Overview

ShopWith was a San Francisco-based mobile commerce startup founded in October 2017 by Aaron Chou, Melody Kim, and Lewis Chung. The company participated in Y Combinator's Summer 2018 batch and pitched itself as "mobile QVC for Gen Z" — a platform where shoppers could browse virtual storefronts alongside their favorite fashion and beauty creators in real time. ^{[1] [2]}

ShopWith identified a real behavioral shift — Gen Z's purchasing decisions were being shaped by social video — but built a product form that was structurally dependent on redirecting influencer audiences to a standalone app. That distribution bottleneck proved fatal. The company never raised a follow-on round after YC, and all three founders had moved on to other roles by mid-2019. ^[3]

PitchBook lists ShopWith as "Out of Business." ^[3] No acquisition, acqui-hire, or public pivot was recorded. The concept ShopWith pioneered — shoppable social video — was ultimately validated by TikTok Shop, Instagram Shopping, and YouTube Shopping, all of which launched natively on platforms that already owned the audience ShopWith needed to borrow.

Founding Story

ShopWith was founded in October 2017 by three people whose backgrounds were well-matched to the problem they were trying to solve. ^[1]

Aaron Chou served as co-founder and CEO. He studied Biochemical Engineering at Drexel University before pivoting into technology, eventually landing a Product Manager role at Facebook and later working at famo.us, a JavaScript framework startup. ^{[4] [5]} His time at Facebook gave him direct exposure to how social graphs shape consumer behavior — a foundation for ShopWith's thesis that social video was already driving Gen Z purchasing decisions, just without a native commerce layer.

Melody Kim co-founded the company alongside Chou and is listed in some sources as co-CEO — a title structure that may reflect a co-equal founding partnership rather than a formal dual-CEO arrangement. ^[6] Kim studied Cognitive Science at the University of California San Diego, a background that would have been directly relevant to designing the user experience of a social shopping product. Her later career as a Product Designer at Betteromics and an instructor at Seasons of Design suggests she led the product and design function at ShopWith. ^[6]

Lewis Chung rounded out the founding team as the technical co-founder. He holds a B.S. in Computer Science from UC San Diego and worked as a Software Engineer at both Coursera and Amazon Web Services before joining ShopWith. ^{[7] [8]} His employment record shows his ShopWith tenure beginning in April 2018 — roughly six months after the company's founding date — suggesting the company may have operated in a pre-product, exploratory phase through late 2017 and early 2018 before Chung joined formally around the time of the YC application. ^[7]

How the three founders met is not publicly documented. The UC San Diego connection between Kim and Chung is a plausible origin point, though this is an inference from overlapping educational backgrounds, not a confirmed fact.

The founding insight was straightforward: Gen Z's buying behavior was already being shaped by YouTube hauls, Instagram try-ons, and Snapchat influencer content, but none of those platforms had a native way to convert that influence into a transaction. ^[9] QVC had proven for decades that people would buy products while watching a trusted personality present them. ShopWith's bet was that the same dynamic could be rebuilt for mobile, with influencers replacing cable hosts and Gen Z replacing the QVC demographic. The team applied to Y Combinator's Summer 2018 batch and was accepted — a signal that the thesis resonated with YC's partners as well.