There is no "business model" that will fix this. Yelp, The Wirecutter, Product Hunt, all these suffer from the principal-agent problem. You, the reader, are the principal looking for a solution to your problem. The app is the agent that solves the problem for you. But the agent has its own motives, and can behave in ways you don't want.
Yelp was great until it decided it needed to become a gatekeeper for restaurants and coerce vendors into paying for ads.
The Wirecutter was decent until it got acquired by NYT and changed its style, with a much heavier focus on affilliate revenue and positioning itself as a a "perk" for NYT subscribers.
What is your revenue source (or planned source)? There have been a lot of product recommendation services over the years which started out great when they were free. But then they have to figure out how to turn a profit and get enshittified. Using AI on the back end doesn't solve anything.
we want to move in this direction:
- offer subscriptions for merchants and earn percentages on sales by implementing a direct checkout (but the fact that lumigo forms a partnership with brand X is not an indicator that the algorithm will be calibrated to suggest that product first..we want to maintain the absence of bias of any kind)
- sell some advertising space only around the search results that will not affect the user experience in any way or at most the related products suggested after a search
- create pro subscriptions for much more advanced features on products search
- offer a small part of our functionality via API to implement some aspects of this technology outside our ecosystem as well
and these are just some of the ideas we have in mind, but they make it clear that if I search for X the algorithm will return exactly X without any influence whether today, tomorrow, the day after tomorrow...
Sounds good. It will be interesting to see if you stick to that when you're running out of cash and a brand offers to pay more for preferred placement.
Yelp was great until it decided it needed to become a gatekeeper for restaurants and coerce vendors into paying for ads.
The Wirecutter was decent until it got acquired by NYT and changed its style, with a much heavier focus on affilliate revenue and positioning itself as a a "perk" for NYT subscribers.