@darynakulya Thank you! We don't fully support tech-related products. But we've found Product Hunt to be a great source for accessories (for instance: chargers, phone batteries, etc.) and Suto definitely uses it to make decisions about those types of products.

@zedlander Thanks! When we first started thinking about this idea about a year ago – we wanted to first connect users to product category connoisseurs (folks who know too much about Headphones, or TVs, or Pens). So in order to test it, we put our personal phone numbers on a page and ran some ads on it to see if people would be interested in a service like this. As we went through more testing, we realized the fact that it was a conversation made it a lot easier to interact with our users and understand what their needs are. We've stuck with it ever since :)

@ngardideh didn't realize that's how you ended up with a chat interface. Definitely right way to go about customer development / validation :)

@darynakulya It was definitely weird putting out my our personal phone numbers at first, for sure – but totally worth it!

@jenniferdewalt uuuuusuallllyy about 4 hours. PH may be slowing us down a bit :)

@kelrabiey Totally understand :) That's less time than I usually spend researching significant product purchases.

@jenniferdewalt @kelrabiey If it's a brand new category we have no knowledge in before, it definitely takes longer. For a common category (like Headphones or TVs, for example) – we know how to judge products, where to find reviews and what inputs we need in order to make a recommendation. Those things speed it up (i.e. we'll always be faster than one person doing their own research, because this is our job :P).

@theblondedev Hi Maddie! And thanks!

@jkliks @kelrabiey Thanks Jeol, appreciate the support! We'd love it if you gave it a try and let us know what your experience is like :)

@saadhrizvi Thanks for the question! We currently don't make the purchase for people as the core of our product is our recommendations. Down the road, it could be a possibility for Suto to purchase products after a user decides that it's what they'll be going with.

@shwinda Yes - we do pull in reviews from the Wire Cutter (we love them), as well as several other places. Wire Cutter and those sites are great for recommendations on "the best product, for most people, in most use cases." - but people's needs will sometimes differ from the general use-cases. We do not write anything internally - but when we recommend a certain product, we'll store that it's been recommended for a specific use-case. Next time someone has that same use-case, that product will likely be recommended again because we know that the other person was happy with it.

@sylvain_dem Hey, thanks for your question! We're currently operating with an affiliate model (when there are retailers that support it for the products we recommend). We're planning on having AI on the recommendation side and maybe around the conversation as well (there's some NLP around the conversation already but it could be enhanced a lot with AI). Would love to hear how you would solve these problems as well :)

@ngardideh awesome! what is the conversion rate you're seeing from Suto's recommendations so far ? Definitely agree with AI/NLP :)

@sylvain_dem About 25-40% users tell us that they went with our recommendation. The affiliate conversion rate is much lower at the moment (but we have some ideas on how to increase it). Overtime, when Suto becomes more trust worthy and better at answering questions – then we'll be able to increase the recommendation conversion rate as well.

@flenguyen Thanks, appreciate the support! Do you trust friends with product recommendations?

@brunowong It's a balance between what your needs are, what's been reviewed well by experts, what's been reviewed well by actual purchasers, and what our users have picked before. For example - a website could review a toaster as the best of the year, but user reviews after a year show that it completely breaks down. We'll take into account multiple sources.

@bryantpeng When we first started thinking about what Suto would look like, Baymax actually came up as a great example of what we want it to feel like when you interacted with Suto. In a way, we want Suto to be Baymax's cousin that helps you purchase products (as opposed to keep you healthy). I think that thought stuck with us as we designed it :D

@weheartscott Hey – we're still looking into this. They sometimes block our messages and sometimes they let it go through, we've reached out to FB to see what's going on.

@rafizkv - We support anything that's not too subjective. Categories like Fashion or Furniture aren't currently supported.

@inantweets We currently don't have specific timelines, unfortunately. Sometime in the future!

@juecd_ Thanks for the question! You'll first have a conversation with Suto to figure out your exact needs for the product, and any preferences you have. Then it pulls in thousands of hours of external research on product categories (from articles, reviews, forums, expert opinions, etc.). It will try to find the product with the most unanimous positive reviews that fits your needs - so it's more biased towards you than towards a certain product. There are also humans helping power it - they provide expertise and extra research in certain products and are able to understand your context better than an AI. In the end, you'll get a few recommendations with reasoning as to why it's recommended for you specifically. And you can make your decision from there :)

@rustinrassoli there are a lot of affiliate programs that you can sign up for - and they'll just put you in a review process (like amazon, newegg, anything on comission junction, etc.). You never really get on the phone with them. We waited until we had some content on there before applying so the reviewer didn't think that we're some shady website. We only needed, like 50 questions or so and they just approved. An alternative is to just fake the content yourself in the beginning :) At a certain point, we'll have to talk to some retailers face-to-face, but by that point we'll [hopefully] have lots of growth already.