their audience data and help them create a product portfolio that is best suited for their fans. We design all of these products, set up their custom store on Global Belly and manage the production and fulfillment logistics of the whole store as well. Influencers share their custom products to their fans and followers via their store on Global Belly and they start earning revenue for each product sold from day 1.<p>We have currently launched 17 influencers in the food vertical and shipped thousands of products so far. One of our largest influencers is SweetAmbs, who is a pastry chef specializing in cookie decorating. Through her beautifully crafted videos she has built an audience of 3M across her social media platforms. We helped her launch her own line of DIY cookie kits, signature cookie mixes, books, and e-tutorials via her Global Belly store (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;globalbelly.com&#x2F;collections&#x2F;sweetambs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;globalbelly.com&#x2F;collections&#x2F;sweetambs</a>) She is just one of the millions of content creators we believe will be the future of commerce as they begin to capitalize on their own brand instead of pushing others.<p>Though the majority of our launches have been in the last 3 months, we have already started learning some interesting things. The size of the influencers&#x27; audience is only one parameter to watch, as smaller influencers have proven that they can be just as successful as larger ones. An influencer with only 100K in followers can generate the same product revenue in the first week of launch than one with over 500K. We are starting to collect data on how much an influencer can actually sell to predict revenue they can generate based on audience parameters like age, gender, income and education.<p>While we are the only company doing this in the food space at the moment, this model has seen success in the fashion and beauty industry. Would love to connect with anyone at Revolve and Huda Beauty and anyone with extensive knowledge or a unique perspective in the social commerce space. We are looking forward to hearing ideas and feedback from the HN community and any experiences you have in this space!
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Nilef
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!

~~~
ankita_gb
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!

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glohbalrob
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/](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.

~~~
ankita_gb
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.

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davidajackson
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"?

~~~
madhuri_gb
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.

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harrisonjackson
> 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!

~~~
madhuri_gb
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.

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mdszy
>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.

~~~
reaperducer
_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.

~~~
hazz99
> 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.

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dansnerd
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/apb1lVS)
[https://imgur.com/8CpJnCo](https://imgur.com/8CpJnCo)

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

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frequentnapper
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?

~~~
madhuri_gb
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.

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

What's the hardest thing to scale in this?

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mohanm2001
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

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

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personjerry
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?

~~~
_1tan
Reminds me of [https://www.stackcommerce.com/](https://www.stackcommerce.com/)
which seems to do something similar for publishers.

~~~
mohanm2001
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

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

~~~
madhuri_gb
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.

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

~~~
harrisonjackson
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

~~~
fourstar
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".

~~~
harrisonjackson
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.

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

~~~
wpietri
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.

~~~
fourstar
> 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?

~~~
wpietri
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.

