Taste was founded by John Lin and Justin Messina, a marketing and engineering duo with 20 years of experience in personalization technology. 

Their experience in advertising exposed them to the tactics used by marketers to sway consumers. When news broke that many review sites were heavily manipulated (Source), they were inspired to design a technology that improves the experience of finding recommendations online. Taste was born from the simple belief that —”the best online reviews come from those who share your personal taste.”

Taste began as a passion project when the founders set out to build a personalized review platform for movies. Working nights and weekends, they released the first version in late 2016. The product quickly gained traction through Reddit and grew to a sizable community of cinephiles and data enthusiasts. In 2019, the company raised a $725K round and began to expand its technology into more categories across digital media and fashion retail.

With more than 1 billion consumers visiting sites like Yelp and IMDB, online reviews are now the #1 trusted source for purchase decisions among Millennials and Gen-Z. However, we believe these review sites do not offer a truly personalized experience. Why should two people with drastically different tastes see the same ratings and reviews?

Taste provides personalized reviews and recommendations based on each individual’s taste—it’s like the Netflix “Match%”, but imagine if it worked for just about anything.

Through our app and website,  users can now create a taste profile in seconds and begin seeing recommendations that are uniquely tailored to them.

The review and recommendation industry is mature and growing. Yelp saw $1.01B in revenue for 2019 (Source) and TripAdvisor saw $1.6B in revenue for 2019 (Source), with the majority of revenue coming from lead-generation. Other category-specific platforms like IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes, and Goodreads are housed under larger corporations such as Amazon and Comcast. Based on our extensive research, the average revenue per monthly-active-user across the industry ranges from $3-10.

In 2020, we began building one of the first shopping recommendation platforms for fashion, home, and furniture. This allows us to tap into a large space of the lead-gen business through affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing in the fashion alone is expected to reach $2.76B globally by 2021, growing at 10% YoY (Source).

In the past year, our organic user audience grew by 76% YoY, and the ROAS (return-on-ad-spend) reached 286%.

*Year to year growth measured solely based on the increase in organic users and is not a reference to changes in financial conditions.

Our movies and TV platform appears in the top search results in the App store, has over 500K registered users, receives about 5.8M screen views per month, and has over 3,500 five-star reviews. We’ve proven that people are willing to pay for better recommendations through our freemium model where we’ve had more than 4,000 paid users to date.

There are currently 30,000 users participating in our beta program for music, podcasts, games, as well as fashion and retail. We’ve also been featured by major press outlets including The Independent, Gizmodo, Stuff Magazine, IndieWire, PCMag.com and more.

Users create a taste profile by rating items. Our AI technology correlates the preferences of like-minded users and delivers personalized reviews and recommendations in the form of a Match%.

Our technology is designed to work across multiple categories, which means expanding into new categories is seamless; the books you like and your favorite restaurants might help inform the suggestions you get for what shows to binge!

Taste is uniquely positioned to generate revenue as an advertising platform, as well as directly from consumers through a freemium model.

At scale, for lead-gen and advertising, we benchmark at $20 APRU per active user per quarter, with an average order value of $133 and a 15% commission rate.

For in-app-purchase (freemium), we benchmark 3% subscription rate for active users, averaging $15 / year.

While we don’t compete directly with anyone review or discovery platform, the company's product overlaps with a wide range of other technology companies' products in the online review, shopping discovery, and social shopping spaces.

What sets us apart from other companies is our belief that a person should only need to manage one taste profile across the web. Our products are designed with a consistent experience, focusing only on personalized reviews, specifically from others who share your taste. This will allow us to build a moat by owning a user’s data across multiple categories.

Our vision is to simultaneously replace all review platforms and become the new standard for product discovery. By consolidating reviews and recommendations across categories and making them personalized, a person would only need to manage one profile across the web.

When it comes to reviews and recommendations, “trust” is often more important than accuracy. Our technical founding team not only has deep roots in predictive algorithms, but also has expertise in marketing and user experience. We have a track record of not only building great technology, but of creating experiences that build community and elicit unprecedented in-app activity, all of which contribute to the accuracy and trustworthiness of our recommendation platform.

At Taste, we believe that personalized reviews and recommendations are the future, and our technology and early traction makes us one of the leading candidates to deliver this to consumers. We’ve demonstrated not only the ability to create a mature product and acquire users, but we’ve also skillfully handled valuable data in a transparent, non-invasive manner. Our company is built on the goal of decentralizing data to get more fair recommendations—so it only makes sense for us to be a company funded by the crowd. In our previous round, we raised over $725K from 450+ early users. We are so excited for this opportunity to open our company up to new investors like you!