Planning to buy an Enfield? Shout and share with your social network and chances are that you might find a few of your friends interested in buying the bullet as well. In fact, few years back, there were yahoo groups of potential buyers who were planning to buy cars and these group members will go together to the store and bargain on price.
And then came deal sites/ group buying sites which replicated a similar model, though leaving one important parameter aside – i.e. the fact that these ‘bargain hunters’ didn’t know each other, so there was no real connection among them. Their transaction currency was the deal that they were looking at. Hence, most of the times it never worked.
Tyche’d is a Mumbai based startup which launched its public beta today and aims to mix purchase intent with social graph. The product enables one to discover people from their social graph wanting to buy similar products and services in their own location. It provides consumers an opportunity to connect with more buyers and aggregate demand from their social graph enabling self-service group buys without depending on deal enablers or intermediaries. The platform presently focuses on high-indulgence and high-purchase involvement categories like Travel, Gadgets, Electronics, Real Estate and Automobiles.
Users also have a choice to create & join open group buys that are visible to all users from their location wanting to buy similar products. The platform was in a closed beta mode for 3 months and is what the team calls a ‘Social Wishlist’.
Tyche’d basic hypothesis is that there are users in our own friend circle who intend to buy similar products & services but we are unaware of them. And the team aims to bridge the gap using the platform (available for 200+ cities across 12 countries).
In essence, a social flavor of group buying built on social discovery as the key platform.
How is Tyche’d different from Vertical Group Buying Services?
Vertical/group buying platforms often have demand-supply issue and they are often lost in aggregating demand as well as supply. Similarly, deal sites are driven by ‘lowest cost’ hooks and tend to be operations and capital heavy. Tyche’d wants to enable commerce through Social Graphs by connecting buyers with more buyers, thus shifting the power of negotiation to consumers.
Questions to Tyche’d Team
The most important piece in the entire hypothesis is to bring sellers onboard, i.e. you have got a set of buyers and then what? Also, there are pure-play group buying services like BuythePrice and Tyche’d may be competing with being a feature at BuythePrice (or similar product).
Aside, how many of your Facebook friends are actually friends – I mean, is Facebook a real representation of one’s social graph? Is there more to social than being on Facebook?
Isn’t Tyched’ competing with services like meetup boards which can also be used to organize ‘lets go bargain hunting’ (the way it happened in China)? After all, social and commerce can happen in different permutation/combination and social need not prelude commerce.
– Building a ‘destination site’ vs. leveraging Facebook app platform? Is destination site the right way to go, given so much of noise about deal sites/cheapest pricing?
What’s your take? Do give Tyche’d a spin and share your comments. The product does has a fresh appeal and outlook towards social commerce.
As far as the founding team is concerned, the company is founded by Pravin Jadhav, ex-Product & Marketing Head at advertising technology venture – Ohana Media (Pravin is a regular contributor on Pluggd.in); and Kulin Shah, ex-Senior Investment Manager at Reliance Venture Asset Management, venture capital arm of Reliance ADAG.
Read: Building Awesome Social Products [6 Basic Principles] (by Pravin Jadhav, cofounder of Tyched).
