Wow, it's cool to see this idea trending on HN! Full disclosure, I'm one of the co-founders at https://www.marmalade.co. Speaking from personal experience, it’s been a long road getting from the universe of all Shopify products to a curated inventory that’s easy for people to shop on. While ChatGPT isn't going to replace human curation anytime soon, the AI tailwind has made it much easier to build search and recommendation systems. On our end, we've definitely caught the semantic search bug. Watch out for it - you’ll wake up one day with a cross-modal hybrid search index on pinecone and any number of models on huggingface :). However, as you rightly point out, user growth is still the key. We're working toward launching a community aspect of the platform in the coming months as a solution.
You site looks good, and your results are fantastic! Job well done. I did hit a server error though, so obviously still some issues to work out, but overall, really well done. Moving to semantic search was one of my top priorities before we went under, but I struggled to justify the costs of it as we were operating on a shoestring budget.
Best of luck to you and your team on user acquisition!
