Buycott — from a barcode to company news

Buycott started with a reel Kaaustaaub Shankar had seen about the war, where somebody was trying to boycott companies connected to it. We ended up talking about perception. The same information doesn't mean the same thing to everybody. Your past experience and your values change how you read it. Even if two people agree on the facts, they can make different decisions from them.

So I didn't want the app to be a moral traffic light. A barcode scanner that says BUY or DON'T BUY is fast, but the software is quietly making the most important decision for you.

We wanted to do something narrower. The app would scan the barcode, work out which parent company is behind the product, find the reporting about that company, and cut it down enough that somebody standing in an aisle could get the top line. The judgment stayed with them.

I don't think you need a huge amount of information to make a purchase decision. You need the right amount for the decision you're making.

Kaaustaaub, Ary Sharma, Aniruddhan Ramesh and I built the prototype at MakeUC.