The archive · Developer & Business Tools · Product decision · 2011–2012
Curebit bet friend referrals would beat ads; $1.2M seed backed it in 2012
YC-backed Curebit made post-purchase referrals shareable and double-sided: roughly 1,000 e-commerce and SaaS customers by 2012-01-27.
Curebit
What the business is
Curebit was a hosted referral-marketing platform for e-commerce and SaaS: post-purchase Facebook, Twitter or email share prompts, standalone referral pages, and one-off campaign tools, sold as plugins for 14 platforms including Shopify and Magento.
Starting capital：$1.2M seed announced 2012-01-27 from 500 Startups, Karl Jacob, Auren Hoffman, Dharmesh Shah, Gordon Tucker and Alex Lloyd (Accelerator Ventures).
How it started
Curebit came out of Y Combinator's winter 2011 class and launched at Demo Day in March 2011 as a way to turn existing customers into marketers. Co-founder and CEO Allan Grant's timing thesis, quoted by TechCrunch, was that the best moment to ask is right after a purchase, "when you've basically voted with your wallet." On 2011-10-17 the company launched its Social Referral Optimizer, which automatically split-tested offer copy, incentive type, sharing message, landing page and design, and learned from tests running across other sites on the network.
What happened
By 2012-01-27 Curebit said it had roughly 1,000 customers, from small e-commerce stores to Giggle.com and an unannounced top-20 retailer plus a consumer foods company. Reported results: 15%-25% share rates when only one side of the deal benefited, 45%-65% when the deal was double-sided, about 3% for a standalone share button, 1-5 clicks per share, and conversion generally 2-3 times higher than traditional campaigns — in some cases up to 30% — with higher average order values at checkout. The $1.2M seed announced that day, from 500 Startups and a group of operators and angels, was earmarked for continued product development and three hires that would take the five-person team to eight.
No ending yet — it is still running.
Background
Curebit came out of Y Combinator's winter 2011 class and launched at Demo Day in March 2011 as a hosted referral platform for online stores and SaaS companies. Co-founder and CEO Allan Grant's thesis was timing: ask for the share at the post-purchase moment, when the customer has just "voted with their wallet," rather than through a passive share button.
The platform offered post-purchase Facebook, Twitter or email prompts, standalone referral pages, and one-off campaigns, and shipped as plugins for 14 platforms including Shopify and Magento. Its Social Referral Optimizer, launched 2011-10-17, split-tested offer copy, incentives, landing pages and design across sites. By 2012-01-27 the company reported roughly 1,000 customers: 15%-25% share rates with one-sided deals, 45%-65% with double-sided ones, and conversions 2-3 times traditional campaigns.
On 2012-01-27 TechCrunch reported a $1.2M seed from 500 Startups, Karl Jacob, Auren Hoffman, Dharmesh Shah, Gordon Tucker and Alex Lloyd of Accelerator Ventures. The money was earmarked for product development and three hires — two developers and one designer — taking the team from five to eight people.
What has to be true
- The post-purchase moment is the strongest signal of intent, and Curebit's own data put double-sided referral deals at 45%-65% share rates versus about 3% for a passive share button.
- The metrics came from paying merchants rather than a pitch deck: roughly 1,000 customers across 14 platform plugins meant the model was already running in the wild.
- The founders kept optimizing the offer itself — copy mattered more than discount size, they reported — which made the product a testing tool rather than a one-button widget.
- The seed combined a known accelerator and hands-on operator angels, giving a five-person team room to keep building instead of chasing revenue immediately.
What can be applied
Time the ask to peak intent and reward both sides of the referral: the customer who just paid is the cheapest, highest-converting marketer a store has.
Aftermath
As of 2012-01-27 Curebit had just announced its $1.2M seed, reported roughly 1,000 customers with double-sided referral share rates of 45%-65%, and was hiring two developers and one designer to grow from five to eight people, with product development the stated use of funds. Nothing in this batch documents what happened after that date.
Sources
- YC Alum Curebit Raises $1.2 Million For Online Referral System
- Y Combinator Alum Curebit Wants To Optimize Your Referral System, Turn Your Customers Into Marketers
- Curebit (YC W11) Raises $1.2 Million For Online Referral System
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