What is Unfluence?

Unfluence is a platform for sharing and discovering recommendations.

How does it work?

Users create a profile to share their recommendations, and follow trusted users and communities to discover recommendations. There is no "global" search/discovery. Users only search/discover within their trusted network and communitites.

What is the goal?

The goal of Unfluence is to empower individuals to share and discover quality products from reputable brands, inverting the power of influence away from the big money ad industries and social media platforms.

Who is Unfluence for?

Unfluence is for everyone: because we all value quality products from reputable brands, and are eager to share and discover these. We believe the future is not more ads and privacy intrusion. Unfluence tries to subvert this power of paid influence, and instead provide a platform this is aligned with reputable brands, beloved products, and empowered consumers. Unfluence is a rebellion against a future which belongs to marketers.

It is a bet on high trust communities - from friends and family, to private groups and communities - as the (already) future of buying research and behavior, and provides a platform that empowers and aligns with it.

For so long, ad agencies and social media companies have been the center of influence. Their whole business model (their monetization) relies on their ability to influence folks buying behavior. We believe a change back to the community, to individuals, is long overdue.

Unfluence is in service to this returning of power, providing a platform for the community where users can share and discover recommendations from those they trust.

How it is used?

Unfluence recommendations have many discovery points.
  1. From within Unfluence as users search for recommendations
  2. From direct links elsewhere on the internet where users point to their profile, like users link to their LinkTree (Unfluence is a superset of LinkTree where a users profile page serves the same utility, while providing additional value: rather than a "stand alone" page of links, these recommendations live within Unfluence's social network - where users can follow, search and discover these recommendations)
  3. From a brand website widget. Whereas brands websites reviews can be manipulated, Unfluence is the "gold standard" for reviews since not only are the reviews outside of the control of the brand, the results are dynamic based on the user and cannot even be "vetted" since the results are specific to a customer's unique network. [This widget is still in development.]
  4. From a browser pluggin. Users can install a browser pluggin which surfaces the recommendations from their network on the items and brands they are viewing across the internet, as well as see alternate items and brands for that category. [This pluggin is still in development.]

What Currently Exists for Recommendations?

There currently is no plaform for recommendations, and they are spread over existing platforms. Yet these other platforms have different goals, and are not designed for sharing and discovering trusted recommendations.

Facebook / Discord Posts

Facebook offers a "looking for suggestions" post type. These posts are answered by friends (or community members of a page) which provides the trust. Similarly, Discord posts on servers for private communities. However:

  • Posts are "fleeting" and pushed down (into oblivion) very quickly
  • Posts require the recommenders to know the user asking (vs the user know them)
  • Posts require the recommender to want to engage this time (may have answer in past already)
  • Posts are hard to search
  • Fleeting nature of posts (and little searchability for future) makes it a bad use of time
  • As posts, no ability as searcher to aggregate together across a few different posts

Facebook social graph and private Discord servers have great trust, but is fundamentally the wrong type of platform (using posts)

Unfluence uses a similar social trust: users only see recommendations from those they follow, but with a platform where recommendations are first-class submissions, and not ephemeral posts

Website Reviews

Direct-to-consumer brands often have reviews on their website for products users are exploring. However:

  • These reviews are hosted by the brand itself, and often curated and manipulated.

Unfluence is the "gold standard" for reviews, and a website embedding an Unfluence widget shows utmost faith in their products. What displays is dynamic based on the user, and brands could not control or even "vet" what a user would see - it all depends on the user's unique network.

Amazon Reviews

These reviews are on an independent platform, and grouped by product with aggregate data and are searchable. They are guaranteed by purchase, so it seems like users can trust them. However:

  • They also present the date in aggregate form and are searchable.
  • However, Amazon's business model presents a conflict of interest.
  • Amazon is losing trust with outright fraudulent reviews

Amazon reviews are the right type of platform (grouped by product and searchable), but has declining trust due to a conflict of interests with the business model of the platform

Unfluence is a platform built for product feedback. But unlike Amazon Reviews, the trust is established by a users own network - and immune to fraduelent reviews from paid reviewers or product hijacking.

Amazon Search

The Amazon search algorithm has helpful tags for finding a good product, and the search itself has the ability to priotize and surface the best products.

Apart from the fradulent reviews messing up the ability to surface the best products, Amazon has shown more interest in surfacing results that best align with its business model: prioritizing ads/sponsored, as well as its own brand lines.

Non-sponsored items are now below the fold for a lot of searches.

In Summary: Amazon search is the right type of platform, but has declinging trust due to a conflict of interests with the business model of the platform.

Unfluence is a platform built for product discovery. But unlike Amazon Search, there is no central search/display that can be manipulated and sold to brands, so it is one users can trust.Users create their own network (where their search only exists within).

Blog Reviews / Gift Guides

Gift guides can validate products.

Blog posts exist for all sorts of reviews and recommendations.

Yet setting up a blog/website is a lot of work, and then has no audience.

Existing ones are often full of affiliate links and since the reviewer is a stranger it lacks trust.

Unfluence is easily accessible for everyone, and easy to get started. Recommendations are only available within the network of people who choose to follow the recommender (not publically, which ensures the results are not "affiliate" SEO-based links hoping for search engines to drive traffic and make money).

LinkTree

LinkTree allows users to list links for their social accounts and products they recommend.

However, the pages these recommendations exist on stand alone islands. Consumers who follow dozens of trusted folks have no means to search across these pages of recommendations - and neither do the links makes themself searchable: Linktree doesn't capture information about the recommendation (brand, product, category, audience) so there is little utility a search or aggregate could provide.

Unfluence is a superset of LinkTree. It provides the exact same functionality of being a landing page profile which ties together the person's reach (all their social platforms) and recommendations (all the links of products they are recommending). While Unfluence serves the same utility, it provides additional value. Rather than a "stand alone" page of links, these recommendations live within Unfluence's social network - where users can follow, search, see aggregate data, and discover recommendations. While Linktree and alternatives are tech companies solving a technical problem of turning one link spot (EG on instagram) into a whole list of links - Unfluence is a product company that understands the real need that they are only superficially addressing: a vibrant wave of influencers looking for a single platform to recommend their products, in a way that is fully structured to allow for detailed searching (by product, brand, category, or audience), following, and discoverability.

Unfluence is ripe to take over the "list of links" pages that currently exist. Unfluence is a superset of this - allowing the exact same behavior, but layering on a social graph where consumers can follow, search, and see aggregate data.

Community Surveys

Many online communities conduct annual surveys, to guage all the products, services, software, etc the members are using. These results are published afterward, for all members to learn from each other.

However, these surveys are centralized, closed, and time-sensitive.

Unfluence is a decrentralized, open, evergreen survey. Users share and request recommendations, as individuals and within communities. These recommendations are available in real time to everyone, not just collected by the creator and published later. Further, recommendations by a user are not "locked in" and change over time as their opinion/products change.

Who created Unfluence?

Kujo is made with love from the team at Kujo Yardwear. We are a direct-to-consumer product brand creating footwear and apparel designed for working in the yard.

The idea for Unfluence came about in many ways, but all converged here.

  1. We work with many phenomenal influencers in lawn care. These are folks tireously putting out incredible content to help grow the community. They vet many brands, and often recommend ones that have helped them grow their business. While their content lives across Instagram for images, YouTube for videos, and podcasts for audio - their recommendations are forced to live in video descriptions or across hundreds of podcasts. For those who use linktree, there is no way for users to follow all the community members they trust, to search across many pages for various product recommendations. And even if such a search existed, linktree doesn't capture the brand, product, category, and audience to support the search in a powerful way. It grew on us in time that influencers deserved a platform built for recommendations (not video, pictures, or posts), where community members could follow, search, and discover.
  2. Integrity is a founding principle for Kujo. We stand behind our products, take care of our customers, and always seek to do the right thing. When it comes to reviews, this means not only do we not control, filter, moderate, or manipulate our customers' reviews, but we go above and beyond in making it easy for customers to see all reviews, sort by star, or even filter by text search. Some of our competitors use dark patterns to default the review filtering to 5-star only (with a UI that makes this hard to notice), or just blatantly remove and filter out bad reviews. While we are proud of our decision, it highlighted the conflict of interest brands have in hosting their own reviews, and made clear to us the need of an independent platform (with a transparent and well-aligned business model) where customers could find trustworthy feedback on brands and products.

What is the Business Model of Unfluence?

Unfluence doesn't make money; it's supported by Kujo Yardwear. But it is important to us that there is a path for the platform can survive on its own, and that this monitization path is aligned with users, and not at their expense. Unfluence's "some-day" monization model will be to allow brands to prompt users for a recommendation.

Let's break this down, and see how its good for users, good for brands, and scalable.

Aligned with Users

In Unfluence, users can already be prompted for recommendations. These prompts can currently originate from from three sources: onboarding, communities, and mutuals.

These prompts for recommendations exist because they are helpful to the user. We use so many products, and so many we take for granted, that it can be hard to conjole recommendations for so many categories and facets of our life. Yet, when asked for something specific, it's easy to recall if we have a product we love for that category. Prompts help the user recall and articulate their recommendations, and so help their family and friends who rely on these recommendations.

With the proposed monitization model, we add a new source of these helpful prompts: brands. Brands can pay to prompt users for a recommendation. This marketing spend on their part is aligned with the value of the system, with helping users recommend products for their network.

This would work by allowing brands to create custom audiences (by incorporating an Unfluence script for purchase/review events on their website, or by uploading past customer lists directly) and compete in a real time exchange. Users can opt-out of this targeting, but contrary to most targeting, it exists to help the user recommend (for or against) purchased products to help their network, and only works for brands which have great products; and not to manipulate the user into buying a product (the goal of most social media targeting efforts).

This monization model (of brands paying to prompt for recommendations) is aligned with the system in a way ads can never be. Brands can never purchase "ads" for search result spots - results are always dynamic to a user based on their trusted network. With Unfluence, brands can pay to surface requests for consumers to recommend (or dismiss away) their product - hoping the user themself takes an action to bring the product to life in the network. Only then is it alive in the system.

Thus, marketing spend in the platform is directly aligned with the value of the platform - bringing more recommendations to bear to help your network make informed decisions. The marketing spend bears fruit and becomes real only through happy customers - and no amount of cash can deceive users in search results (as ads do) since these are not pitches as recommendations to searchers, but pitches to be recommended by users. This pitch is aligned with the platgorm, users are not annoyed by these requests but happy to recommend great products to their network. They align with the system - a system where users want to recommend products/brands to help their network make informed decisions - and these requests (along with the three existing origins of prompts: onboarding, community, and mutual) remind users of products.

Aligned with (Great) Brands

Unfluence's monization model is correctly aligned not just with users, but with quality brands. It is not only powerful for users, it's incredibly good news for brands with quality products.

Unfluence helps fixes a broken system of expensive ads by providing a platform to work directly with their audience, moving the power of influence from expensive agencies to happy customers.

Traditionally, influence has been held by the agencies with the largest ad spends, deploying it on mediums to target and manipulate viewers based on their personal data. This ad business model is a race to the bottom: of mediums harvesting everything they can know about users so as to compete for ad revenue to monitize their product, as well as brands with small budgets feeling pressured to do everything they can to be efficient with their small budgets.

The shift of influence to individuals is already underway with influencers: where brands work with trusted experts. Unfluence provides a platform for not just influencers, but for everyone to share their recommendations; where users can find recommendations from anyone they trust: family, friends, co-workers, influencers. This platform is aligned not only with users to share and discover, but also with brands that have great products and are recommended by customers into their networks, where no amount of big money can buy search result spots or secure expensive ongoing visibility in social feeds.

Alignment Scales

This monitization model has alignment with users and brands, and so scales. This contrasts with the ad model, where there are hosts of inverse relationships with scale: as more ads innundate consumers, the noise outpaces the signal; products incorporating ads do so as a tradeoff and not as a benefit of the product itself; and privacy is ever attacked to leverage more data to compete for spend.

Taglines

Which tagline is best?
  • Take Back the Power of Influence
  • Recommendations You Can Trust
  • Your Own Circle of Influence
  • Product Bookmarks, Shared
  • The LinkedIn of Products
  • An Open Evergreen Survey
  • The Future of Influence
  • Everyone is an Influencer
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