Wishpot Blog

Wishpot closes Series A!

Today we announced the closing of a Series A round led by two great early stage investors:  Monster Venture Partners and H-Farm.

Here're some more info from our press release:

Wishpot announces Series A financing

Company funded by web innovators on two continents to accelerate growth Seattle – April 21, 2008 – Wishpot, the popular online social shopping community, announced the closing of a Series A investment round. The round, which added $1 million in funding, was led by Monster Venture Partners. Other investors in the round include H‐Farm, an Italian Internet development group, as well as existing
investors including Adrian Hanauer.

Founded in 2007, Wishpot has developed a hosted solution for tracking personal wish list entries across any website on the internet. The free product, which is currently in beta, has already become a popular web site for social shopping. The site is expected to undergo a series of important enhancements during mid 2008 and launch in foreign markets during the second half of 2008 and 2009.

Rob Monster, Managing Director of Monster Venture Partners, has joined Wishpot’s board of directors. “On the surface Wishpot is a consumer site that democratizes the online wish list across any site that sells products or services on the Internet. However, look a level deeper and you will see the power of being able to predict future demand in real‐time segmented by user attributes.”

“We’re very excited to have Rob’s team onboard. In the short term we’ve been working together, the team at Monster Venture Partners have already helped us establish relationships that will get us to the next level”. Says Max Ciccotosto, CEO  and founder of Wishpot.

Wishpot is planning to use the funds to further enhance its vertical offerings, improve the Wishpot platform, increase the business development activities, and introduce business analytics for enterprise customers of the platform.  Expanded adoption of the platform is an important growth priority. The Wishpot platform hosts a range of popular consumer needs, including registries for weddings, baby announcements, birthdays, and holidays. A user can add an item to a registry with a single click, similar to the way a user can “Digg” an article discovered on the Internet. Once a product has been added to a personal Wishpot, the user can also access Wishpot’s powerful features for comparison shopping, to solicit feedback, and get recommendations from a personal social shopping network.

About Wishpot
Wishpot, founded in 2006 out of Seattle by veterans of Microsoft, is a personal and social shopping utility that makes it easy to save, share and discover interesting products. Visit http://www.wishpot.com for more information.

About Monster Venture Partners
Monster Venture Partners (‘MVP’) is a new breed of early‐stage venture capital firm based in Seattle. MVP’s investment philosophy is to engage in a genuine hands‐on partnership with founders to jointly create value for all stakeholders. For larger opportunities, MVP co‐invests with leading investors from around the world, selecting from a universe of like‐minded investors who are able to add strategic value. MVP is focused on three primary verticals: marketing technology, consumer healthcare, and global consumer Internet.

About H‐Farm
H‐Farm was founded in 2005 to create and develop innovative technology and new media startups. Since its foundation H‐Farm tested many ideas at once and turned the best of them quickly into companies, attracting the human capital necessary to make them grow. H‐Farm works in different vertical industries, from mobile and Internet companies to 3D animation, IPTV, User Generated Content, Digital Billboard and Interactive Window companies. H‐Farm today is recognized in Italy as a unique place to seed finance a start‐up. Using design thinking, H‐Farm is developing a worldwide‐interconnected network of innovative technology and new media startups.  H‐Farm is now starting to partner with leading venture capital firms and strategic investors to provide its companies with the resources to maximize their potential.

E-Commerce News and social shopping "portals"

The E-Commerce Times just published a very good piece titled "Portals in a E-Commerce 2.0 world".

I really liked the first quote :)

"Social shopping sites are definitely already more semantic than general Web 2.0 sites," Wishpot CEO Max Ciccotosto told the E-Commerce Times. "They do a lot of interesting things with the concept of 'product;' they are able to scrape for this info, parse it, etc. They are filtered gateways."

One interesting point that came to mind when reading the article is that Ned - the author - referred to us and other social shopping players as "portal".  That's something that we had not been called before.

I can definitely see why Ned is referring to social shopping as "portals", but at the same time there is a key difference from a "traditional" portal.

Portals were (and are) designed to provide a filtered view to users.   Such sites (think MSN, Yahoo, etc...) employee people that decide what gets presented to users.  The goal is to provide information that is interesting and useful, at the same time saving a LOT of time to readers. 

If you think about what we do at Wishpot than you can definitely see that we are providing a "filtered" view for our users.  An example is our "Most Wanted" page.   But a KEY difference is that we do not employee anybody to pick what gets into the page.   Instead we have algorithms that aggregate the picks of our users and display them as needed in the different sections of the site.   

Wishpot Wedding Registry on Seattle Times

Check out this great article from the Seattle Times highlighting the benefits of the Wishpot Wedding Registry!

We're of course really happy to see that brides and grooms like Mahnaz and George are fully realizing the potential of having a registry on Wishpot.  Why is it so cool?  Think about it:

• No need to go down to a store (or more than one) for five hours looking random stuff you won't need or you're planning on getting just to return it a few days later.
• You get the stuff your really want from the stores you really like
• You give your friends and family flexibility on where to buy the gifts and at what price

Wishpot highlighed on USA Today...

Wishpot is one of the four sites highlighted by an article on the power of social shopping by USA Today.

The article starts by highlighting one of the key benefits that Wishpot provides:

"Beckie Tran doesn't have kids, which means she usually has no clue what presents to buy for her friends' children. Fortunately she gets advice from a separate group of buddies — including people she's never even met."

One of the coolest feature on Wishpot is the ability to look at most wished items in specific demographics.  For example you can see what "females" between "18 and 23" are wishing for in the "Books" category.  It makes it very very easy to find the right gift for the right person!

Wedding registry with a social twist

From our press release today!

Big thank you to our friends at mywedding.com!

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Seattle – December 12, 2007 -  Wishpot - the popular online social shopping community announces the release of a set of new functionalities to help couples to create their wedding registry.

Wishpot is targeting three key area of the registry experience:

Allow couples to create a wedding registry with items from any online or retail store

Increase interaction with friends and family to help by providing suggestions and feedback

Make it more fun and less time consuming by letting brides discover great ideas from wedding experts and other brides

“Making it easier to find ideas for the perfect registry was one of our top priorities. Today, creating a registry is not necessarily a very efficient experience” says Max Ciccotosto, CEO of Wishpot.

The new set of functionalities includes the ability to browse for sample wedding registries, view most registered items, and see what other brides are registering for. “We are providing brides with many tools to find what they really like. They can find ideas on Wishpot or they can browse any website and quickly add what they like to their Wishpot registry. There are no boundaries.” says Max Ciccotosto.

Wishpot is also introducing the concept of "wedding experts". This is a program open to only a handful of individuals that have shown great passion and talent in helping brides (and grooms) with their wedding. Some of the early experts are well known bloggers like Emily Anderson (author of book “Eco Chic Weddings”), Mackenzie Sara (editor of the “Something new, Something old” blog), and Bee Kim (publisher of the Weddingbee blog).

Wishpot is also announcing a partnership with the fast growing wedding planning destination mywedding.com. When couples sign up for a free wedding website via myweding.com, they will be equipped with a Wishpot registry.

Wishpot and MyWedding

Today we've announced a partnership with mywedding.com!

As a result every new free website on mywedding.com will be equipped with a Wishpot Wedding Registry!

To check out the integration you can signup for a free website and go to the registry page.

As usual let us know if you have any suggestions to make this better!  Send us a note at feedback (at) wishpot (dot) com.

Wishpot joins Curious Office Partners portfolio

I am thrilled to announce that Wishpot is now officially part of the Curious Office Partners portfolio. Curious Office will be providing us with additional operational and executive assistance. For those of you not familiar with Curious Office, they are a Seattle-based investment company and incubator that is focused on next gen Internet companies. Other notable companies in their portfolio include ImageKind, an ecommerce community for art projects, and Shelfari, a social network for book lovers.

Adrian Hanuer, co-founder of Curious Office Partners, has been a great supporter of Wishpot and was one of the first angel investors in Wishpot. Adrian is a super-savvy investor and business executive. He was a seed investor in aQuantive (recently sold to Microsoft for $6 billion) and was also an early investor in Amazon.com. Adrian's knowledge of commerce and advertising is deep and he is an incredible resource for us.  It would be hard to talk about Adrian without mentioning that he also is a soccer fanatic and is co-owner and managing partner of the Seattle Sounders – a professional soccer franchise. Oh yeah, and he is an amazing competitive poker player.

I am also incredibly excited to have Kelly Smith, co-founder of Curious Office Partners, join our advisory board. Like Adrian, Kelly is extremely accomplished. He was the founder and CEO of ImageKind as well as RocketVox which was merged with thePlatform and acquired by Comcast. He also has international experience and led RealNetworks business development efforts in Europe, Middle East and Africa.

What can I say? These guys are rock stars and I just couldn't be happier to have them involved.

Max

Wishpot for Facebook

If you are on Facebook (and who isn't these days?) your shopping and gifting life just got easier!  We recently released Wishpot for Facebook!

Wishpot for Facebook lets people share their favorite products, give gift suggestions and discover what their friends like and recommend – all within Facebook. One thing to keep in mind is that this is not a “lite” version of Wishpot; it delivers the complete Wishpot social shopping experience within Facebook!

Also, Wishpot for Facebook is unique in that it easily allows users to interact not only with their Facebook network but also with friends and family that aren’t on Facebook.

Let us know what you think!  You know we love feedback!

Conduit and Wishpot press release

Our friends at Conduit have issued a press release that highlights Wishpot.   We use their technology for the Wishpot Toolbar.

You can read the full press release here:  http://www.conduit.com/news/PressReleases/CBOAug2007.aspx

Extract that highlights Wishpot:

"Wishpot Community Toolbar: Wishpot, the popular and innovative social shopping service, recently launched their community toolbar powered by Conduit and joined the Conduit Network to gain exposure to over 12 million users. Wishpot makes it easy to save, share and discover interesting products from any store or website. The Wishpot toolbar allows users to add items to a personal wish list from any website or to search for the best deals on millions of products from thousands of trusted merchants. It also offers a direct links to Wishpot chat and other Wishpot services. You can download the Wishpot community toolbar at: http://wishpot.ourtoolbar.com .

"We launched the Wishpot social shopping toolbar because we wanted to expand the Wishpot experience for our users. We found that our users love it because they can interact with Wishpot and add items to their wish lists quickly and easily right through the toolbar," said Steven Ashby, Chief Marketing Officer of Wishpot. "Building the Wishpot social shopping toolbar with Conduit was fast and painless and allowed us to deliver a polished, professional, quality toolbar which helps us keep our community happy and more engaged."  "

Hearst acquires $30M social shopping company

Today it was announced in the Wall Street Journal that media giant Hearst Corp acquired social shopping website Kaboodle for $30 million. Hearst, the publisher of magazines such as Cosomopolitan and Good Housekeeping, saw obvious value in social shopping.

This is very interesting to us because Kaboodle is the company we have seen as most similar to Wishpot. Unlike Wishpot, they haven’t really tried to address in store retail shopping, but like Wishpot they provide tools to collect, manage, share and discover products through online lists.

We want to extend congratulations to the Kaboodle team. Congratulations to the Kaboodle team. This is some great market validation for the social shopping space and I firmly believe we have barely scratched the surface of the opportunity and innovation for social shopping.