Deal discovery and sharing startup Found launches, ‘Sport Shoppers’ rejoice

Found Shopping, the deal discovery and sharing service from Cape Town launched its free app for iPhone and Android at the city’s Design Indaba last week.

We’ve been tracking Found’s evolution for a while. The team behind Found’s previous app, Pashash, was backed by Google Umbono — now Google for Entrepreneurs — and showed promise when it went on to win Startup World South Africa last year. Co-founder, Faheem Kajee, subsequently spent two months in Silicon Valley marketing and getting feedback before deciding to refocus the proposition specifically around sharing deals. Pashash was renamed to Found in order to represent the shift.

Kajee tells us that the app needed to find a niche. “The niche we chose was deals in particular because it was an area that we could compete against apps like Pinterest and Instagram in, and because it appeals to such a large segment of the market,” says Kajee

Kajee believes that finding a great deal is about more than just saving money. He says it’s about feeling like a smart, savvy shopper that has outsmarted the system. “We think of deals as little gems which everybody loves,” says Kajee. “Found Shopping is the best way for people to share the exhilaration of finding these gems first.”

The app builds on the idea of Sport Shoppers: a term coined by researchers at San Francisco State University to describe a market segment that shops competitively. Sport Shoppers compete for deals, experience a high when they find something, and even train to improve their performance. Elements of this psychology are common in most shoppers.

Beyond deal discovery, Found Shopping allows shoppers to keep track of their finds, as well as how much money they are re saving themselves and their friends as a result. Found is entirely based around the location of deals in brick-and-mortar stores and aims to surface the most popular deals in an area.

Kajee says that Found Shopping ended the weekend in the Top 10 Lifestyle Apps in the South African version of Apple’s App Store. Although focused in South Africa for the moment, Found has its sights set on global expansion in the next few months.