Hey PH’ers - I’m Karim, one of the creators of Suto.
We created Suto to be the easiest way to get expert product recommendations. Instead of searching a bunch of blogs, review sites, forums, etc. - just send a message to Suto. We’re trying to be that friend you have that knows a lot about cars - but for all products!
And we’re pretty excited to launch messaging through Facebook Messenger and email, along with SMS.
Would love to get your feedback on the helpfulness of Suto, and your messaging experience - plus any requests you may have!
Best,
Karim
Just a note: we're only available in the US and Canada for now.
@bryantpeng When we first started thinking about what Suto would look like, Baymax actually came up as a great example of what we want it to feel like when you interacted with Suto. In a way, we want Suto to be Baymax's cousin that helps you purchase products (as opposed to keep you healthy).
I think that thought stuck with us as we designed it :D
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Awesome Karim! I'm curious to know what would the revenue model be, affiliate ? Are you planning on some kind of AI/Human ?
@sylvain_dem Hey, thanks for your question!
We're currently operating with an affiliate model (when there are retailers that support it for the products we recommend). We're planning on having AI on the recommendation side and maybe around the conversation as well (there's some NLP around the conversation already but it could be enhanced a lot with AI).
Would love to hear how you would solve these problems as well :)
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@ngardideh awesome! what is the conversion rate you're seeing from Suto's recommendations so far ? Definitely agree with AI/NLP :)
@sylvain_dem About 25-40% users tell us that they went with our recommendation. The affiliate conversion rate is much lower at the moment (but we have some ideas on how to increase it).
Overtime, when Suto becomes more trust worthy and better at answering questions – then we'll be able to increase the recommendation conversion rate as well.
@zedlander Thanks!
When we first started thinking about this idea about a year ago – we wanted to first connect users to product category connoisseurs (folks who know too much about Headphones, or TVs, or Pens).
So in order to test it, we put our personal phone numbers on a page and ran some ads on it to see if people would be interested in a service like this. As we went through more testing, we realized the fact that it was a conversation made it a lot easier to interact with our users and understand what their needs are. We've stuck with it ever since :)
@juecd_ Thanks for the question!
You'll first have a conversation with Suto to figure out your exact needs for the product, and any preferences you have.
Then it pulls in thousands of hours of external research on product categories (from articles, reviews, forums, expert opinions, etc.). It will try to find the product with the most unanimous positive reviews that fits your needs - so it's more biased towards you than towards a certain product. There are also humans helping power it - they provide expertise and extra research in certain products and are able to understand your context better than an AI.
In the end, you'll get a few recommendations with reasoning as to why it's recommended for you specifically. And you can make your decision from there :)
For these kinds of products (headphones etc) I usually go on the Wire Cutter; are you guys pulling stuff from there (And other product review sites)? Or do you write up your own reviews internally for products?
@shwinda Yes - we do pull in reviews from the Wire Cutter (we love them), as well as several other places. Wire Cutter and those sites are great for recommendations on "the best product, for most people, in most use cases." - but people's needs will sometimes differ from the general use-cases.
We do not write anything internally - but when we recommend a certain product, we'll store that it's been recommended for a specific use-case. Next time someone has that same use-case, that product will likely be recommended again because we know that the other person was happy with it.
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