August 13th, 2024

Launch HN: Shaped (YC W22) – AI-Powered Recommendations and Search

Tullie and Dan from Shaped are developing a semantic recommendation platform for marketplaces, enhancing user experiences by integrating data sources and optimizing real-time data management, showing success with various clients.

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Launch HN: Shaped (YC W22) – AI-Powered Recommendations and Search

Tullie and Dan from Shaped are developing a semantic recommendation and search platform aimed at enhancing user experiences for marketplaces and content companies. They have created a sandbox for users to explore demo models and evaluate results interactively. The platform addresses the challenges posed by the overwhelming amount of online content, which complicates users' ability to find relevant information. Shaped aims to empower technical teams to build advanced recommendation systems by integrating directly with various data sources, managing real-time streaming, and ensuring data quality. The platform leverages cutting-edge models for language, image, and tabular data, facilitating the extraction of value from unstructured data. Real-time optimization is a core feature, essential for the performance of recommendation systems. Shaped has already demonstrated success with clients like Outdoorsy, DribbleUp, and Overlap, reporting significant increases in conversions and user engagement. Tullie and Dan bring extensive experience from their previous roles in AI research and product development, and they are eager to receive feedback on their platform.

- Shaped is a semantic recommendation and search platform for marketplaces and content companies.

- The platform integrates with various data sources and simplifies real-time data management.

- It utilizes advanced models to enhance the extraction of value from unstructured data.

- Shaped has reported significant improvements in user engagement and conversions for its clients.

- The founders have strong backgrounds in AI research and product development.

AI: What people are saying
The comments on the article about Tullie and Dan's semantic recommendation platform reveal several key concerns and interests from the community.
  • Many commenters are interested in the pricing structure and suggest providing a pricing calculator to facilitate decision-making.
  • Questions arise regarding the personalization capabilities of the platform and how it handles data ingestion and model monitoring.
  • There is a focus on the quality measurement of recommendations and the potential for users to manipulate these metrics.
  • Comparisons are made to existing solutions like Algolia and Vespa, indicating a competitive landscape.
  • Several users express congratulations and interest in the platform's evolution since its previous release.
Link Icon 12 comments
By @candiddevmike - 6 months
This seems like a tough build vs buy sell. For a lot (most?) companies, the search/recommendation system isn't necessarily optimized for the customer's search. Instead, it's a way to maximize revenue via preferred placement or inject ads. This almost always leads to a gigantic if/else chain of bespoke business analyst driven decisions for the marketplace.

How are you going to allow folks to influence the system? Or do you see your system integrated behind their pseudo-recommendation engine?

By @AnujNayyar - 6 months
Congratulations on the launch. We've weighed up algolia, in house, type-sense etc and so I'd would have been very keen to know more, but asking for us to integrate before knowing the pricing is a tough sell.

Would highly recommend having at least an estimated pricing calculator so we can determine if its worth our time to install.

By @poojasengupta - 6 months
Congrats (from a fellow Melbournian) on the launch. I used to work at Coles and Catch leading their online businesses, search and product recommendations was a big part of it. We had over tens of thousands of SKUs. It's harder when trying to do it with dynamic inventory locations and quantities (Coles had over 850 online stores that my team managed). We were looking at Algolia but it wasn't quite there yet (back then). I don't think anyone has solved for that as yet (I left Coles >5 years ago). Curious to hear how you would approach it.

These days I'm the founder of a circular economy marketplace for South Asian ethnic clothing and items - PurvX. The current search is terrible (due to the low-code platform it's on), will be keeping Shaped on my radar when we re-platform.

By @philip1209 - 6 months
How do you measure quality? And, can users game that quality?

I think that's the hardest thing on any recommendation or search system. It's really hard to do without using money as a neutral measure of value. And, without a good measure of quality - it's unclear that the system is optimizing the right metrics (without cannibalizing others).

By @jvans - 6 months
How do you personalize to the specific signals of the product, do they ingest into your infrastructure? What happens if a customer discovers a bug in a feature they're ingesting, how do they have control of retrains/pinning model versions? Who handles monitoring, the customer or your service?
By @astronautas - 6 months
How does this compare to Vespa? If the key difficulty in scaling search is infra as you say, Vespa is an interesting alternative.
By @sidcool - 6 months
What are the underlying ML models? Open source or custom trained?
By @yding - 6 months
Congrats on the launch!
By @thierrydamiba - 6 months
What vector database do you use under the hood?
By @hajrice - 6 months
How does it compare to Algolia?
By @deepskyai - 6 months
Congrats Dan and Tullie - and the rest of the team. Great to see AUSTRALIA and particularly Melbourne (formerly known as the most liveable city in the world) represented. Is there anything different now compared to what you released ~18 months ago? Or just launching on HN now?
By @gk1 - 6 months
Congrats (from Pinecone) on the launch! The e-commerce and media recommendation space desperately needs an AI-based solution without the lead-filled baggage of legacy search or recommender systems.

> 100M+ Users I assume you mean 100M+ end-users have interacted with a site or product that uses your technology. The way it's phrased sounds like you're saying Shaped itself has 100M+ users which of course it doesn't. Consider replacing that with "100M+ interactions" or something.