Hipper

Hipper was my second start-up I ran through an early stage incubator. I billed it as a platform for trusted reviews, with the easiest access to the 12 billion dollar affiliate market—enabled by focused design, behavioral constraints, and doing good.

It was a fun and easy way to harness the collective knowledge of our favorite products—but Hipper was unique in combining incentives and restrictions to ensure meaningful content creation and participation.

Notable behavioral patterns:

• Only allow images taken in the app = Only original and trustworthy content

• Max of one new post per day = Maximizes curation quality and audience engagement

• Automatic affiliate marketing = Lowest effort for promise of tangible gain

• Charity partners by default = Financial incentive, even with a small audience

• Built upon known patterns and existing tech = Limited unknowns and technical debt

Through market research, online surveys, and customer development - I identified demographics and interests of my likely early adopters and what order features needed to be built out to satisfy them.

Joining the early stage incubator, the 2017 San Francisco class of Founder Institute, was a wonderful and maybe slightly masochistic experience! Educational in many ways with extremely tight deadlines and unfiltered critiques from brilliant mentors and peers. I learned that my company wasn’t fundamentally flawed and even had a clear vision of monetization, but it was simply riskier than I could afford at the time.