Shelf is a social network based on the media you consume
Social networks have become increasingly homogenous, showing everything from text to short videos across platforms, where algorithms often overshadow your creativity. In this ubiquitous environment, it's harder than ever to get a genuine sense of someone's vibe before deciding to follow them.
Enter Shelf, an app that lets you create a personalized "storefront" of your media habits, then connect with others based on the movies, shows, books, games, and music they consume. It also lets you track progress while reading your favorite book or watching a trending show.
"If you observe culture at large on the internet, it's shifting away from posting selfies to here's what I'm reading, watching, screenshots of the reviews of my movies and so on. It's essentially going deeper about a person, trying to understand what they're in … that's what Shelf is all about," said Jad Esber, founder and CEO of Koodos Labs, the startup behind Shelf, in an interview.
Esber grew up writing online poetry anonymously, then spent the early years of his career at YouTube in London from 2015 to 2018. During this time, he worked on the creator side of the Google subsidiary, helping people create content, grow their audience, and monetize their work. This was when YouTube grew its creator ecosystem in various emerging markets outside the U.S.
After spending over three years at Google, the Cambridge University master's graduate returned to academia, joining Harvard University to research consumer internet trends and study the internet academically. That eventually helped him conceptualize Shelf in a market full of social media apps with millions and billions of users.
"We built many, many products," Esber told TechCrunch. "They all didn't work until Shelf, and Shelf emerged from those learnings."
How does it work?
The Shelf app, available on iOS and coming to Android, lets you connect your accounts associated with media, including Apple Music, Goodreads, Netflix, Spotify, and YouTube, then builds a customizable "storefront" web page that updates automatically based on your consumption progress. You can also manually add links to any other internet service to your virtual shelf — even links to your favorite TechCrunch articles, which you can showcase to your followers.
The New York-based startup also plans to expand the list of supported services, including Steam for gamers.
"[A]s humans and as people online, we're very multi-hyphenate. We're not just into music, movies, shows, and all these things. Adding support for certain categories will expand the user base, but at the same time deepens the use case for existing users," Esber said.