Are amateur beauty reviews the way of the future?
Judging by investment interest in Supergreat, a platform that hosts product reviews from regular beauty consumers, they might be.
The business has raised a $2.5 million seed round led by Thrive Capital and Third Kind. The round also includes angel investments from Rent the Runway cofounder Jenny Fleiss, Thrive Market cofounders Nick Green and Gunnar Lovelace, Tumblr founder David Karp, and Product Hunt founder Ryan Hoover.
The business was started by Tyler Faux and Dan Blackman in 2018 as a means for beauty fans to talk to one another about what products work for them.
"There are a lot of beauty products out there…and it's hard to know what's good and what's going to be good for you. It's a highly personal space and it's very visual and qualitative. Our users are able to be experts on what works for them," Faux said.
To use Supergreat, beauty enthusiasts type in which product they'd like to review, then create an up-to-60-second video with their thoughts. In exchange for creating and sharing reviews, users get coins that can be saved up to buy things like Bioderma Micellar Water (45 coins) or Sunday Riley Luna Sleeping Night Oil (160 coins).
Faux and Blackman met while working at Tumblr, and later, both worked at Tictail, the Swedish shopping marketplace. When they both went to video platform Huddle and saw how engaged the beauty community was there, they got the idea for Supergreat, Faux said.
"We took that group and we basically built a product around it. That became Supergreat," Faux said.
Right now, Supergreat links out to third-party web sites for users looking to buy products, and will continue to focus on community building. The company is "exploring a bunch of ways to make money," Blackman said. "We do have rewards on products where reviewers can use their coins…to try new products from brand partners and that's the only thing we've built today around revenue."
Later this year, Faux and Blackman expect to test their first commerce features, and plan to add taxonomy into the platform to allow users to look at more segmented reviews. "We want people to be able to discover products from people who look like them," Blackman said.
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