The challenge of finding the perfect gift has become increasingly daunting in today’s digital age, with endless options spread across countless websites and unreliable marketplaces. While the global gift shopping market exceeds $1.2T annually, the experience remains fundamentally broken, filled with stress and uncertainty for shoppers. Outdone transforms this landscape by leveraging artificial intelligence to create a personalized gift-shopping experience that actually works. Through their proprietary recommendation system that combines LLM data enrichment, semantic search, and reranking, the platform analyzes responses to just a few quick questions to suggest ideal gifts from a curated database of over 10,000 high-quality products. Every brand featured on the platform is hand-selected for reliability and quality, ensuring that each recommendation truly matches the recipient’s interests while maintaining the high standards gift-givers expect.
AlleyWatch caught up with Outdone Cofounder Jon Nass to learn more about the business.
Tell us about the product or service that Outdone offers.
Outdone is using AI to transform the gift shopping experience. After answering just a few quick questions, our users are served with personalized gift recommendations from our proprietary database of over 10,000 products. Buying a gift is high-stakes, so Outdone puts an emphasis on quality. Each brand featured on our site was hand-selected for its reliability. And our engine is powered by a proprietary, cutting-edge approach to product recommendation.
How is it different?
The current gift-shopping landscape is dominated by the mega marketplaces (who treat the gift-shopping user journey as an afterthought and whose products are becoming increasingly unreliable) and pay-to-play blogs (who offer little objectivity and are a bear to sift through).
Outdone was built with one purpose: taking the stress out of gift shopping. We started by building a custom neural network trained on consumer data, but have since pivoted to a proprietary approach that combines LLM data enrichment, semantic search, and reranking. This ensures reliable, objective, and hyperpersonalized recommendations.
What inspired the start of Outdone?
Put simply: frustration. My cofounder and I were tired of being stressed leading up to every birthday and every holiday season—and we were shocked that nobody was building a tech-forward approach to solve the problem. So we set out to do it ourselves.
What market does Outdone target and how big is it?
Outdone is looking to disrupt online gift shopping, a $1.2T market. More specifically, we’re focused on young, tech-savvy shoppers that we estimate account for roughly $375B of the overall gift shopping pie.
What is the business model?
We are currently monetizing our site via affiliate partnerships. However, we are transitioning to a more lucrative model where Outdone hosts the product checkout experience tied directly to our partner brands’ e-commerce platforms. We would be paid a commission for every purchase facilitated.
How are you preparing for a potential economic slowdown?
Thankfully, gifting is a quite resilient market. Data shows that the average amount spent per gift drops during periods of economic downturn—but the number of occasions consumers shop for does not. In our world, that means the number of user touchpoints should remain unaffected.
What are the milestones that you plan to achieve within six months?
We’re aiming to help 300,000 frustrated shoppers find great gifts in the next few months. To do so, there are some improvements we need to make to our UX, so we’re rolling out updates to our UX and recommendation methodology on a weekly basis!
What is the one piece of startup advice that you never got?
Talk to as many smart people as you can find. I originally had this perception that founders should be on an island, heads down—build, build, build. But as I’ve gotten further in the journey, I’ve realized that there are so many people out there willing to help and provide advice—even if their work is unrelated to yours. So I make it a point now to try to fit conversations with other founders into my workflow.
If you could be put in touch with anyone in the New York community who would it be and why?
I’m a big admirer of the work that Tullie Murrell and Daniel Camilleri are doing at Shaped. In my view, they’re the leading builders in the city when it comes to recommender systems. I’d love the chance to share what we’re building and get their insights!
Why did you launch in New York?
The energy in New York is unmatched. And the sheer number of entrepreneurs—large and small—in the city is incredibly inspiring.
What’s your favorite winter destination in and around the city?
Am I allowed to say LaGuardia? Snowboarding is my favorite thing in the world, so I get out of the city as much as I can in the winter.
