Gowd, a new subscription-sharing platform with roots in the Chicagoland area, has its sights set on disrupting the marketplace by giving users access to subscriptions they may never have had before.
Founder and CEO Vivek Shah hopes to grow it into the place for users to share usernames and passwords across a variety of platforms.
Though currently operating the platform out of his home in Schaumburg, Shah hopes Friday's launch is just the start as he envisions expanding locally if all goes well.
“I love this city. I used to live in Lincoln Park, went to Columbia College and graduated from UIC,” he told the Chicago Business Journal.
With more than 4,000 total users who have conducted nearly 10,000 transactions to date — thanks to a “soft launch” last September — Shah hopes to reach 20,000 subscribers by the end of August.
He initially came up with the idea for Gowd after offering a few friends cash to use their accounts for SEO-based platforms and realizing the need for a service like Gowd where people can more easily share their subscription accounts with one another.
“It’s a win-win situation. Buyers are getting access to heavily discounted subscriptions, while the sellers are offsetting their costs and may even make a profit,” he said.
The platform provides a place for users of third-party subscriptions to share their services at a monthly rate, at a better rate than the subscription itself would cost.
He described the platform as working similarly to eBay where sellers can submit subscriptions, and buyers are able to subscribe to that listing instantly to get access to the username and password that the seller is sharing.
“There are tens of thousands of different subscriptions out there, and we don’t focus on just one company,” he said. “The seller can determine how many people he or she wants to share the account with. If a particular account has restrictions, the seller can notate that.”
He said the average age of users is around 25 years old, and he sees it as a valuable tool for college students to subscribe to multiple platforms at a better cost.
