New generations require new products and services. Zoomers are moving away from Google, Facebook, and Amazon. They prefer more up to date services for searching, communicating, and shopping. For example, young people often spend less time on Facebook, opting for other social networks that offer more visually engaging forms of communication.
The same is happening to other veterans of their markets. New times require new approaches to old tasks.
Shopping isn’t an exception. To more efficiently attract Gen Z people businesses are looking for the new way of communicating with them.
Today, we are reviewing two platforms that offer an interesting mix of social network and shopping marketplace, providing zoomers with the shopping experience they desire.
Claim – Changing the future of shopping, $4M
Claim.co wants to make shopping fun, rewarding, and social. The message of the company sounds really attractive – “We believe you should benefit from trying new brands and helping friends discover new places”.
Claim brings consumers a new kind of experience based on value that is somewhat similar to the idea of trading cards, but for brands. The startup says it has turned consumer rewards into a multiplayer game by allowing users to have new experiences together while saving money.
Despite that on the level of formal word the platform identifies itself as a platform for shoppers by the fact it is a social network where you share updates on your recent purchasing sharing the benefits and reward points with them.
For every purchase made through the platform, users receive bonuses, which add an extra incentive to shop. A bonus could be a free cup of coffee, free workout classes, hoodies, etc.
The Claim’s special feature is that you can not only collect these bonuses, but also send them to your friends. Alternatively, you can exchange bonuses with other participants. For example, you can exchange your free cup of coffee for someone else’s free workout.
Claim for marketers
Undoubtedly, Claim offers advantages not only to buyers but also to sellers. The main channel for attracting new customers is precisely those bonuses and reward points. What’s important is that with these rewards and bonuses, you can not only bring back customers but also attract new ones. Moreover, this can be done precisely through the mechanism of exchanging bonuses between program participants.
In addition, businesses can distribute a certain amount of bonuses on the social network once a week, which members can readily claim. These bonuses can also be utilised by the business itself, gifted, or exchanged.
The target audience for businesses includes both offline and online restaurants, cafes, and shops. Since the bonuses, such as a free coffee or a workout lesson, are mainly available offline, these shops, cafes, and gyms should be relatively close to each other.
This is somewhat of a negative point as it raises questions about how this platform can scale up. We recall our launch of a similar platform several years ago, and this problem was somewhat painful.
The startup is not yet publicly available, but according to them, they already have some preliminary commitments with small and medium-sized business partners.
The target audience for the social network Claim members is generation Z. The startup decided to educate this generation starting from college and university students.
Since launching Claim as an invite-only beta in January (with a 4.8 star rating on the iOS App Store), the startup has demonstrated traction with over 10k students across universities in Boston and thousands of customer acquisitions for brand partners. Next year, the company plans to expand across the US.
What’s interesting
The idea of shopping gamification isn’t new. Claim implemented it in a collaborative way making this game multiplayer and social, what is really smart.
About Claim
The company was established in November 2021 by CEO Sam Obletz and CTO Tap Stephenson from Yale and Harvard Business School.
Interesting fact, As Tap Stephenson mentioned on the interview “We started Claim because we were really interested in what it meant to own something online”.
On Dec 20, 2023 Claim received $4M in a seed round led by Sequoia Capital and announced that previously the company received $2M in a non-announced pre-seed round led by Susa Ventures and BoxGroup.
Now the company is geo-located around the Greater Boston area. The plan is to use funds received to grow the engineering team and bring Claim to new geographies.
Maka – Instagram for trendy shoppers
Maka (https://makalive.com) shares similar basic idea with Claim – new generation needs new ways of doing shopping. However, Maka sees it in completely different way.
Young people go less social offline, but more and more social online. Take typical instagram account of a modern young people. Photos from the morning run, then of the morning coffee, the look from the office and set of the pics from the evening party. People like to share every moment of their life with their followers and constantly scroll through the feeds of their friends.
Maka decided to build something that can be called – “Instagram for Gen Z shoppers”, i.e. the platform where people uploads their photos and videos in freshly purchased outfit encouraging their followers to make the same purchase. Basically, Maka just took the way as Instagram influencers helps brands to promote their products in Instagram and made it simple, you can shop products right in the Maka app.
Maka’s platform identifies and solves two fundamental problems: a trust issue in the buying process and the challenge creators face in monetizing their influence. To address the trust element, Maka leverages videos as a means to connect users with trusted creators. In low-trust markets, we have observed that video is a powerful tool for building trust. It effectively conveys information, drives conversion, and establishes rapport between the user, the reviewer, and the buyer.
Seeing items on a creator they trust gives users confidence in their purchasing decisions. Initially, the startup considered building a marketplace where creators, consumers, vendors, and brands coexist, with creators showcasing products. However, it realized that customers prioritize the assurance that what they see is what they get, optimizing their limited disposable income on meaningful purchases. In essence, every customer can become a creator.
Notably, the platform offers a review option, allowing customers who make purchases to share their feedback through video reviews, usually between 30 and 60 seconds long. These reviews provide valuable insights for other users, influencing their buying decisions. According to the CEO of Maka Diana Owusu-Kyereko, this feature has significantly impacted both those making purchases and those creating the reviews, fostering a sense of community and trust within the Maka platform.
“That’s what makes us so scalable because I think in the creator economy, if you focus on sort of just the big creators, you have a small pool of creators that you can work with, and that’s what we’ve kind of learned from the beginning,” she said. “What you need is kind of like a scalable base of creators, and that’s why the user-generated content model is so powerful, and that’s why everybody can be a creator is so powerful because then it’s scalable because you have an infinite amount of people who can create video content on the platform based on purchases, versus working with only a select group of creators to create content on the platform.”
Business model
The platform has a rewards system to incentivize users to upload these video reviews. Each time a customer/creator uploads a review, they earn N500 (50 cents). On average, a creator on Maka produces about seven videos per user.
In addition to earning points for each video review, creators accumulate points when others make purchases based on their reviews. Furthermore, creators can download their reviews from Maka and share them on other social media platforms, earning additional points for each share. These points can be converted into cash to shop on the platform.
What’s interesting
Maka is from Nigeria what is non quite common. However, the startup already received its initial funding of $2.7M.
Since its inception, Maka claims to have garnered over 500,000 downloads, numbers it acquired via its initial model of engaging with creators through live sessions.
From its user-generated content model launched two months ago, the two-year-old startup has seen over 2,000 reviews created.