Kanga

co-founder, head of marketing & co-lead product

From 2015 to 2017, we built Kanga as the first social commerce mobile app. We were a bit early with this one, but many of the shopping features that are normal to us today were inspired by Kanga. Before you could buy products on Instagram, Kanga enabled every user to tag products from brands they love in their posts and get paid every time someone bought the product through their post or profile. No waiting for deals from each brands, anyone could tag products from any brand on the platform in our effort to democratize social marketing. Everyone could promote the brands you really love, before the term “influencer.” We reduced a 30+ click affiliate marketing concept to a 3 click in app purchase. Users could buy products tagged in a video without even pausing the video.
Each user also was given a digital shopfront on their profile where they could list their favorite products in custom categories and collections for followers to shop.

In 2017, we created a space in LA for creators of any level to come and make content to post on their Kanga profile. Unfortunately, we were still early to market back then and when Instagram rolled out the beta version of their shopping feature later that year, fundraising and growth became tough. After analyzing our runway, we had to close up shop and try to do best by our investors.