Sibi
A social network where every post was shoppable and every poster was an affiliate. Sibi asked what happens when influence stops being a follower-count property.
2016
Founded
5
Platforms researched
2 years
Duration
Everyone
Is an affiliate
In 2016, seeing something on Instagram and actually buying it were two different worlds. The purchase path disappeared the moment you left the app, and the person who showed you the product got nothing for it. Influence was reserved for people with follower counts. Sibi was a social network built to fix both: every post linked to the product in it, anyone who bought from your feed earned you an affiliate commission, and Sibi took a cut of that commission. Everyone was an influencer. The minimum audience was one friend.
My Role
Co-founder. UX research, product vision, service safaris, user interviews.
Where judgment was required
The moments that shaped the product.
A research matrix mapping each platform against friction points in the discovery-to-purchase flow. Columns: platform. Rows: discovery quality, purchase path clarity, drop-off points, whether the poster is compensated. The gap between Instagram's discovery strength and its purchase path is visually stark.
Service safaris across five platforms before writing a single requirement
Before defining what Sibi should build, I ran service safaris across Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, Snapchat, Apple, Amazon, and Backcountry — not as a user, but as a researcher mapping every friction point between discovery and purchase. The goal was to find where the experience broke down, not to validate a pre-existing solution. The pattern that emerged was consistent: every platform optimized for discovery, none of them owned what happened next, and none of them paid the person who caused the sale. That gap was the product.
A diagram of the Sibi loop: a user posts a product, a friend buys through the post, the retailer pays an affiliate commission, the poster keeps most of it, Sibi keeps a cut. Next to it, the conventional influencer model with its follower-count gate, crossed out.
Drop the influencer threshold to zero
Affiliate programs in 2016 assumed a creator with an audience. Sibi's bet was that the audience size didn't matter — a friend recommending a jacket converts better than a stranger with a hundred thousand followers, and there are millions more of them. If every post was shoppable and every poster earned on the sale, the network's revenue scaled with participation rather than with celebrity. Sibi's cut of each commission was the business. The catch, which we understood and underestimated, was that the model only worked once the feed had enough people in it to generate sales. We had to build a social network before we could earn a dollar.
A timeline: Sibi (2016) on the left. To the right, Instagram Shopping (2018), Hummingbirds (founded 2019), and TikTok Shop affiliate (2023). Each later entry annotated with which half of Sibi's thesis it carried and what it did not have to build.
The market proved the model. It didn't prove a new network could own it.
The thesis held up in two different companies years later. TikTok Shop's affiliate program pays creators a commission on sales from their videos with almost no follower threshold — Sibi's loop, inside a feed with a billion people already in it. And Hummingbirds, a Des Moines startup that has raised over $10M, built a business on the claim that everyday small-following creators outperform macro-influencers — Sibi's other half, sold to brands instead of shoppers. Both validated the insight. Neither needed to build a social network from zero, which is the one thing Sibi had to do.
Process
Service safaris across Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, Snapchat, Apple, Amazon, Backcountry. Surveys and user interviews.
Mapped the social-to-purchase gap. Defined the model: a shoppable feed where every poster earns affiliate revenue and Sibi takes a cut.
Responsive web homepage, mobile app screens, email templates. Product shipped.
A new network needed density before the affiliate loop could pay. The incumbents' feeds already had it.
What Shipped
5+
Platforms researched
2016
Founded
2 years
Duration
Sibi shipped a responsive web product and mobile app across key user flows: Capture+Upload, Discover, Favorites, My Profile, and Photos. The research foundation was thorough — service safaris, user interviews, and surveys across the major social platforms. The market later validated the model twice over: TikTok Shop turned everyday users into paid affiliates inside its own feed, and Hummingbirds raised over $10M on the premise that small-following creators beat macro-influencers.
- Responsive web and mobile product shipped across core user flows
- Service safari research across five major social platforms documented the gap
- User interviews and surveys validated the core problem before building
- The everyone-is-an-affiliate model was later validated by TikTok Shop and by Hummingbirds, from opposite sides of the market
What I Learned
The idea was right. The structure was the variable. Sibi's model — a shoppable feed where anyone who influences a purchase gets paid — is now how TikTok Shop works, and the everyday-creator premise is now a funded company. What both of them had that Sibi didn't was a way around building a social network from zero. TikTok already owned the feed. Hummingbirds never built one; it borrowed Instagram's and sold the brand side instead. A standalone network has to reach density before an affiliate loop produces revenue, and density was the one thing a 2016 startup could not buy against Instagram. The research methodology held up. Service safaris across competitors before writing requirements is a transferable practice. The UX research PDF documents the foundation. What it cannot document is the lesson about which structural choice makes a correct idea unwinnable.
What this demonstrates
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