Some companies are launched to make the founders a quick buck, so they rush to bring their idea to market. Some are founded for the greater good of mankind, perhaps as a billionaire entrepreneur turns philanthropist in his old age. Consmr, the brainchild of Ryan Charles and Noah Zitsman, was founded because of a box of leaky diapers. Huh.
Consmr is simple to use. Scan the barcode of a product while in store, and it immediately shows you consumer ratings and lets you write your own review. It’s akin to Amazon’s app that links to reviews from the website, but it is focused on grocery and beauty products instead. Consmr has found its niche by offering reviews for products with immediacy, rather than something you can wait a week for Amazon to ship.
Check out the interview below to learn more about how the leaky diapers led to Consmr and to find out which product sector it will soon be supporting.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCImHPbE62Y
Some excerpts from the interview:
Q: How is Consmr different from Amazon’s review app?

A: We’re focused on grocery and drugstore products. So there is really a lot of information, over 100,000 ratings and reviews on grocery and drugstore products specifically on our platform — a little bit different from Amazon, which has mostly electronics and books and things like that, not nearly as much information on things like health, grocery, beauty, and baby products.
Q: What are your plans for expansion?

A: We just added nutrition into the app, so being able to highlight things like sodium quantities as well as hidden things like whether an item has artificial colors or artificial flavors, we just added that to the newest version of the application. Moving forward, we’re certainly going to be expanding in the pet care area. People are definitely interested in finding the best products for their pets. And baby products is certainly an area that we already have some information, but people want us to really expand in that category as well.
Q: What happened to all the vowels?

A: I like to say that we couldn’t afford all the vowels. We wanted to come up with a name that was going to be memorable but, obviously, consumer.com was already taken so we went with Consmr.