No, you can’t buy new friends on NetOutlet. NetOutlet‘s friend purchasing is e-commerce with a twist. The simple hook is this: once you buy an item through NetOutlet, you can then share the the news amongst your friend network. Once a friend of yours also purchases the same item, they get a discount and you get a refund. If one more friend buys the product, the price decreases yet again and both you and your first friend get the refund. And on it goes.
So whether you’re going to a concert, a sports event or on holiday with your friends, NetOutlet is the place where you can buy with your friends and save money for everyone. The larger the group of friends, the cheaper it is and everybody in the group will get the same price at the end of the day. So if you were the first of your friends to make the purchase, you will get a refund which will match the difference between the original price and the final price for the whole group.
Physical goods, like golf equipment and coffee makers, are also sold on NetOutlet. Concerts and basketball games seem like an obvious social purchase, but we are curious to see what physical products hook into the same social appeal.
It is interesting to note that NetOutlet used crowdfunding in order to gather their first round of funding, which is remarkable in itself because this crowdfunding was equity based. Originally they took care of their own crowdfunding in what they called Netoutlet: The Quest For Funding. As two non-technical co-founders, they saw this as the best bet. In the end they worked together with Invesdor to finish the round.
Of course, since this is an untested concept, it remains to be seen how the users will respond to it but given the recent deal-of-the-day craze and the amount of people looking for cheaper ways of buying goods and services, we remain optimistic. And similar to the deal-of-the-day concept, the original purchaser can set the amount of time the deal will stay open so that your friends have the time to share it around.
The company was founded in 2012, raised their first seed money in 2012 and now have a total of 4 people working (+ a dog called Lord Nelson).
Jerker Holma also reached out to us with the following comments:
“We’re really excited to finally launch NetOutlet! The point of the service is to balance what consumers and retailers want, essentially giving consumers discounts for helping retailers with their sales. Over the coming months, we’ll keep adding functionality and new products to the site.
“We’re initially targeting customers in Finland but will be looking to expand internationally fairly quickly once we have an adequate proof of concept.”
