Rippl

Their core value prop was 'democratising commerce through social selling' — which sounded revolutionary until Claude started writing product recommendations that convert better than any WhatsApp aunt, and TikTok's algorithm began serving products with the precision of a caffeinated personal shopper who's memorised your entire purchase history.

The reseller network — their human-powered discovery engine — faces replacement by AI recommendation systems that never sleep, never need commission splits, and have never once sent a blurry product photo with 'interested?' underneath.

They do have genuine reseller relationships and commission structures that create switching costs, plus hyperlocal trust networks that took years to build. But network effects only matter when matching is hard — and AI just made product-to-customer matching trivially cheap.

Their LinkedIn shows hiring for 'growth hackers' and 'community managers' while competitors are hiring ML engineers; the most AI-adjacent thing in their job posts is a requirement for 'social media savviness' — which is roughly equivalent to bringing a whiteboard marker to a ChatGPT fight.

People still need to buy things, but they increasingly don't need a human to tell them what to buy. AI eliminates the discovery question that justified the reseller layer — turning social commerce into social overhead.