Friday Q&A: Snipi CEO and Founder Andre Golsorkhi

Due to editorial limitations, we’re running our Friday Q&A a day late. Our sincerest apologies.
Three years ago, Midtown Village-based design firm Omeda Design + Technology, led by CEO and Founder Andre Golsorkhi sat down to a brainstorming session that led to an interesting new online shopping tool.
Snipi which lets users share products, videos, photos and more through an attractive drag and drop interface is attempting to finish what Digg and Delicious started: building consumer profiles created by analyzing the gap between customer purchases online.
“Take ‘X’ user, currently looking for a product for a niece or nephew. They buy it, and then what?,” Golsorkhi asks in a telephone interview with Technically Philly. “They’d drop off Snipi and then two weeks later they’d come back looking for the next thing. But they’re not inactive online.”
Snipi launched a public beta in early May and though growth has been modest the company has seen more than 5,000 registrations since, Golsorkhi says it is steady.
For consumers, Snipi is an attractive service, though a bit buggy and still in beta. Its slick interface more than makes up for the hiccups, and with a wide offering of platforms, which include a Firefox toolbar, an iPhone app and more to come, it seems a promising endeavor.
Technically Philly spoke to Golsorkhi to see what the service was all about, what’s in store for Snipi, and why he thinks Philly is a great place for startups.
What is the business model? Is the company making money from affiliate links?
Snipi was developed and began as a shopping tool, but it’s grown into something much bigger. Publishers now only have access to readers on their own sites. By building a tool where everything is aggregated in one location, we can offer high level reporting information and analytics to publishers, retailers and so on. Today, our only revenue stream is in price comparison.
When did you realize that Snipi could be something bigger than a shopping tool?
Building a good profile of a user is not just about what they’re shopping for. They’re heavily invested in the research process and then they’re done. There’s a gap between that peak and the next thing they buy. Before researching bikes to purchase, they are watching videos about biking, Sniping photos about biking. It’s important to build a profile of what they’re interested in and what they’re up to next. I want to note that we’re not IDing any individual person.
What is the end goal of creating these profiles?
I think that what we want to build is a discovery engine, a destination for users to discover content. With the profiles that we’re able to build, we can start to offer new products, new videos, new news articles, that are sent from other users based on the aggregation of all these interests.
How have you been marketing the product?
We’ve been reaching out to blogs with specific kinds of products and having a quick conversation with them. The biggest gap right now in their business model is that there’s no way of really engaging people other than commenting. What we want to do is allow the bloggers to create streams that are relative to the content they’re writing and allow their users to contribute content that are related to the content.
What’s next for Snipi?
Internet Explorer and Safari toolbars will be released in the next two weeks. And we’re opening it up so users can build streams around any interest by end of next week.
Why are you Technically Philly?
I want to build a startup that has national recognition and want it to be known as a Philly startup. Everyone goes off to New York or San Francisco and thinks they have to go there to achieve success. I have an advantage over those guys because I’m not competing with them. [A venture capital firm in Philly] can get to know me better because there’s less people standing around me.
Every Friday, Technically Philly brings an interview with a leader or innovator in Philadelphia’s technology community. See others here.