We Taught folk to Shop in 10 Minutes

If you haven't met folk yet, it's a personal AI that lives right inside your iMessage, WhatsApp, and Telegram. You text it the way you'd text a friend — “book me a table,” “watch this flight,” “remind me to call my mum” — and it executes.

Yesterday, Arlan, the founder of folk and a friend from our YC batch, texted to see if we could link up Channel3 with folk to help with all things shopping.

In 10 minutes, folk connected to the Channel3 API, made its first search call, and started answering shopping queries — with structured product data, live prices, live stock, and a monetized buy link all powered up.

Watch it work

folk hunts down three clean, pre-owned, in-stock pairs and links straight to checkout:

Pretty cool, right?

What's actually happening

Channel3 is the product data layer for AI-native shopping. As assistants like folk become a real place where people buy things, they need product data that's structured, always-fresh, and trustworthy — otherwise your AI confidently recommends a sold-out sweater in the wrong color, and everyone loses. So we give folk:

• Recommendations pulled from a universal catalog of real products
• Live prices and stock
• Price tracking
• Monetization, because every product folk surfaces is tracked through the retailer's affiliate program

Why this is fun

The whole point of folk is that it meets you where you already are. If you use folk to help book restaurants, and you want to use it to shop, you can.

We'll be spotlighting more developers who are building awesome products on Channel3's API in the future — if you want to know more, check out our website: trychannel3.com.