Clare Walker, a 23-year-old in Brooklyn, has racked up about $700 value of reward playing cards or, in her phrases, “free money,” by referring her contacts to Flip. “There were definitely some people who I haven’t really kept up with since high school, but I was like, ‘Hey, add me on Flip. Here’s a free 75 dollars, enjoy,’” Walker says. Her purchases on Flip embody JBL wi-fi headphones, quite a lot of luxurious skin-care merchandise, and a dwell houseplant.

Noor Agha, CEO of Flip’s developer, Humans Inc, says his product’s sudden recognition renders Flip “one of the fastest things that ever happened in ecommerce,” though he declined to share even a ballpark estimate of the scale of his consumer base. He claims to have made the primary platform “built for brands only” and rejects the suggestion that cash-incentivized referrals are driving Flip’s rise or are important to its survival.

Agha argues that by permitting anybody to monetize their evaluations, whereas barring customers from immediately working with manufacturers as influencers often do, Flip ought to foster a extra real group round commerce than can its established rivals.

“Everybody can earn. It is not by selection of somebody at Flip,” Agha says. He claims that his platform’s design is guided by the query “How do we bring honesty and authenticity to commerce?”

But his recipe for authenticity isn’t foolproof. The prohibition of brand-to-creator interactions might show troublesome to implement, as manufacturers are accustomed to working with influencers. After her in-app evaluations started gaining traction, Collier Barksdale, a 25-year-old Flip consumer in New York City, was contacted by a magnificence and life-style model on Instagram. In a message seen by WIRED, the corporate provided to ship product samples in alternate for Flip evaluations. Barksdale didn’t settle for.

And Sky Canaves, a senior analyst of retail and ecommerce at Insider Intelligence, a digital market analysis agency, questions whether or not Flip can maintain on to the customers it’s successful via the present giveaways. “The company is engaged in a very expensive customer acquisition strategy,” she says—one that could be essential to lure folks from platforms like Instagram and TikTok, each of which have added procuring options. “If Flip stops meeting expectations around these types of compensation, then there’s likely to be some pretty significant departure of users.”