Every day, you see another product or story about how email makes work life more tedious and less productive. But what about your home life? Aren’t emails crucial when everyone needs to get together for Dad’s birthday? When old friends set out to plan a group trip? LinkHubb knows it’s important for people to share links with each other to help share information, but they set out to do it in a better way.
Sending off an email with your rows of flat text is no way to share information in a world that is so visual. For founder Daniel da Costa, this came to a head earlier in 2014 when – you guessed it, he was trying to collaborate on the purchase of a birthday gift for his dad. “So I thought, what if you could view the links in a visual format from multiple sources, with the ability to vote on each option and add comments without creating a pyramid of emails and links?”
After finding cofounder Stuart Sillitoe, who helped develop the concept and UX, and spending four months to build, LinkHubb was launched in late September. Monetization options outside of the basic, free version of LinkHubb include targeted advertising relevant to the posted Hubbs, Premium Hubbs, and a B2B option for white-labeling.
The product is simple and convenient because the Hubbs are still driven by a single link to a user’s Hubb, and the invited collaborators do not need accounts of their own. It’s build as a “private curation tool, one event at a time.” In this example, a Hubb user pasted the links to several different hotels in order to invite discussion and voting. The alternative uses are endless: wedding dress selection, recipe sharing, restaurant selection, house hunting, and any decision that requires reviewing information that lives online. da Costa says that the sharing and collaboration of all things wedding is one of the most popular uses for the platform right now, but businesses find that sharing articles and commenting on the details is another use case they have seen.