Why AI Can't Be Bought, Reviews & Crowdfunding Validation with Victor Jager

Thank you for having me.

First, I’m French, as you can probably hear from my accent. When I was twenty I moved to Dublin, in Ireland, to study. I was doing a degree in global business, and as part of that degree I had to find an internship. That’s when I joined Smartbox, which operates in the gift sector. It’s a French group, but their headquarters were in Dublin. After the internship I stayed for three years, and when I felt I’d seen everything, I moved to Web Summit, which is in the event sector, completely different. I stayed there a couple of years, then COVID hit, and I decided to move back to France with my girlfriend. That’s where I found Lovebox.
What’s interesting is that for almost five years I had been in a long-distance relationship with my girlfriend, and I’d never heard of Lovebox. When I came across the brand online, three things stuck with me. First, the product was cool, and I wished I’d known about it when I was in a long-distance relationship myself. Second, Lovebox sounded a lot like Smartbox, so I thought, maybe I’m just meant to work in a boxed environment. Coincidence. And third, it was still a small startup. Before that I had only worked in companies with maybe two hundred employees or more, and joining a startup felt like a completely new experience. That’s why I applied.
I think the reason Lovebox clicks for so many people comes down to a paradox. We live in a world that’s more connected than ever, yet a lot of people feel disconnected from their loved ones. That’s what Lovebox is trying to fix: bringing people closer, brightening someone’s day, whether it’s a text, a picture, or a spinning heart on the box. I joined as an operations analyst, but very quickly I took over operations, became the COO, and now I’m a shareholder. It’s been quite a journey.
On running a brand as an operator rather than a founder, I wasn’t a shareholder back then and I wasn’t a founder, and I think you see things a bit differently in that position. When I joined, the team was pretty young, and for some people it was their first company. Part of the staff came from a startup background, which wasn’t my case. I was coming from bigger companies, so I brought a vision shaped by a structured environment. That’s part of why I took over operations so quickly. The company was growing very fast, and it needed structure, it needed process, and it needed someone to carry people along. That’s what I focused on back then, but things are a bit different now.

Exactly. Passion is the word. To be that involved in a business and help it grow, you need passion, because if it’s not there, at some point you lose focus. It’s challenging, let’s face it. We’ve had a lot of ups and downs, and without passion it’s much harder.

You’re completely right. You can send a text or share a picture for free on WhatsApp, and yet people still pay for the Lovebox. We’ve sold over 300,000 Loveboxes over the years. As I mentioned, the paradox is that we’re so connected, yet being connected doesn’t mean anything on its own, and people are looking for new ways to express their emotions. You see it when we run ads on social media. Some people comment, “It’s basically just sending a text, except you have to pay 170 bucks for it.” I’m not going to convince those people, and that’s fine. If someone believes a free text is better than the Lovebox, they don’t see the value of the product, and I’m okay with that. We’ve accepted that Lovebox is a niche product. Not every household will have one. Yet ten years later we’re still selling thousands of Loveboxes every year, just in the US, which is our primary market, not even counting the rest of the world. So people clearly do see the value, and it lies in the emotion the product can bring.
We keep that positioning meaningful by staying personal and genuine rather than generic. The Lovebox isn’t meant to carry a big speech. That’s what a voice note or a long text is for. The idea is simply to make someone say, “Hey, I’m thinking of you.” No grand declaration needed. So across a couple, a parent or a grandparent, what changes is the tone of the message, but not the concept itself.

Yes, one hundred percent.

Lovebox was launched on Kickstarter back in 2017. Because we wanted to avoid repeating some of the mistakes we’d made in the past, we really wanted to listen to the crowd and make sure we were building something they actually wanted. So before going back to Kickstarter with Keep, which we launched this summer, we ran two rounds of beta testing. We put the first prototypes in the hands of the community to get their feedback. The product wasn’t perfect, so we improved it. Then we ran a second beta test with an even larger group, and in total we had forty-five beta testers by the end. Those people helped shape the product into what it is today.
That was the first layer of validation, but it wasn’t enough for us. We wanted validation from the entire crowd, not just a small group of testers who were already Lovebox customers and part of the community. That’s why we went back to Kickstarter, to put Keep in front of people and let the all-or-nothing mechanic decide. Either you hit your goal, the campaign succeeds and you ship the product, or the campaign ends, backers are refunded, and the product stops there. So Kickstarter was the final step of the loop. It started with community feedback, continued through the beta test as a first layer of approval, and the Kickstarter campaign is what ultimately convinced us that Keep was the future of the company.
Beyond validation, Kickstarter also gives visibility and brings new people into your community. Our beta testers were Lovebox users, but Kickstarter has its own audience, backers who’ve already supported dozens of other projects. It exposes the product to people who love novelty and new trends and companies that launch products with the crowd. It’s completely different from launching purely through our own website, and we reach a community we probably wouldn’t have reached otherwise.

You’re completely right. Gifting is one of the most competitive landscapes there is. Google is still very much about people actively searching for things like “long distance gift,” while social platforms like TikTok and Instagram give you the social proof, like reviews and UGC content. Now AI assistants are adding a new layer, something more synthetic than Google. Instead of clicking through ten links, you get a direct recommendation from the AI. What’s really changed is that people used to do the comparison themselves, and now they’re starting to delegate part of that decision-making to the AI.
As for what decides which brands get named, I think it’s probably the frequency and consistency of mentions across the internet rather than budget. An AI doesn’t have an ad space to sell, so it has to rely on what’s actually being said about the brand. I think that creates a real risk for small brands. In a pre-AI world, a small budget could still make a difference on Google or TikTok if you had the right angle or hook on Instagram. With AI assistants, if a brand isn’t present enough across the web, in reviews, press, content, you name it, it might become invisible no matter the budget.
That’s something we’ve started working on over the past few months, our online presence and reputation. A good example is Trustpilot. We had a page there, but we weren’t paying much attention to it. We didn’t have many reviews, and honestly our score wasn’t great. Then I thought, if AI relies on reviews and online reputation to decide who to recommend, that’s not good for us. So we started actively asking for reviews to build up our Trustpilot score, and even if they’re bad reviews, get reviews. Our score has now improved significantly, though there’s still some work to do. It’s become less of a one-off fix and more of a permanent part of how we run the brand, and Trustpilot is just one example of many I could give you.

I one hundred percent agree, once again.

Honestly, the past few years have been challenging. Not that long ago we were more than ten, spread out everywhere, and like a lot of consumer brands, the last few years were hard. We made difficult decisions to scale down the team, and right now we’re just under ten people. If I’m honest, I’m happier and my mental health is better now than it was before. That doesn’t mean we lost our ambition. We’re still very ambitious, and I think we just learned from our mistakes. A few years ago, if we had more work, our instinct was to hire someone. Today we’re at peace with the resources we have and with what we can and cannot do, and that’s helped us prioritize.
The paradox is that we’re much more efficient with ten people than we were before. Part of that is AI, which we didn’t have back then, but the bigger thing is that back then we were trying to do things by the book, with fifteen people on the same project and everyone involved in every step and every decision, because that’s how we wanted to run things. We lost a lot of time, energy and money that way. Today we’re a smaller team, but we move two or maybe three times faster, and part of that is due to AI.
An example is acquisition. Back then we had one person handling acquisition for the US, one for Europe, and one overseeing both, so three people in total. Now it’s just one person doing marketing for Lovebox. One low-hanging fruit that made that possible is reusing creative across markets. If we’ve made ad content for the US, we can use the same content in Europe rather than building separate creative for every market. There are things we refuse to touch, like customer experience and our relationships with retailers. Those were non-negotiable.
Going from a bigger company to a smaller one in terms of headcount was hard, because we had to let people go. But in the end it’s not about how many employees you have. It’s about whether your customers are happy, whether you can deliver what you set out to deliver, and whether the company is profitable, because we still have to pay everyone’s salary at the end of the month. If we can’t do that, it means the scale isn’t right. So sometimes we have to say no to a project. The real question we ask ourselves is, is it worth our investment, is it worth our time, is it a must-have or a nice-to-have?
We’ve been through a lot, but we never gave up on ambition, and you can see that with Keep, which I hope will one day be on everyone’s keychain. We’ve sold 300,000 Loveboxes, and we hope to send millions of Keeps with a smaller team, and that’s fine. The ambition is still there. What’s really changed is where we set the bar for ourselves, and in the end AI also helped a lot.

That’s what we’ve seen at Lovebox in the past few years. We’re going much faster with a smaller team than we were back then. And yes, I do have more sanity. It’s important too.

I’ll stick with what I know. I became a shareholder at Lovebox about a year and a half ago, so thank you. I’m very happy here, and genuinely grateful for the opportunity I got five years ago to join Lovebox and move up the ladder, if I can say that.
I’m definitely not done with Lovebox. We launched Keep this summer, and we’ve already sold 2,500 units in just four months, which is a pretty good start. We already have four or five product ideas lined up for the coming years, so probably two new products next year and maybe two the following year. We have enough ideas to keep us busy for the next three to four years, so there’s still a lot to build. We’re ambitious, and I’ll stick with Lovebox for now, make sure we hit the millions of Keeps I mentioned earlier, and make sure those new products land well. We’ll see from there.
Beyond that, I think at some point in my life I’ll want to start my own business and be the founder of something, because even though I’m a shareholder now, I didn’t create Lovebox myself. When I was studying global business, I never really saw myself as an entrepreneur. I imagined a career as an employee, climbing the ladder, maybe reaching a C-level position eventually. But given how things have evolved for me at Lovebox, I can’t really picture myself working for someone else anymore. So I’ll stay with Lovebox for the next few years, but ultimately I think I’ll want to build something on my own one day. Probably hardware, but we’ll see when I have the time.

Thank you. A lot of ambition, but also a lot of passion, as you said earlier.

Thank you very much for having me. It was really nice to talk about these topics with you, and I’ll keep you posted when we launch the new products.