Many people love this time of year – family reunions, Winter Wonderland, and of course, presents. Even though Christmas is over now, there surely are many other special occasions to come.
For some, however, choosing gifts is an absolute nightmare. Selecting the perfect present can be extremely stressful. Whether you’re gift shopping for parents, children siblings, a significant other, or a colleague, ideally you’d put some thought into the gift. But for those of you struggling and stressing out, you can use Outdone.
https://twitter.com/OutdoneGifts/status/1469266743319224320
Advanced gift hunter
Launched this month, Outdone offers an AI-powered engine that recommends brands from which you can buy gifts. The recommendations are based on a questionnaire centered on the gift’s recipient.
The founders of Outdone conducted market research by surveying customers about their favorite apparel brands. From there, they used the obtained data to train and test the engine.
Outdone makes money through an affiliate business model. Brands don’t get paid to be featured on the engine, but every time an Outdone user makes a purchase from a featured brand through the platform, they get a commission.
Jon Nass, co-founder of @OutdoneGifts, a company built to take stress out of gift shopping. He oversaw the build & launch of Outdone’s AI-powered gift recommender.Outside of professional endeavors, he's passionate about snowboarding, photography & climbing.https://t.co/WmZzeBehdM
— IdeaMensch (@ideamensch) January 10, 2022
Testing it out
To see how the engine works, I tested it using my 20-year old female cousin as a prospective recipient. The Outdone engine asks for age and gender first, then some questions about their hobbies – whether they like the beach, yoga, parties, etc – and the area they live in. My cousin likes to stay home and go hiking, so it’s natural that she would prefer brands that care about the environment.
In the end, Outdone recommended Mink Pink, tentree, Fabletics, and The North Face. I’ve only heard of the last one previously, so it was certainly interesting to learn about the other three.
Outdone is based in the US, so a lot of recommendations are going to feature US brands, although it was also nice to see an Aussie brand like Mink Pink. But it’s a fairly new enterprise, and the engine learns more with every user that takes the questionnaire, so we might see brands from other countries in the future.
Photo credit: The feature image has been taken by Kira Auf Der Heide.
Sources: Product Hunt / Stephen Braunewell (Medium)
