Shmore
Shmore raises a fundamental question: is a community a centralized place, a collection of fan pockets, or a concentration tool for e-commerce brands?
Context
Shmore was born from a very concrete need at Sunology: the necessity to reclaim a community of thousands of members previously hosted on Facebook groups. The challenge was to bring this audience back to a proprietary platform to continue offering a space for collective emulation between prospects and customers. This model proved to be an excellent way to reduce the volume of incoming support requests while increasing customer satisfaction and pre-purchase reassurance.
Role
As co-founder and Product Strategist, I defined the product vision, designed the feature architecture, and crafted the full user experience. My scope covered positioning definition, backlog prioritization, and onboarding design.
This project was conducted in tandem with the community manager to ensure features met operational expectations. We designed a customizable brand community (public or private), equipped with analytical tools and connected to Shopify to identify who is a prospect and who is a customer. The goal: streamline interactions while leveraging user posts as an SEO/GEO indexing corpus.
The Hypothesis
Shmore was built on a clear hypothesis: brand community members convert more, spend more, and cost less to retain than standard customers. The platform had to prove that a native community space, integrated into the e-commerce ecosystem, would outperform alternatives (Discord too gaming-oriented, Facebook Groups too generic, Circle too content-creator-focused).
Design of Belonging: UX for Collective Intelligence
Productions
Functionally designed as a mashup between Slack and Reddit, the core of the product is a community feed organized into thematic channels. The goal: avoid the chaos generated by synchronous tools like Discord or WhatsApp, which fail to provide structured, retrievable, and indexable discussions.
The lateral menu allows the creation of custom channels with their own restrictions (open to all or restricted), reorderable via simple drag & drop. To always ensure a baseline discussion space, the default 'General' channel can never be deleted.
Reflection & Learnings
Building a community tool raises a major go-to-market challenge. E-commerce brands believe in community ROI in theory, but sometimes struggle to justify the time investment (animation, moderation) against their short-term imperatives. The key learning: community is a long-term asset in a world often obsessed with short-term returns. The real challenge isn't just providing 'the right tool', but ensuring the brand has the bandwidth to run it.