Wanna.fund?
Everybody has their list — all the dreams they’d pursue if they only had the time. Certainly, that was the case for us: four long-time friends (David, Daniil, Maria, Anton) and collaborators with demanding jobs (three of us work at Snapchat) and much else on our respective plates.
About six months ago, we decided to do something about it. We set aside one day each week to get together and make some progress on one of our passion projects. As you can imagine, our combined list of ideas was long — so long, in fact, that it took a full month of meetings to properly get through it. But there was one concept we kept coming back to: a concept that, if all went well, would bring thousands of other concepts into the world.
That concept became Wanna: a simple, user-friendly platform designed to close the gap between the things that people want and the things that people can actually buy. Have you ever found yourself idly wishing for a dryer that folds your clothes for you? How about a pillow that stays perpetually cool? Wanna’s where you go to find out whether your daydream exists. If it does, someone will tell you where to find it. If it doesn’t — and if it turns out you’re not the only person who’d be interested in, let’s say, a self-cleaning microwave — we’ll work with manufacturers to bring it to life.
With Wanna, we’re aiming to fundamentally change the relationship between consumers and producers. As things currently stand, producers have to rely on guesswork when it comes to formulating new products. It’s a risky endeavor — they spend thousands (or millions) of dollars to get their ideas onto shelves, and then they close their eyes and hope for the best. By giving everyday consumers a real voice in this process — and by demonstrating real demand in advance — Wanna eliminates all this costly bloat. What you get, in the end, are products that cost less for the consumer, and earn more for the producer. Everybody wins.
But we’re not just trying to save the consumer some money. Our goal is to make the consumer an active part of the process — to inject some creativity, and agency, into the staid old business of buying and selling. Instead of passively ordering products based on the ads they’ve been served, Wanna’s users will help develop the products they buy, tailoring them to their specific needs. Companies, meanwhile, can cut back on marketing costs, because their customers will be lined up before production even begins, and those customers will be markedly more engaged than the average passive consumer. This helps with sustainability, too: with a clearer sense of pre-production demand, there’s a much smaller risk of overstock.
It’s important to note that transparency is paramount to us — an ethos that guides everything we make. Accordingly, you won’t see us playing favorites with manufacturers, or maneuvering to enrich ourselves at the user’s expense. Every manufacturer will have an equal opportunity on our platform; we’re here to connect our users with the people who will bring their visions to life. Wanna’s dealings with these manufacturers will be detailed on our website for any interested party to see.
Wanna, we hope, can go some small way towards building a better, more efficient, more sustainable, and more person-centered market. In the meantime, we have a new idea for Wanna: an app that automatically generates perfect, elegant last sentences for blog posts.
