http://www.kaboodle.com
The world of internet shopping can be a lonely, scary place. Or maybe it’s just boring. Online access to the ‘internet mall' seemed to, like, totally leave out the social aspect of shopping. Luckily, startup Kaboodle has resurrected the relationship between people and purchasing. We sat down with Manish Chandra, Kaboodle's CEO, to chat with him about the past, present, and future of his company.
1. What is your company about? What's your business model?
Kaboodle is a social shopping community where people discover, recommend and share products. Kaboodle's powerful shopping tools allow people to organize their shopping through lists, discover new things from people with similar style, get discounts on popular products, and find best prices. At the heart of Kaboodle is a fun and engaging community of people who love to shop. Community members create and join groups; share advice, feedback and product suggestions; and personalize their profiles with polls and other widgets. Kaboodle was launched in 2006 and has 250,000 registered users and 2 million monthly visitors. Our core revenue comes from brand and targeted advertising and in-content product referrals to online retailers.
2. Why did you start this company?
In early 2003-2004, when my wife and I were remodeling our home, we found the process of shopping for products that match our sense of taste and style excruciatingly hard. The collaboration tools on the web for shopping were weak and most sites just aggregated product catalogs. Finding and keeping track of our favorite home products online, and making decisions on which to buy, was a painful and inefficient experience. I started Kaboodle in 2005 and brought the founding team together with a vision to transform online shopping with a much more social and simpler experience.
3. Has your vision changed since you founded your company?
Our early vision was to build a collaborative shopping tool, where the focus was on people sharing products and input with people they already knew. As Kaboodle grew, however, we saw from our user base a real desire to interact “socially” – they would find and connect with others like-minded people in Kaboodle. Groups of people with similar interests (e.g., beauty products) or taste (e.g., modern furniture) were forming and so we focused on building social features into Kaboodle to enable our users to interact and share products, not only with people they already knew, but with the entire Kaboodle community.
4. What's your background?
My passion is working with great teams to solve interesting problems and build great companies. Prior to Kaboodle, I was the VP of Marketing at Versant. I joined Versant when Versant acquired Mokume in 2002. Before Versant, I was the VP of Marketing at Versata. I helped grow the company from 8 to 600 employees and took it public in March 2000. I've also held R&D and Product Management roles at Sybase and Intel. My educational background includes an MBA from UC Berkeley (Haas), an MS in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin and a Bachelor of Technology from IIT Kanpur, India.
5. How have you built a community of people who recommend things they like? What’s in it for them?
Shopping is an inherently social activity, where discovery, input, recommendations, and purchasing are all part of the normal shopping process. Our goal in creating Kaboodle's online shopping community was not only to give our members the tools to emulate the offline shopping experience online, but to also leverage the power of the online experience. This meant enabling our members to participate in every aspect of the shopping experience on Kaboodle, which among other things includes giving explicit and implicit recommendations and input, and also receiving input and recommendations. In addition, we work with select retailers to offer exclusive discounts to Kaboodlers for products which have become popular in the Kaboodle community.
6. Have you entered into any partnerships with other companies? What kind of partnerships did you seek? How did those partnerships help you?
We have distribution partnerships with Conde Nast and eBay. We also have a partnership with Shopping.com, through which we can provide our members easy access to best prices on products. The partnerships have helped us in introducing Kaboodle to new users and also helped in delivering the best experience for our community.
7. How has funding helped you grow as a company? Which investors did you choose to work with? Are you seeking additional funding?
We raised our $5 million Series A round from a number of leaders in search and online shopping. Our investors include Kanwal Rekhi, Rajeev Motwani, Ron Conway, Iggy Fanlo, Jeff Clavier and Garage Technology Ventures. Our investors have helped us with both strategic insights and creating the right introductions. At this point we are not seeking additional funding.
8. What does the future look like for Kaboodle?
We believe Kaboodle's social shopping community will fundamentally alter the landscape of online shopping – by connecting people with similar taste and style, and tying together the entire shopping process, from product discovery to purchase.
The fastest-growing categories in online shopping are lifestyle goods. A recent Forrester / Shop.org study reports that in 2006, for the first time ever, consumers spent more on apparel, accessories and footwear online ($18.3 billion) than on computer hardware and software. And there is significant room to grow from there: only 8% of clothing sales occurred online (versus 35% of computer sales).
Most shopping platforms built to date have been optimized, not for lifestyle goods, but for products where decisions are based primarily on features and price, like electronics and computer hardware and software. These same platforms provide a solitary shopping experience, and work well for people who want to quickly and efficiently complete a transaction completion.
9. What are some of the technologies that make Kaboodle a reality? What technological advances do you see improving your service?
From our users' standpoint, Kaboodle's platform is incredibly simple. The “Add to Kaboodle” toolbar button allows users to add items to Kaboodle from anywhere on the web with just one click of a button. The social features and site discovery (products, people) are also built for ease-of-use and broad adoption.
On the back end, Kaboodle's state-of-the-art information processing platform is the basis of Kaboodle's multiple patent filings in the areas of information extraction and summarization and machine learning. This platform automatically extracts and summarizes information from any web page, using user input to incrementally learn and improve the accuracy of the extraction. Using proprietary techniques, user activity is correlated across the Kaboodle community, connecting users to existing Kaboodle content and other users and aiding the search for relevant information.
Going forward, additional technological advances will allow us to better personalize recommendations for our members (based on a user's stated taste preferences and site behavior), and highlight to our users aggregate data that help provide additional insights to our users.
