Benable

The word-of-mouth platform growing through word-of-mouth.

For a handful of our investments at Footwork, we’ve purposely chosen with the company to remain quiet about them for some time. This gives the team the chance to build out of the spotlight, while they tweak and iterate on the product and on distribution. This has been the case with our investment in Benable, which we’ve been patiently waiting to talk about publicly. And we feel now’s the right time, with the product experiencing breakout growth, to share Tony and the Benable team’s story with the world.

A screenshot from Benable’s homepage.

Why did we get so excited?

Word of mouth drives one quarter of the global economy. Billions of dollars change hands every day because someone says “you have to try this!”— whether it be a restaurant or hotel, a set of products to buy, or a service provider to contract. Offline, recommendations have always been the most powerful driver of commerce. But figuring out how to bring those human recommendations online has remained stubbornly unsolved.

That’s where Benable comes in. Benable is the horizontal recommendation platform that makes it easy for anyone to compile and share what they love — products, places, services, and more. Today, over 500,000 users across 150 countries have shared more than 10 million recommendations on Benable, from local coffee shops to travel itineraries, from trusted skincare to go-to realtors. Someone adds a new recommendation every two seconds. And the growth the product has experienced recently has been remarkable: 50% month-over-month, almost entirely from… word-of-mouth 😉.

A recent chart of Benable’s hockey stick growth in monthly active users.

How did Benable get here?

Benable’s founder, Tony Staehelin, spent years in the startup idea maze reflecting on what to build next after the last company he co-founded, Teespring, went through a real startup rollercoaster. Once upon a time, Teespring was a Silicon Valley darling. It grew from $5M to $150M in GMV and 70 to 200 employees in a year, raised capital at a $650M valuation, and then it ran into headwinds, finding it very difficult to get off the drug of chasing its own growth curve and course-correct. Tony witnessed the downsides of hyper-growth without an enduring product, and was determined to do things differently as he embarked on the Benable journey. He spent two years outside the spotlight, interviewing people about their biggest problems - strangers he would seek out on Nextdoor and Indeed, need-finding in a way we’ve never seen. He became fascinated by how great recommendations travelled via word of mouth and the role that plays in daily life. Tony studied why previous attempts at recommendation networks had failed, and methodically crafted a product that felt magical from the first interaction.

We were fortunate to meet Tony through our good friend, co-investor, and Tony’s former Teespring colleague, Jack Altman, and got very excited about his DNA as a founder, the magnitude of the opportunity Benable’s going after, and the early signs of product-market fit. This week the company is opening up and doing its first-ever press, already at significant scale — more here from Ann Gehan in The Information. Footwork led Benable’s $11M Seed round, and the company’s investors also include Jack, venture firms Third Prime and PJC, and angels like Scott Belsky, Walker Williams, and Cat Lee.

The opportunity in AI, the creator economy, and beyond

In the age of AI, it feels like the experience that makes us human is at an all-time premium. While people are turning to AI to get help, the validation and authenticity humans bring from their lived experiences seems even more valuable to capture. And the desire for this is showing up in Benable’s usage and growth. Built for the creator era, Benable is tapping into the worldwide surge in the number of people sharing content, and brands funneling spend into the creator economy. On Benable, anyone can create and share recommendations, not just creators with a massive following. And all users can monetize their content along the way, via the more than 35,000 brands that partner with Benable today, like Etsy, Ulta Beauty, Target, VRBO, Nike, and TripAdvisor. Brands pay creators whenever people shop, and use Benable as a way to find talented authentic voices passionate about their products.

To get started with Benable yourself, make your first list here, and check out some of my favorites: feeling crafty, baby essentials, sustainable restaurants, and London with kids (by me!).

Benable’s going after a massive opportunity — the ubiquitous social network for recommendations. A place where the $6 trillion of annual word-of-mouth commerce globally is organized, searchable, discoverable, and monetized . A generational company on the scale of Pinterest — but broader, deeper, and more authentic. We couldn’t be more excited to work with Tony and the team to realize this vision.