The Most Effective Marketing Doesn't Look Like Marketing

01 /The Concept

ShopMy just raised $70M in a round that crowned it a unicorn at a $1.5B valuation.

The startup set out to change the future of e-commerce through "curated commerce" – building a marketplace where products can be discovered not just through search bars, categories, and filters, but through recommendations from trusted people with taste worth following.

Click on a curator's name and you get their personal list of recommended products. The lists are extensive enough that ShopMy's AI probably helps curators organize and surface items – but the curator is ultimately responsible for what goes in.

Find any item on the marketplace and you can immediately see how many curators have endorsed it and who they are – which is a surprisingly strong purchasing signal.

Beyond individual curators, the platform also has "circles" – groups of multiple curators organized around a shared identity. There are circles of dermatologists and professional makeup artists advising on skincare and cosmetics, founders of fashion brands recommending unusually interesting pieces, and media communities like the Dear Media podcasting network, which was [covered here](/review/vechnyj-dvigatel-dlja-masshtabirovanija) some time ago.

Users can build their own circles by adding curators they like.

ShopMy has assembled 185,000 curators of every variety, and the platform and its users have created more than 30,000 circles.

The marketplace drives $1 billion in purchases annually. It turned solidly profitable in 2024. Revenue has been growing at 200% per year.

02 /Why It Matters

ShopMy started life as a platform for independent fashion designers, cosmetics sellers, and other creative people to build their own online stores.

But then came the promotion problem – these creators needed to market their stores somehow. So the ShopMy founders built a shared portal aggregating products from across those stores.

That led to the next problem: how do you navigate a portal like that in a way that actually feels good for users?

The standard approach used by most marketplaces has two components:

- Build an algorithm that surfaces items similar to what users have already bought.

- Let sellers pay for ads to push their items into those algorithmic recommendations.

Despite being universal, this approach falls short in two meaningful ways:

- Paid ads push items people didn't ask for and mostly don't want.

- Algorithmic "similar items" recommendations trap users in a loop, never surfacing anything surprising or genuinely new.

Anyone who uses Spotify has felt this – after a while, its auto-generated playlists start cycling through the same tracks on repeat.

Most regular listeners eventually stop engaging with those auto-generated playlists. Music recommendations from friends or random people online reliably surface things that algorithmic radio never would.

Word-of-mouth is simply powerful. Studies suggest 88% of consumers trust personal recommendations from other people more than any other factor when making purchase decisions – from "want it" all the way to "which one to buy."

Friend recommendations are most effective, but they're not the only kind that works. A recent study found that on average, 30% of Americans have purchased something after seeing it recommended by a creator online.

- Women are more susceptible to this than men – 36% versus 21%.

- And younger consumers are more susceptible than older ones: 41% of people aged 18–29, 33% in the 30–49 bracket, and 24% for 50–64.

So the ShopMy founders applied this same logic to their portal – letting visitors make choices guided by personal opinions rather than algorithms. They made it their headline statement, printed at the top of the homepage: "Products chosen by fanatics, not algorithms."

As a co-founder puts it: "Word-of-mouth is the most powerful marketing force in e-commerce. We built the infrastructure to scale it."

"Scaling" here means those hundreds of thousands of curators, among whom almost any visitor can find people whose taste resonates with them. From that curator, they get a continuous stream of interesting – and often unexpected – products that the curator found on their own.

03 /Opportunities

A [recent review](/review/sdelaj-idealnyj-marketplejs-v-kotorom-ne-nuzhno-iskat) covered a startup that built a "marketplace unlike a marketplace" for hiring – one where you don't search at all, because the startup's AI agents do the searching and matching for you after voice conversations with both sides.

That triggered a thought about the concept of an "ideal system" from TRIZ theory: an ideal system is one that doesn't exist, but all of its functions get performed. And that's exactly what's happening here.

Today's ShopMy follows the same logic but in marketing – declaring that "we believe the most persuasive marketing shouldn't look like marketing."

Because ShopMy promotes products not through familiar push advertising, but through curator word-of-mouth. Curators are chosen by users. Curators choose products they actually stand behind. The marketing, as such, is invisible – yet the product promotion is real.

The broader trend is exactly this: marketing without marketing. Because the effectiveness of traditional direct advertising has dropped sharply.

Even the current obsession with short-form video as a product promotion tool fits the same trend. Those videos primarily try to entertain first – and only slip in a brand mention or product reference somewhere on the side.

So the direction here is clear: build tools that promote products without traditional advertising, and platforms that help others do the same.

ShopMy is one implementation of this in e-commerce. But the same principle has countless executions across different sectors.

Swiss startup Hypt ([related review](/review/rekomendacii-drajvjat-prodazhi)) raised $2M in September on a platform that incentivizes customers to send personal product recommendations to their friends – nudging them to follow the same purchase path.

Deeto ([related review](/review/novaya-era-b2b-prodazh-klienty-klientam)) raised $12.5M in July on a platform that helps B2B software companies connect existing users with potential new customers – so "existing customers" can personally demonstrate successful implementations to "prospects." Far more persuasive than any case study or ad.

Duel ([related review](/review/novyj-samyj-bolshoj-kanal-privlechenija-pokupatelej)) raised $16M in September on a platform that helps brands turn existing retail customers into a customer acquisition channel – at scale. One employee can manage 15,000 brand advocates with Duel's platform.

So – how could you start promoting your own product without traditional advertising? What word-of-mouth mechanism could you use to create and promote items in a specific marketplace category?

The topic is rich. And increasingly urgent – the effectiveness of traditional advertising is genuinely falling across every sector. Time to design and build new marketing systems that don't look like marketing at all