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TheFind: LifeStyle Shopping (Part 1)

Posted on Tuesday, Apr 3rd 2007

A few weeks back, Siva Kumar came by for a chat. Over a cup of tea, we brainstormed about the state of Shopping on the internet, and Siva shared with me the details of his new startup, TheFind. Over the next few segments, we will discuss the company in detail. Siva is a seasoned entrepreneur, so I encourage readers to watch how he explains his business, and learn from it.

SM: Please describe your business value proposition and your product.
SK: TheFind.com is a discovery shopping search engine optimized for lifestyle products such as clothing & accessories, home & garden, sports & outdoor, kids & family, and health & beauty.

Consumers today primarily use Web search engines such as Google and Yahoo for their shopping searches. While this has proven very lucrative for the search engines, the consumer experience is inefficient and sterile. The search results for shopping searches on these engines are intermixed text links from content sites and spam or affiliate sites along with retail web sites. The paid CPC text links on the side are more relevant but are not comprehensive – only the companies who pay show up. The text link themselves do not provide the needed answers so the consumer is forced to click through these text link search results and CPC advertisements onto the actual retail sites to then find the desired product. Multiple open browser windows are then needed to view the items form various sites to then decide on the purchase.

TheFind obviates the tedium and inefficiency of using Web search for shopping by delivering an experience optimized just for shopping search. TheFind comprehensively indexes all of the products available for sale from all of the online retail sites, then using derived knowledge of the shopping domain serves up just the right matching products ranked in order of best selling brands, styles and stores. The results display is very visual with large pictures of the products and resembles a customized shopping catalog constructed for the specific consumer search query. Additional search tools provide a way for consumers to search for items similar to the one that interests them and also for finding all of the stores that carry a particular product in order to decide the best place to buy the desired product. Shopping search with TheFind is fast, comprehensive and fun.

Think of TheFind.com as “Google meets Bloomingdales” – we have both the comprehensiveness and robust search technology wrapped in a simple UI like Google, and the visual appeal, stressing the trends, brands and styles of Bloomingdales for searching and then browsing and shopping for lifestyle/soft goods products.

(to be continued)

[Part 1]
[Part 2]
[Part 3]
[Part 4]
[Part 5]
[Product Review]