Hibi — 日々, day by day.
A small team in New York building the missing layer of local marketing: the one where a store pays for the customer who walked in, and the person who sent them gets paid.
The billing unit of local advertising should be a customer walking through the door.
A local store spends hundreds to thousands of dollars a month on Instagram, Google and Yelp, and cannot say which dollar brought which customer. Local creators send customers to those same stores every week, and because nobody counts it, they are not paid for it.
Hibi counts it. A creator posts with a code, a customer redeems at the counter, and that single event becomes one line on the merchant’s bill and one commission for the creator. The merchant’s marketing spend is set by the number of new customers who came in and paid — not by impressions.
We are not a marketplace. Marketplaces sell matches, and matches get bypassed. Hibi runs the transaction itself — the reward, the count, the payout — and every week that record gets more valuable to everyone on it.
Four commitments
No numbers before dataWe publish pilot results, not projections. No scale narrative before the first cohort has produced its three numbers.
Consumers are never chargedRedeeming a code is claiming a discount. Nothing more is asked of the customer.
No selling of personal dataWhat leaves the system is anonymous and aggregated. Merchants see their customers; nobody else does.
No exclusivity, no rankings, no paid reviewsCreators post where they like. Merchants buy customers, not praise.
Founder-led, New York based
Jiaming Wang
FounderLeads product, strategy and the first merchant cohort. Writes to hibi.nyc@gmail.com and reads every reply.
A core team of three plus a circle of part-time contributors across product, design and community outreach. We are adding senior people for the pilot — see the open roles.
We are hiring for the pilot
Founding engineer
Redemption, weekly billing, anti-fraud — end to end. Payments experience preferred.
Product designer
Merchant, creator and consumer surfaces. Mobile first.
Field sales lead
Bilingual onboarding through community networks in New York.
Pre-seed, New York
We are raising a pre-seed round to run the first cohort of stores. Materials on request.
Request the deckGet early access
The first cohort opens in New York. Tell us who you are and we will reach out when your neighborhood goes live.