[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Lumona (YC W24) - Product search based on...
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Launch HN: Lumona (YC W24) - Product search based on Reddit and
YouTube reviews
Hey HN! We are Lumona (https://lumona.ai), a product search engine
that recommends products based on what people on social media--
Reddit and YouTube, for now--are saying about them. Rather than
going through SEO-filled Google results or adding site:reddit.com
to your search, we explain what makes a good product, show you the
best products, and back it up with Reddit and YouTube reviews about
the product. We're starting with skincare products (more on that
below) and plan to expand from there. Here's a demo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4kKjW2YkZ4&lc=Ugzl94GP9SDBO... We
started off with skincare because, growing up, we struggled with
acne but had no clue what skincare products could actually help us.
Going down the rabbit hole of endlessly scrolling
r/SkincareAddiction and watching countless hours of videos about
cystic acne was not fun. Lumona's skincare search index was built
by first scraping the internet for listings of skincare products,
along with their ingredient lists, through a combination of SERP,
Amazon's API, and web page crawling. We then use a fine-tuned
Mistral LLM to parse through a large number of Reddit threads and
YouTube transcripts to extract opinions made by users, along with
the context in which the opinions were made. These opinions are
then matched with any relevant products through another fine-tuned
LLM that looks at an opinion and any products that have a high
cosine similarity as that of the opinion's subject and decides
whether that opinion is relevant to any of those products. Using a
Mistral-7B FT trained on GPT-4 outputs allowed us to parse through
hundreds of thousands of Reddit threads in a simple way with just
hundreds of dollars of compute. If your query relates to a
specific situation (e.g. "cleansers for my son who has inflamed
acne on his forehead"), we search semantically through the opinions
of Redditors and YouTubers to retrieve the products recommended by
those who have dealt with a similar situation. If your query
relates to a specific product (e.g. "iunik centella gel"), we
instead go through the product listings themselves to return you
the relevant products. We also use an LLM to analyze your search
query to tell you what ingredients or effects are preferable for
your skin concern.For example, if you searched for "inflamed
forehead acne", properties like "Oil-Control" and "Azelaic Acid"
which are good for dealing with inflamed acne would be explained to
you, and results containing those properties would be boosted and
tagged in our results. You can also try out searches like "korean
cleansers under $20 with Cica" to filter for certain ingredients
and price points. While we think we've built a product search that
would be pretty helpful for our teenage (and current!) selves,
there are many improvements we'd like to make, such as getting
opinions from Tiktok and other social media platforms and making
our opinion extraction process more robust for edge cases (e.g. by
using OCR, video transcription tools). We're also planning on
allowing our users to upload their own reviews and content and to
expand our search across more products. The long-term potential is
to be a go-to product for anyone looking for what other people
think about anything subjective (products, restaurants, b2b
products, vacation planning, etc.). We believe that the entire
discovery experience can be revolutionized by making it as easy as
searching on Google to find out what the people you care about
think about something. On the individual level, we want to make
sharing your opinions with your friends and the world as easy as
posting a picture on Instagram. For now, if you have any skincare
needs, whether it be to solve a skin concern, get rid of an
annoying pimple, or just to find a good sunscreen, please give us a
try: https://lumona.ai (We are an Amazon and Stylevana affiliate.)
We'd love to hear your feedback on our search engine, whether that
be how the skincare search performs, what you think is missing,
what products you want to see there, or any technical suggestions!
Author : philena
Score : 46 points
Date : 2024-03-29 19:04 UTC (3 hours ago)
| kaiomagalhaes wrote:
| this idea is awesome, I hope you get into software products
| philena wrote:
| thank you! we've been wanting this as well while building this
| out haha, will do :)
| gumptionary wrote:
| I understand why you went for a product search engine (gotta
| monetize) but I think one of the reasons mining reddit for intel
| is so helpful is you aren't always being sold a product.
|
| For example: I recently turned to reddit because I was looking
| for a foam roller to resolve some IT band issues from running,
| and ended up finding a stretching routine that has fixed my
| problem without buying anything.
|
| Either way, I think this is really cool and bypassing the
| nonsense that google is becoming is a winning path.
| philena wrote:
| thank you! i completely agree -- i often go to reddit when
| looking for tv show recommendations because of its honest
| advice from the community (maybe it's because of its
| anonymity?)
|
| we definitely want to expand this to outside product search and
| be more of a general recommendation/opinion search (e.g. in
| your case, finding out what people are saying about how to fix
| band issues from running), interested as to what you would
| think about this :)
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| This is great. You can then start seeding products which give you
| a high cut and then proclaim them as the "best". Basically what
| Wired and all do now but without the whole article bit and you
| can claim "knowledge of the public".
| philena wrote:
| that's an interesting idea -- we have been seeing this play out
| successfully as well (like you mentioned, Wired + sponsored
| youtube videos + etc). though that would be useful for
| profitability, we're afraid that may compromise our
| reputability as being the knowledge of the public. instead
| we're looking for ways where, when we expand to more opinions
| and reviews, we can robustly filter out those that seem
| disingenuous / are sponsored. curious as to what you think
| about this "filtering" out + if you have any ideas of going
| about this :)
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| As long as you don't show blatantly horrible products, your
| reputation will be fine.
| dawalker wrote:
| we'll do our best :)
| ravroid wrote:
| Cool concept. Not relevant to me in its current state being
| limited to skin care products, but would love to use something
| like this for things like supplements or other products where I
| otherwise have to sift through Amazon reviews & reddit threads.
| dawalker wrote:
| Thanks and makes sense. Supplements+general health and beauty
| will probably be one of the first things that get added outside
| of skincare. Would be interested in seeing the reviews as well
| for those considering how supplements are sold+regulated.
| huevosabio wrote:
| This is so cool. I already do this in a very ad-hoc way. Will
| definitely try it!
|
| My only concern is that once Reddit reviews get used at scale for
| product discovery, we will see an inflow of fake and paid reviews
| in the comments. This will further pollute Reddit and probably
| drive discussions to forums closed from the public eye, e.g.
| Discord.
|
| Obviously, this is not your fault at all, it's just the market
| dynamics at hand.
|
| Anyway, let me try it!
| dawalker wrote:
| Thanks, we really appreciate it! This is something we've been
| thinking about too. One of the things that we've noticed is
| that video reviews have a lot more effect on us than almost all
| text reviews, which are harder to fake (for now). We're
| thinking that letting people upload their own video reviews
| will help solve this problem as long as we can detect video
| deepfakes, but that's definitely not a complete solution (like
| you said though, not sure anything is).
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| tbf it's common for YouTube uploaders to be paid to advertise
| products that barely work
| dawalker wrote:
| lol true, the state of youtube ads is pretty bad nowadays
| (although the raid shadow legends spam is gone from my feed
| now). Just places more emphasis on how much people trust
| the individual channel.
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| > _My only concern is that once Reddit reviews get used at
| scale for product discovery, we will see an inflow of fake and
| paid reviews in the comments_
|
| This is already happening.
|
| _A lot_ of product-related posts on Reddit are made by
| marketing agencies, PR firms, SEO consultants, etc. There 's
| also a thriving secondary market for "high karma" Reddit
| accounts, which are bought and sold with ease. Unlike old-
| fashioned forums, which were difficult for outsiders to crack,
| Reddit is _easy_ to game and basically it 's already the most
| astroturfed place on the internet. Making it the basis of a
| product search system can only make it worse.
| dawalker wrote:
| Very true. It's interesting how Reddit has maintained a
| relatively high trust within most people though. It's also
| worth noting that while this is happening, there aren't many
| other places that most people go to where the site is mainly
| text-based and there is a higher level of trust that I know
| of. Personally, I'd trust Reddit over a random blog from a
| Google search, but that isn't a high bar.
|
| All of that being said, I think this will be a much bigger
| problem with misinformation generally on all of the internet
| as AI gets better, especially considering the election later
| this year.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| > It's interesting how Reddit has maintained a relatively
| high trust within most people though
|
| Maybe the PR companies moved up a level in the meta-game -
| Don't talk up your product, talk up Reddit itself, _then_
| go on Reddit to talk up your product.
| dawalker wrote:
| They're getting smarter for sure, maybe some shadow
| marketing going on with the IPO too lol
| addandsubtract wrote:
| As with anything on reddit, "the real ______ is always in the
| comments." You get the best advice in place you expect it the
| least.
| dawalker wrote:
| Great point. While reddit may be astroturfed, all it takes
| is one good comment.
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| Thing is, there aren't many marketing firms that don't
| have (or can't buy on a work-for-hire basis)
| upvote/downvote networks. It's trivial to promote
| comments in ways that look organic. It's equally trivial
| to downvote commercially harmful comments into oblivion.
|
| What's more, Reddit posts are usually actively discussed
| only for a day or two. But votes can be cast, and new
| comments can be added, for months. One strategy is to
| wait until the conversation has completely died down,
| then hijack it with new comments that somehow seem to get
| as many votes as they need to rise to the top. When, a
| year later, somebody digs up that thread on Google,
| they'll see the promoted comments first.
|
| Reddit has severe structural flaws that are, I think,
| unfixable. In making the upvote/downvote thing a kind of
| game, and in enabling easy throwaway accounts whose votes
| are weighed in the same way as those of the longstanding
| accounts of regular commenters, they've naturally made
| their forum easy for commercial interests to game.
| chasebank wrote:
| Already happening? Here's a clip from an astroturfing firm in
| the year 2000 for Sprite and other clients. They called it
| 'under the radar marketing' back then. I'd wager 95% of all
| product recommendations on Reddit, and HN for that matter,
| are placed by people with agendas.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0z0a4SLIsM
| avsavani wrote:
| Results doesn't finish loading for me, I will try again in few
| hours, I am really curious to see how it compare to generalized
| search engines like Perplexity and You.com
| philena wrote:
| sorry about the loading issue -- we'll look into that right
| now!
| QAComet wrote:
| This is a neat product, and I plan on trying out some of the
| recommendations for sunscreen.
|
| During my journey using the app there were a few things I noticed
|
| 1) It seems like the intermediate page is generating text from
| the LLM as well, which makes the whole process quite slow on my
| machine. It took maybe 10 seconds before the loader finished
| displaying the text. If I try and perform the same query again on
| the same browser, the results are somewhat quicker, maybe
| 700-800ms of wait time, but this still seems too slow. Once I ran
| the query five or so times, it was as quick as the demo queries
| on the front page.
|
| 2) Consistent results: If I use the same query on separate
| browsers, I'm given different products as the "Top Recommended
| Product", which seems odd. I know LLMs are stochastic, but the
| feed starting with the "Top Recommended Product" probably
| shouldn't have stochasticity. This problem opens up some
| interesting ML cans of worms, but I believe these issues could be
| overcome.
|
| 3) Another issue was if I wanted to scroll in the left column
| while the right column was still loading, the scrolling was very
| janky. This was an issue on firefox, but it took quite a long
| time for the app to be functional (> 10s)
|
| 4) Perhaps you could move the search bar and the logo to the top,
| so the logo is on the top left corner and the search bar takes
| space to the right of it. This way there aren't overlapping
| elements, I'm sure there's some annoying edge cases there which
| would frustrate users
|
| 5) For negative ingredients (and maybe any of the ingredients) it
| would be nice if you kept track of an ingredient database with
| references. I want to know _why_ some ingredient is bad for my
| skin, and what I could expect.
|
| 6) If a product has many distributors, my first through was the
| arrow scrolling through products was a slider for the distributor
| list. I wonder if there's a nice way to differentiate the arrow
| further, so its functionality is more apparent.
|
| Anyway, this is an excellent proof of concept, I'm excited to see
| how this product develops.
| qiongzhouh wrote:
| Thanks for trying it out!
|
| As for the performance issues, we're looking into several
| things that could speed things up - Fine-tuning a small LLM for
| the results on the intermediate page and deploying on a
| provider with higher throughput and time to first token -
| Admittedly, there there are quite a few SQL query / index
| optimizations we need to make on the backend, along with making
| parts of our pipeline async - The frontend itself is also not
| very performant right now, but we're working on it.
|
| We cache previous calls to the API, so that's why the demo
| queries or queries others have tried before you are faster.
| I'll ship a change that makes the results more consistent but
| not fully consistent later today.
|
| As for the ingredients, citing sources is definitely a next
| step. In the meantime, I recommend looking up the ingredients
| that catch your eye on a place like EWG Skin Deep if it's a
| huge concern for you (I used to do this to make sure my
| ingredients weren't comedogenic for acne).
|
| Great point about the distributor list UI, we'll think about a
| better way to show it!
| hypercube33 wrote:
| How do you deal with bot posts to push products on either
| platform skewing the reviews?
| qiongzhouh wrote:
| For now, we're excluding Reddit posts that are clearly
| automated and making sure the YouTube content is not sponsored,
| which you are required to disclose by the YouTube ToS.
|
| We'll have to dig deeper into not to filter out spammy reviews.
| I can imagine analyzing a user's post history or detecting if
| content was clearly GPT written, but it's hard to really tell.
| I know there things like Amazon review analyzers out there, but
| we'll have to learn more about this. I wonder if the people of
| HN have any suggestions on this front.
|
| There'll probably be a lot AI generated reels that look like
| they're from real people online soon too. I wonder what
| platforms like Tiktok and YouTube will do about this. If this
| ends up being a huge , we can probably try to use ML methods to
| check if the video was filmed in the real world
| hubraumhugo wrote:
| We've tried to build this in the past with Looria.com, where we
| aggreagted and summarized reviews from the most trusted sources,
| e.g. Reddit: https://www.looria.com/reddit
|
| Couple of challenges:
|
| - Astroturfing is everywhere
|
| - The data sources, especially social media, become more
| protective with their data
|
| - Monetizing this is super hard. As an aggregator, you're always
| just the intermediate. The glory times of ads and affiliate
| marketing are over.
|
| Vetted.ai is working on something similar and they raised $14M in
| 2022. For all consumers, I really hope one of you will succeed!
| nextworddev wrote:
| Curious - what is your bearish case for profitability of
| affiliate marketing?
| p10_user wrote:
| people can find multiple ways to get to the same product.
| once your way starts charging they will find another way.
| dawalker wrote:
| Is the implication here that you need to charge and users
| will leave you once you do? If you can make a product
| that's significantly better, then you should be able to
| charge. The thing I'd note for affiliate marketing as a
| business model is that for it to generate significant
| revenue, you need to have a lot of traffic while other
| business models can generate that much faster
| (subscriptions) or make you money based off of that traffic
| (ads) instead of how many products are purchased.
| robryan wrote:
| Over time affiliate programs like the Amazon one have become
| a lot less generous. On the other hand though from running an
| ecommerce site I'd be happy to work with an affiliate like
| this that isn't just a coupon website that basically adds no
| value.
| dawalker wrote:
| That's what I've heard as well. Also, the lag to when you
| actually get paid is super painful.
|
| Also curious - how do you think about affiliates as someone
| who runs an ecommerce site? Are there any reservations
| about whether services like us take search traffic or ads
| revenue?
| dawalker wrote:
| Thanks! Super interesting how many different approaches there
| are to this problem. Definitely encountered these challenges,
| and we think there's solutions to them eventually that we have
| to build towards. I'll drop a message sometime, would love to
| chat :)
| mkchoi212 wrote:
| Are you paying for Reddit's API or did y'all find a way around
| it?
| p10_user wrote:
| they're either paying or it was a gift from sama
| dawalker wrote:
| would love to say that it was a gift from sama, but he hasn't
| blessed us :(
| qiongzhouh wrote:
| We are not paying for Reddit's API to get our data, there are
| some really good and complete and publically available dumps of
| Reddit data available online. We are in contact with the folks
| at Reddit, which is of course a YC company, so they're aware of
| what we're doing.
| shaoner wrote:
| Love the idea, my only concern is how to trust that at some point
| you're not going to include sponsored products?
| qiongzhouh wrote:
| As a user of our product, I'd really hate it if we were
| recommending crappy products. I suspect users will also feel
| the same and this thought will hold us accountable.
| pj_mukh wrote:
| Yo, can I take a picture (of my skin) and you can suggest some
| solutions? Multi modal plz!
| dawalker wrote:
| For sure! We'll work on that in the next couple of updates,
| it's been on our minds for a while.
| frankdenbow wrote:
| Nice work! I kind of do this with google and reddit already
| sometimes, as a well written explanation for why someone likes a
| particular item plus the upvotes do help me make decisions.The
| format looks pretty good, woudl just like to have a view of all
| the products at once in a comparison if possible.
|
| The concept of a search that is multi layered is something I see
| The Browser Company and others doing to make your one search a
| bit more impactful, so kudos for going in that direction as well.
| I would do restaurants and search availability as well.
|
| More thoughts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKFDuZsdXrc
| dawalker wrote:
| Thanks! We just watched your review together in the living
| room, and we really appreciate your thoughts+detailed feedback.
| The list of items is an interesting idea that we'll think about
| how to fit into the ux. Comparisons is definitely something we
| want to add later down the line as well.
|
| The idea of restaurants, like you mentioned, would be really
| great to have. It's not an immediate priority, but once we get
| Tiktok/short form videos on the site and integrate it well,
| it'd be really exciting to make and use.
| CSMastermind wrote:
| I sat on the before we begin page for a long time waiting for
| something to happen before I realized nothing would:
|
| https://imgur.com/a/cvT1iF8
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