19 ms·

How to proceed when you run out of cash, but you still believe?

292 points by aldamiz 7y ago

proxybop 7y ago
That’s an interesting article. To me, that company should have been really valuable and done really well especially in the retail clothing industry. I wonder if it’s more luck and connections than anything that has to do with product when forming a company
- overcast 7y ago
  Who you know, luck, being in the right place at the right time are MAJOR components of success in life. Infinite number of equally talented people in this world, without the right path.
  - toomuchtodo 7y ago
    https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610395/if-youre-so-smart-why-arent-you-rich-turns-out-its-just-chance/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610395/if-youre-so-smart-... (If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich? Turns out it’s just chance.)
    - proxybop 7y ago
      Wow, thanks for ruining my life But seriously. That...feels true. But rather than waiting for things to happen to me, what happens if I go out and expose myself to more events where the dice of fate can be rolled for an outcome in my favor (or against)? Am I manipulating luck that way?
      - overcast 7y ago
        Networking, experiencing new things will ABSOLUTELY increase your chances of being successful in life. I've lost count the number of times I've met someone who led me to bigger things at a party/night out that I initially didn't really want to go to. No matter what it is, no matter how comfy that couch, go meet new people. Best way to advance.
      - fillipvt 7y ago
        That certainly is the best way to maximize luck. One such type of event is getting to know people, be it through work, networking, online w/e.
    - harrisonjackson 7y ago
      There is a positive take away. If it is up to chance, then you "just" need to increase your exposure to opportunities + the longevity of your efforts. More opportunities, over a longer period of time, gives you more coinflips.
  - maest 7y ago
    This comment showed as burried for me, which I find odd.
    - TheFiend7 7y ago
      Did it fall under a certain upvote/downvote threshold or something? It was the sane for me.
    - alexpetralia 7y ago
      Me as well.
- fhbdukfrh 7y ago
  Don't confuse a software product with a business model. Their own words state they've "solved" the previous human problem of fashion without figuring out a viable way to capitalize. That means they don't yet have the right product. I think they've solved an intermediate problem on the path to the actual underlying pain that people would pay for.
- solumos 7y ago
  The name of the successful version of this company is "Stitch Fix"($2.39B market cap). > we haven’t found a relevant business model > We are a team of 8. We are 2 full-stack, 1 iOS, 1 Android and 4 product people. It's a bad sign if your company is 50% product people and you can't establish product-market fit, especially with a "whale" for a competitor. I guess it wouldn't be unheard of for a conglomerate like LVMH to acquire, but I'm not sure there's enough traction to justify a scenario like that.
  - alehul 7y ago
    > I guess it wouldn't be unheard of for a conglomerate like LVMH to acquire, but I'm not sure there's enough traction to justify a scenario like that. +1. Worked on a fashion startup a while back, and being early-stage we still did end up in a meeting with a C-level at LVMH. They're open to hearing a lot of ideas, but the conversations quickly fell apart at realizing quite how early-stage we were— they generally want validation in the form of success in integrating your product with other fashion companies. From what we learned, fashion is notoriously behind in tech, and it's a slow climb up the chain if you're B2B.
  - severine 7y ago
    Thanks for the reference, I hadn't heard of Stitch Fix. They seem to have a great tech blog: https://multithreaded.stitchfix.com/blog/2019/09/10/stochastic-optimization/ https://multithreaded.stitchfix.com/blog/2019/09/10/stochast...
klinskyc 7y ago
It seems like telling the world you are dead in the water gives the upper hand to an acquirer here right?
- aldamiz 7y ago
  I hope you can read the post and be more positive. Thanks!
  - JoshTko 7y ago
    GP is trying to subtly let you know that you've significantly reduced negotiation leverage with any potentially interested party. There no benefit to you to publicly state your cash position.
    - CrazyStat 7y ago
      Any interested party will get access to the books and have that information anyway.
      - TallGuyShort 7y ago
        The buyer, yes. But now they can't even spin this as strategic or synergetic. It's obvious and public that it hasn't been a commercial success yet. Granted, that's usually overstated and I don't think it makes much of a difference to most people. But it's something. But hey - we all got an interesting read out of it.
        CrazyStat 7y ago
        That's a reasonable point, but it's not the argument that was being made (and that I was responding too).
    - kryptiskt 7y ago
      Weakness can be a kind of leverage. If the interested party knows that the company has weeks to live, they are forced to make a quick decision or lose out on the opportunity permanently.
sergesalager 7y ago
Eskerrik asko! ;-)
- aldamiz 7y ago
  :)
sofiaqt 7y ago
This is a brave post. It takes a lot to share this with the world. I truly hope the right partner comes along and makes the best use of all the hard work you put into this. Respect
- aldamiz 7y ago
  thanks sofia :)
Etheryte 7y ago
Looking at the technical bits, I can't help but feel that you've failed to communicate it well. Case in point, the caption for the edge detection image of the girl: > “…providing interactive access over a worldwide computer network to the plural fashion images, together with access to the fashion data for the fashion items in each of the plural fashion images and the information linking to the vendors of the fashion items…” This sentence (with ellipsis!) does not appear anywhere else in the article, so right off the bat it's hard to understand what you're trying to convey. Secondly, it's insanely verbose, the whole sentence can be boiled down to "hosting fashion images with relevant metadata". If it's an excerpt from one of your patents, then without context it only muddles the situation — it makes it seem like you either don't know how to communicate your tech or you're trying to mislead.
- aldamiz 7y ago
  Yes you are right, it is an excerpt from one of our patents. I completely agree that it is very confusing as a caption, and I've taken it out. Doing it in a hurry didn't help. Thanks for the heads up.
grogenaut 7y ago
Dangit I was hoping medium had decided to call it quits. Wish hn would highlight the blog name not the domain.
- dang 7y ago
  It's on our list.
  - grogenaut 7y ago
    killing medium or changing the tagging?
  - kirubakaran 7y ago
    For at least 12 years :-p https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=60806 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=60806 https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=pg%20subdomain&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
shamino 7y ago
I have some criticism of the idea, actually. As someone who doesn't think they have good taste in clothes, I would not use this. I would want to upgrade my wardrobe and improve my style.
- Pyxl101 7y ago
  It seems like this idea could also achieve that by providing some kind of union of two taste-graphs. I'll input my wardrobe, then select from a set of pre-uploaded designers, and the algorithms can recommend clothes for me to purchase that are inspired by both my taste and the designer's. What would be neat is if this system could automatically mine the taste graph from historical photographs pulled from social networks and the like, without effort on the user's part. (For example, everything you've uploaded to common social networks, or everything in your phone - if you choose to provide them)
czxtm 7y ago
Good luck!
nikanj 7y ago
Society tends to tell stories about survivors. Just believe, believe even harder, sacrifice all, and you'll succeed. We don't share stories of people who believed so hard, and then ended homeless and broke. xkcd touches on the subject too ( https://xkcd.com/1827/ https://xkcd.com/1827/ ), as they tend to do regardless of the topic.
dwrodri 7y ago
As someone who is interested in one day starting my own business, I have nothing but respect for someone who has the guts to follow through with that and pursue their vision. That being said... why did you (or if anyone else can chip in) decide to chase funding when you didn't have a business model? Maybe I'm being naïve here, but isn't it kind of crazy to raise 3.5M in funds for a business that has no plan but to be acquired by someone else? I'm torn, because I believe that people should absolutely pursue passion projects, and that a passion project should absolutely be monetized... if you have developed a respectable business model and a potential product-market fit. My first thought is that you could get some funding and use this as a platform for fashion retailers to exchange consumer profiles at the B2B level, or as part of the internals of the recommendation system.
- AchieveLife 7y ago
  "Maybe I'm being naïve here, but isn't it kind of crazy to raise 3.5M in funds for a business that has no plan but to be acquired by someone else?" That's a sane question. IMO it's the current financial environment that encourages such "leap without looking" strategies. Fear of missing out is huge right now. I know of a startup that received a multi-million valuation and many more million in funding. They don't even have a prototype!
  - timClicks 7y ago
    FOMO has always been present. What's changed is that debt is almost free. That allows VCs to take (very!) speculative bets for relatively low risk. They know that if each of their portfolio companies has a 10% chance to reach 30x returns, investing in 10 companies should pay off.
  - RussianCow 7y ago
    This is very real. A friend of mine started a company with over a million in seed funding with what basically amounts to just an idea. Years later, the company isn't doing that well in terms of sales/revenue, but they still manage to raise money because they have a couple obvious acquisition targets. It seems crazy to me to throw millions of dollars at a company with the hopes that one of maybe three or four megacorps in the industry will acquire them, but investors buy into that, and that's all that matters.
bumblebee4 7y ago
Looking at your own brand homepage, my impression is that it is too technical. I had expected to see many instagram-like pictures of people who demonstrate that they have managed to dress better by using your product. Isn't your value proposition that people can dress better? Maybe I have overlooked it but I think you have the perfect software to run an online shop. Pay influencers to use your product and viewers who like the results will want to buy clothes from you. The profit margins of the sold products should be higher than anything that can be made from selling an app.
- aldamiz 7y ago
  Thanks bumblebee4 - fashiontasteapi.com is a the b2b side of the company and the value prop is that we can help retailers automatically classify clothes and understand/classify people. It is for technical and business people, not the end consumer. This is a line of business we were just starting, and hopefully will continue. The consumer website is chicisimo.com :)
  - zer00eyz 7y ago
    Have you ever thought of targeting by size? As a tall person dressing and fashion in general SUCK! Online has made it easier but selection is still limited and cost is outrageous.
    - aldamiz 7y ago
      In our case, size is a property in the ontology. For some players (second hand for example) size is the number one "personalization" requirement. Imagine you see a feed of products, and none of it is your size...
      - jiofih 7y ago
        That is a very sought-after feature and yet not mentioned in any of your pages. Patagonia made waves a couple years ago with software to find matching sizes alone.
  - 7y ago
TekMol 7y ago
What strikes me as odd is how unstylish everything in that post and on the fashion taste api website is. Is that intentional? Because I would think with $3.5M in funding, you can hire professional photographers, models and stylists to make the photos and the videos. And a webdesigner to make the site. The appstore pages look better. And you have good ratings from thousands of users. So why do you want to close it down? How many users do you have and what are your running costs?
- aldamiz 7y ago
  :) You are right, the fashion taste api website does not intend to be stylish. It tries to convey a message to business and tech teams, and we know it could have a better design. Take a look at the consumer product https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMMmdCB1-Wg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMMmdCB1-Wg hopefully you like the design better :)
  - magic_beans 7y ago
    > and we know it could have a better design You've REALLY underestimated the power of design.
luckydata 7y ago
reading the blog post I learned everything I needed to know to understand why they haven't been successful commercially. I wish them good luck but their business skills seem to be awfully lacking.
mtgx 7y ago
Is there a Woocommerce plugin on the roadmap?
zarriak 7y ago
The product seems good but I can't help but think it would have been a much better strategy to try and look for an acquisition as soon as the patents were filed. Also would have preferred a browser extension and website for the reverse image searching.
ydnaclementine 7y ago
seems like tech that boutiques would say they’re interested in, but don’t bother because ‘what we’re doing now seems to work, so why change’. the one shop/brand who does understand and utilize the tech will take off
TallGuyShort 7y ago
>> We are a team of 8. We are 2 full-stack, 1 iOS, 1 Android and 4 product people What were the 4 product people doing day to day?
- adrianpike 7y ago
  This stuck out to me too - maybe OP's using product as a catchall for "non-engineers", but with a ratio like that I'd be very curious what kind of bottlenecks the team's facing and what kind of daily work output's being generated.
- sdnlafkjh34rw 7y ago
  They shared a link with the bios of the whole team: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1r0IIViwp5MuNcWXZqNI2C60PKh_uDGHBzSah-i22AtY/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/1r0IIViwp5MuNcWXZqNI2C60P... The non-engineers are the: CEO Head of Ontology Head of Product Design & User Research User Research
  - aldamiz 7y ago
    Yes. I wouldn say our "Product people" are not very traditional product people, you have our bios and focus in the team link in the post and below. Hope that clarifies the doubts. I've also clarified it in the text, and it now reflects the reality better. https://docs.google.com/document/u/1/d/1r0IIViwp5MuNcWXZqNI2C60PKh_uDGHBzSah-i22AtY/edit https://docs.google.com/document/u/1/d/1r0IIViwp5MuNcWXZqNI2...
weiming 7y ago
Cool idea but, from watching the demo videos: (a) That's a messy, unappealing closet. (b) The Alexa interaction felt awkward. Probably a touch interface would've worked better. (c) Ugh, (used?) boots on the TV stand. (d) Many of the clothing items we own are Asian items without barcodes. Wonder how the import would work on those. (e) The website (chicisimo) could use a lot, and I mean a lot of copywriting love. So many walls of text. Some fashion photos should be front and center. It is hard to understand what is going on in the animated iOS screen.
choward 7y ago
Those arguments for acquiring patents are as weak as the patents themselves. I'll admit that I only skimmed and read parts of them but nothing seems patentable or particularly innovative to me. It just looks like standard software engineering. > as a startup we need to create value and this method has proven successful in the past This means nothing to me. You did something I'm not a fan of in the past (patenting software) so that makes it okay to do now? > we’ve never thought of using patents against others It doesn't matter that you've never "thought of using patents against others". Things change. And the way that business is going it seems inevitable that these patents are going to end up in the hands of patent trolls. Patent trolls don't usually come up with their own patents. They buy companies that aren't doing well just for the patents. > And now, our number one driver for building IP: companies sometimes need leverage to negotiate or deal with the big tech players I don't understand this one at all. What negotiations are you having where patents help?
AndrewKemendo 7y ago
I empathize completely with this team because my company was in a very similar situation in 2018. We had two very technical computer vision products, had found traction and a growing enterprise user base but revenues didn't grow fast enough and all of the major companies were entering the market. We were lucky enough to find an acquisition off ramp last year but all of the feels are the same. The big takeaway I learned is, if your differentiating product/service could be classified as a feature (which most ML or CV products are) inside a platform or application, you'll be run over by the major platforms who rebuild your product/services inside their platform. Your only hope is that your team/data/IP is so far ahead and the acquiring company can't build what you're doing in-house more cheaply than what you're willing to sell for. Unfortunately it seems like there are fewer and fewer cases where major players can't rebuild your work more cheaply. Second, it's excruciatingly difficult to prove the value of your product/service to a potential acquirer because you don't know their metrics, and if you do, you don't know their acquisition strategy. We did an intensive integration of our product with a Fortune 50 retailer, and based on their own numbers showed (using their own A/B tests) that our service provided a statistically significant lift in a core metric that they cared about, in this case paid conversions. Their CEO even talked about it at a public summit. However their acquisitions strategy didn't include small companies that aren't major strategic partners (Only >$200M+ acquisitions). The worst part here is that, the founders (like I was) are absolutely in love with the technology and how amazing it is. The problem is, from a business perspective, that basically doesn't matter. You could be doing the most amazing work in NLP token inference, but if the product doesn't fit perfectly as an acquisition and it's not so compelling as to build a huge platform around, it's probably going to fail. I wish it weren't the case, but it leaves me questioning what the value of doing really hard technology is as a startup. It seems clear that the most financially successful startups aren't solving fundamentally hard technology problems until they get to scaling something with broad product market fit.
- aldamiz 7y ago
  Hey AndrewKemendo, such a great comment, so many points to think about. Thanks for sharing!
- tachyonbeam 7y ago
excalibur 7y ago
> One of our processes. This process needs some work. It replaced the girl with an entirely different girl, and swapped her Metallica tee for H&M, effectively removing her taste.
- williamstein 7y ago
  Indeed -- I found it difficult to read the post after studying the first mangled diagram.
j45 7y ago
If there is a smaller part of your business that can generate $, it can be a good way to help you stick around/simmer until the timing is right for the demand to increase. Products are about as much as deciding what part of your solution you're building that lines up with what the market is ready to actually do and growing from there incrementally. A neat example of this I read about was how the iPad was designed for many years before the iPhone came out, but the iPhone in a way was a starter/training device for a larger touch computing experience.
devit 7y ago
Assuming this can recommend clothes that someone is going to immediately love based on previous purchases, this seems incredibly valuable for all the fashion e-commerce sites starting from Amazon, and could in fact turn any large site with this technology into a monopoly at least until someone replicates it. Of course it needs to actually work though, which is not clear from the article (categories like "comfy" aren't going to cut it, you probably need a sophisticated deep learning approach on product images plus brand identity data and maybe Instagram posts with a lot of training data). Obviously you can also run a store or an affiliate-based site yourself with it, but the problem is that you are going to be missing data on customer's taste; maybe you could exclusively cater to people who love posting their photos on Instagram, connect to their Instagram account and understand their fashion taste from their posted photos - or you could even support imitating someone else fashion's taste by looking at their Instagram profile.
- ezzzzz 7y ago
  Yeah, this is sort of confusing to me. I know that B2B/SAAS is a preferred model for VC these days, but I'm sort of baffled that you wouldn't just take the tech that's been developed (assuming it works) and just integrate it with your own e-comm platform. Like, couldn't something be bootstrapped here? Maybe add a subscription/service model to create revenue?
- josephjrobison 7y ago
  I agree with you, the product looks pretty cool and promising, and seems it could be a good fit within Amazon or something with a vast array of clothes.
  - saalweachter 7y ago
    There's kind of three problems you run into with that sort of thinking. 1. Is there a difference between great recommendations and random recommendations? Maybe purchases are bottlenecked on money rather than desire, so your customers can already find as much stuff as they can afford to buy. Maybe your customers want to browse and look at literally every product on your website and will find it on page 1 or 100. Maybe your customers need to see a lot of options to realize how much they like the perfect recommendations, so showing them what they'll end up purchasing first doesn't really make a difference. Maybe your customers are lazy and will buy the first shirt you show them regardless of how good it is. 2. Can you get by being dumb if you have enough data? A company like Amazon has soooo much data on shopping preferences based on past purchases. They can construct extremely naive models from their 20 years of logs and expect them to perform very well given your ten years of personal shopping data with them. 3. Does your superior algorithm create a moat? For any interesting problem, you can get like 80-90% of the quality while spending 1% of the programmer-hours as the best of class. So if you're best of class, does your extra quality buy you anything, or is 80% as good as you good enough for most customers? Eg, can your potential acquirers just halfass something and get all the value you provide for a fraction of the cost, or do they need your extra years of experience to compete?
dazhbog 7y ago
Haha, that is exactly what is going on with us now. We just launched our first Kickstarter[1] and its not going well. We will go ahead, eat ramen, and pursuit this, and its a HW product. Wish us luck. [1]: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pycno/pulse-building-smart-devices-the-simple-way?ref=pyc&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=h.getpycno.com https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pycno/pulse-building-sm...
- koverda 7y ago
  Just a heads up, there's another IoT product called pulse: getpulse.co
- hrydgard 7y ago
  You need to begin the Kickstarter page with way better examples of problems you can solve.
thepratt 7y ago
For the patent section, I don't understand how any of the 3 are worthy of a patent or were able to be patented. I'm not sure of timelines, but for the 3rd[1], isn't that what Instagram integrated ages ago with circles linked directly to a checkout - prior art? [1] system to automatically match an item in an image, against its equivalent in a database with ecommerce links to purchase that same product.
- dboreham 7y ago
  I haven't read these claims, but I have been involved with patents here and there and: aren't almost all granted software and business model patent claims bogus in one way or another, usually either obviousness or prior art?
HenriNext 7y ago
> "We are a team of 8. We are 2 full-stack, 1 iOS, 1 Android and 4 product people." And that leaves 0 for business + marketing + sales. Maybe you didn't find the right business model during 5.5 years because you had nobody working on finding the right business model?
- paxys 7y ago
  "Product people" is a very generic term, which likely includes some of what you mentioned.
  - HenriNext 7y ago
    Fair point. But if after 2 years you haven't found a business model, it might be better to fire couple of the product people and get dedicated biz people, as opposed to waiting 5.5 years and then go belly up.
    - alexpetralia 7y ago
      Out of curiosity, do you have direct experience with entrepreneurship? This is extremely easy to say from a distance, and so naturally everyone does, only to bite their tongue once they've gone through it.
      - edoceo 7y ago
        I've built a few companies. I think it's super valuable to have some on the team who doesn't give shit at all about the tech and only cares about a) is this the right problem and b) who cares (read: pays). This person helps you focus, forces (if given authority) the tram to focus on "things that move the needle". Devs and designers simply lack that customer-development focus. I think every team would benefit from a qualitative analysis role like this - regardless of title. I have one now. We argue every day, but the balance of perspective is key.
        jiofih 7y ago
alexis_fr 7y ago
“Blogger” started like this, according to the interview in “Founders at Work”, an interesting book. The guy of blogger had to fire pretty much everyone, and it was on bay still running, and everyone angry at the former employer. A few months pass and Blogger took off.
thysultan 7y ago
Start minting believe coins.
paulie_a 7y ago
Move on. It's a bitter pill to swallow but that's the reality. It's game over. You might be able to scrape some cash together and you will be in the same place 6 months later.
Animats 7y ago
"An In-Bedroom Fashion Stylist that understands the user and her taste and knows what clothes she has in her closet." That's from Clueless.[1] Is there anybody who really wants that? People with too much money and no fashion sense? Is that a market? [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNDubWJU0aU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNDubWJU0aU
zuhayeer 7y ago
We need an inverse of this too "How to proceed when you're flush with cash, but don't believe"
- sombremesa 7y ago
  Put the money in a CD. Probably better than anything else you can do when you're about to flush someone else's money down the toilet.
look_lookatme 7y ago
According to Genius you sue google.
gerdesj 7y ago
"If you read all the way until the end, I appreciate it. In return, I want you to discover a song in a language you’ve probably never heard before: Basque." I've heard of Basque, off of Northern Spain. Also isn't there a bit of France involved? Good luck for the future.
theicfire 7y ago
Wow, thank you for this. I admire your team's dedication and bravery. I found the details of all the assets of your company fascinating, since I myself know very little about classification or fashion. This is a bit of a business review type article, and I hope you write more about this and things go well for you all.
- aldamiz 7y ago
  thanks theicfire :) maybe in the future!
jakobmi 7y ago
FIRST build a successful business, THEN try to sell it. You try so sell something that's essentially worthless, and even worse: you have zero negotiating power. So at best, you would accept an offer of ~10'000 USD. This is the cold hard truth in this case, and I don't mean it in any bad way.
1_over_n 7y ago
There are other ways to proceed when your running low - in my experience it depends heavily on how hungry a bulldog you have built (i think paul graham said this) which is often a function of when you raised cash. If you have to make payroll and can't proceed without all those people sat in their we-work seats with computers you need to buy them thats a difficult spot. We have tried to stay lean for as long as possible and avoided taking cash because we work in medtech and don't want investors that do not understand our roadmap and milestones. We have found partnerships with academia, government, and research institutions have helped drive our project forward without needing to play the VC game. We advance our product and havent given equity away.
- tomrod 7y ago
  Are you comfortable sharing what you've built? I'm in the non-profit side of medtech and love seeing well-built products.
  - 1_over_n 7y ago
    Happy to talk about it offline / privately as we are quietly working towards releasing something. Not sure how is best to reach you?
goatherders 7y ago
So they built some tech with no business model? Ooph
idorube 7y ago
I'm reading about your product and can only think one thing: "But, why?...."
z3t4 7y ago
The most important factor of product success is probably timing. If you have had a problem for years, you are not likely to adapt a solution. But if you've only had the problem for a short time, like from one day up to a month, then you are much more likely to adapt the solution. So you basically have to be lucky, or go to market fast (within one month).
Aeolun 7y ago
If you run out of cash, maybe you shouldn’t still believe. I don’t mean to tear it down, but the idea as it stands apparently isn’t a business. You must change the product if you still want to achieve market fit somehow.
jbduler 7y ago
We were in the same situation 4 years ago for our computer vision company, same team size. We targeted the wrong industry (beauty) and that was a mistake. Lessons to be learned and plenty of contacts for you as we went through the process of an acquisition. PM me, I am easy to find.
krn 7y ago
> We finally found the right path 36 months ago, but we haven’t found a relevant business model. The best use case for such technology is a B2C fashion app targeting 16-36 women with an extremely well-designed UX, that doesn't force to signup or enter any payment details. Look at the Fashion Finder[1] by Daily Mail, and how it was successfully monetized via affiliate networks[2]. I could easily see such an app being acquired by one of the latest unicorn fashion startups, such as TheRealReal[3], Poshmark[4], thredUP[5], or Vinted[6]. [1] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/fashionfinder/index.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/fashionfinder/index.html [2] https://skimlinks.com/resources/case-studies/case-study-the-meghan-markle-effect-on-daily-mail-fashion-finder/ https://skimlinks.com/resources/case-studies/case-study-the-... [3] https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/23/luxury-consignment-e-tailer-the-realreal-to-enter-the-unicorn-club-with-new-funding/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/23/luxury-consignment-e-taile... [4] https://www.forbes.com/sites/bizcarson/2018/12/14/next-billion-dollar-startups-how-a-serial-social-shopping-entrepreneur-built-poshmark-from-used-clothes-into-a-625m-retail-empire/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/bizcarson/2018/12/14/next-billi... [5] https://www.forbes.com/sites/glendatoma/2019/08/21/thredup-resale-175-million-funding/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/glendatoma/2019/08/21/thredup-r... [6] https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/27/vinted-the-second-hand-clothes-marketplace-raises-141m-at-a-1b-valuation/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/27/vinted-the-second-hand-clo...

292 points by aldamiz 7y ago

That’s an interesting article. To me, that company should have been really valuable and done really well especially in the retail clothing industry. I wonder if it’s more luck and connections than anything that has to do with product when forming a company

overcast 7y ago
Who you know, luck, being in the right place at the right time are MAJOR components of success in life. Infinite number of equally talented people in this world, without the right path.
- toomuchtodo 7y ago
  https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610395/if-youre-so-smart-why-arent-you-rich-turns-out-its-just-chance/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610395/if-youre-so-smart-... (If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich? Turns out it’s just chance.)
  - proxybop 7y ago
    Wow, thanks for ruining my life But seriously. That...feels true. But rather than waiting for things to happen to me, what happens if I go out and expose myself to more events where the dice of fate can be rolled for an outcome in my favor (or against)? Am I manipulating luck that way?
    - overcast 7y ago
      Networking, experiencing new things will ABSOLUTELY increase your chances of being successful in life. I've lost count the number of times I've met someone who led me to bigger things at a party/night out that I initially didn't really want to go to. No matter what it is, no matter how comfy that couch, go meet new people. Best way to advance.
    - fillipvt 7y ago
      That certainly is the best way to maximize luck. One such type of event is getting to know people, be it through work, networking, online w/e.
  - harrisonjackson 7y ago
    There is a positive take away. If it is up to chance, then you "just" need to increase your exposure to opportunities + the longevity of your efforts. More opportunities, over a longer period of time, gives you more coinflips.
- maest 7y ago
  This comment showed as burried for me, which I find odd.
  - TheFiend7 7y ago
    Did it fall under a certain upvote/downvote threshold or something? It was the sane for me.
  - alexpetralia 7y ago
    Me as well.
fhbdukfrh 7y ago
Don't confuse a software product with a business model. Their own words state they've "solved" the previous human problem of fashion without figuring out a viable way to capitalize. That means they don't yet have the right product. I think they've solved an intermediate problem on the path to the actual underlying pain that people would pay for.
solumos 7y ago
The name of the successful version of this company is "Stitch Fix"($2.39B market cap). > we haven’t found a relevant business model > We are a team of 8. We are 2 full-stack, 1 iOS, 1 Android and 4 product people. It's a bad sign if your company is 50% product people and you can't establish product-market fit, especially with a "whale" for a competitor. I guess it wouldn't be unheard of for a conglomerate like LVMH to acquire, but I'm not sure there's enough traction to justify a scenario like that.
- alehul 7y ago
  > I guess it wouldn't be unheard of for a conglomerate like LVMH to acquire, but I'm not sure there's enough traction to justify a scenario like that. +1. Worked on a fashion startup a while back, and being early-stage we still did end up in a meeting with a C-level at LVMH. They're open to hearing a lot of ideas, but the conversations quickly fell apart at realizing quite how early-stage we were— they generally want validation in the form of success in integrating your product with other fashion companies. From what we learned, fashion is notoriously behind in tech, and it's a slow climb up the chain if you're B2B.
- severine 7y ago
  Thanks for the reference, I hadn't heard of Stitch Fix. They seem to have a great tech blog: https://multithreaded.stitchfix.com/blog/2019/09/10/stochastic-optimization/ https://multithreaded.stitchfix.com/blog/2019/09/10/stochast...

klinskyc 7y ago

It seems like telling the world you are dead in the water gives the upper hand to an acquirer here right?

aldamiz 7y ago
I hope you can read the post and be more positive. Thanks!
- JoshTko 7y ago
  GP is trying to subtly let you know that you've significantly reduced negotiation leverage with any potentially interested party. There no benefit to you to publicly state your cash position.
  - CrazyStat 7y ago
    Any interested party will get access to the books and have that information anyway.
    - TallGuyShort 7y ago
      The buyer, yes. But now they can't even spin this as strategic or synergetic. It's obvious and public that it hasn't been a commercial success yet. Granted, that's usually overstated and I don't think it makes much of a difference to most people. But it's something. But hey - we all got an interesting read out of it.
      - CrazyStat 7y ago
        That's a reasonable point, but it's not the argument that was being made (and that I was responding too).
  - kryptiskt 7y ago
    Weakness can be a kind of leverage. If the interested party knows that the company has weeks to live, they are forced to make a quick decision or lose out on the opportunity permanently.

sergesalager 7y ago

Eskerrik asko! ;-)

aldamiz 7y ago
:)

sofiaqt 7y ago

This is a brave post. It takes a lot to share this with the world. I truly hope the right partner comes along and makes the best use of all the hard work you put into this. Respect

aldamiz 7y ago
thanks sofia :)

Etheryte 7y ago

Looking at the technical bits, I can't help but feel that you've failed to communicate it well. Case in point, the caption for the edge detection image of the girl: > “…providing interactive access over a worldwide computer network to the plural fashion images, together with access to the fashion data for the fashion items in each of the plural fashion images and the information linking to the vendors of the fashion items…” This sentence (with ellipsis!) does not appear anywhere else in the article, so right off the bat it's hard to understand what you're trying to convey. Secondly, it's insanely verbose, the whole sentence can be boiled down to "hosting fashion images with relevant metadata". If it's an excerpt from one of your patents, then without context it only muddles the situation — it makes it seem like you either don't know how to communicate your tech or you're trying to mislead.

aldamiz 7y ago
Yes you are right, it is an excerpt from one of our patents. I completely agree that it is very confusing as a caption, and I've taken it out. Doing it in a hurry didn't help. Thanks for the heads up.

grogenaut 7y ago

Dangit I was hoping medium had decided to call it quits. Wish hn would highlight the blog name not the domain.

dang 7y ago
It's on our list.
- grogenaut 7y ago
  killing medium or changing the tagging?
- kirubakaran 7y ago
  For at least 12 years :-p https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=60806 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=60806 https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=pg%20subdomain&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

shamino 7y ago

I have some criticism of the idea, actually. As someone who doesn't think they have good taste in clothes, I would not use this. I would want to upgrade my wardrobe and improve my style.

Pyxl101 7y ago
It seems like this idea could also achieve that by providing some kind of union of two taste-graphs. I'll input my wardrobe, then select from a set of pre-uploaded designers, and the algorithms can recommend clothes for me to purchase that are inspired by both my taste and the designer's. What would be neat is if this system could automatically mine the taste graph from historical photographs pulled from social networks and the like, without effort on the user's part. (For example, everything you've uploaded to common social networks, or everything in your phone - if you choose to provide them)

czxtm 7y ago

Good luck!

nikanj 7y ago

Society tends to tell stories about survivors. Just believe, believe even harder, sacrifice all, and you'll succeed. We don't share stories of people who believed so hard, and then ended homeless and broke. xkcd touches on the subject too ( https://xkcd.com/1827/ https://xkcd.com/1827/ ), as they tend to do regardless of the topic.

dwrodri 7y ago

As someone who is interested in one day starting my own business, I have nothing but respect for someone who has the guts to follow through with that and pursue their vision. That being said... why did you (or if anyone else can chip in) decide to chase funding when you didn't have a business model? Maybe I'm being naïve here, but isn't it kind of crazy to raise 3.5M in funds for a business that has no plan but to be acquired by someone else? I'm torn, because I believe that people should absolutely pursue passion projects, and that a passion project should absolutely be monetized... if you have developed a respectable business model and a potential product-market fit. My first thought is that you could get some funding and use this as a platform for fashion retailers to exchange consumer profiles at the B2B level, or as part of the internals of the recommendation system.

AchieveLife 7y ago
"Maybe I'm being naïve here, but isn't it kind of crazy to raise 3.5M in funds for a business that has no plan but to be acquired by someone else?" That's a sane question. IMO it's the current financial environment that encourages such "leap without looking" strategies. Fear of missing out is huge right now. I know of a startup that received a multi-million valuation and many more million in funding. They don't even have a prototype!
- timClicks 7y ago
  FOMO has always been present. What's changed is that debt is almost free. That allows VCs to take (very!) speculative bets for relatively low risk. They know that if each of their portfolio companies has a 10% chance to reach 30x returns, investing in 10 companies should pay off.
- RussianCow 7y ago
  This is very real. A friend of mine started a company with over a million in seed funding with what basically amounts to just an idea. Years later, the company isn't doing that well in terms of sales/revenue, but they still manage to raise money because they have a couple obvious acquisition targets. It seems crazy to me to throw millions of dollars at a company with the hopes that one of maybe three or four megacorps in the industry will acquire them, but investors buy into that, and that's all that matters.

bumblebee4 7y ago

Looking at your own brand homepage, my impression is that it is too technical. I had expected to see many instagram-like pictures of people who demonstrate that they have managed to dress better by using your product. Isn't your value proposition that people can dress better? Maybe I have overlooked it but I think you have the perfect software to run an online shop. Pay influencers to use your product and viewers who like the results will want to buy clothes from you. The profit margins of the sold products should be higher than anything that can be made from selling an app.

aldamiz 7y ago
Thanks bumblebee4 - fashiontasteapi.com is a the b2b side of the company and the value prop is that we can help retailers automatically classify clothes and understand/classify people. It is for technical and business people, not the end consumer. This is a line of business we were just starting, and hopefully will continue. The consumer website is chicisimo.com :)
- zer00eyz 7y ago
  Have you ever thought of targeting by size? As a tall person dressing and fashion in general SUCK! Online has made it easier but selection is still limited and cost is outrageous.
  - aldamiz 7y ago
    In our case, size is a property in the ontology. For some players (second hand for example) size is the number one "personalization" requirement. Imagine you see a feed of products, and none of it is your size...
    - jiofih 7y ago
      That is a very sought-after feature and yet not mentioned in any of your pages. Patagonia made waves a couple years ago with software to find matching sizes alone.
- 7y ago

TekMol 7y ago

What strikes me as odd is how unstylish everything in that post and on the fashion taste api website is. Is that intentional? Because I would think with $3.5M in funding, you can hire professional photographers, models and stylists to make the photos and the videos. And a webdesigner to make the site. The appstore pages look better. And you have good ratings from thousands of users. So why do you want to close it down? How many users do you have and what are your running costs?

aldamiz 7y ago
:) You are right, the fashion taste api website does not intend to be stylish. It tries to convey a message to business and tech teams, and we know it could have a better design. Take a look at the consumer product https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMMmdCB1-Wg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMMmdCB1-Wg hopefully you like the design better :)
- magic_beans 7y ago
  > and we know it could have a better design You've REALLY underestimated the power of design.

luckydata 7y ago

reading the blog post I learned everything I needed to know to understand why they haven't been successful commercially. I wish them good luck but their business skills seem to be awfully lacking.

mtgx 7y ago

Is there a Woocommerce plugin on the roadmap?

zarriak 7y ago

The product seems good but I can't help but think it would have been a much better strategy to try and look for an acquisition as soon as the patents were filed. Also would have preferred a browser extension and website for the reverse image searching.

ydnaclementine 7y ago

seems like tech that boutiques would say they’re interested in, but don’t bother because ‘what we’re doing now seems to work, so why change’. the one shop/brand who does understand and utilize the tech will take off

TallGuyShort 7y ago

>> We are a team of 8. We are 2 full-stack, 1 iOS, 1 Android and 4 product people What were the 4 product people doing day to day?

adrianpike 7y ago
This stuck out to me too - maybe OP's using product as a catchall for "non-engineers", but with a ratio like that I'd be very curious what kind of bottlenecks the team's facing and what kind of daily work output's being generated.
sdnlafkjh34rw 7y ago
They shared a link with the bios of the whole team: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1r0IIViwp5MuNcWXZqNI2C60PKh_uDGHBzSah-i22AtY/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/1r0IIViwp5MuNcWXZqNI2C60P... The non-engineers are the: CEO Head of Ontology Head of Product Design & User Research User Research
- aldamiz 7y ago
  Yes. I wouldn say our "Product people" are not very traditional product people, you have our bios and focus in the team link in the post and below. Hope that clarifies the doubts. I've also clarified it in the text, and it now reflects the reality better. https://docs.google.com/document/u/1/d/1r0IIViwp5MuNcWXZqNI2C60PKh_uDGHBzSah-i22AtY/edit https://docs.google.com/document/u/1/d/1r0IIViwp5MuNcWXZqNI2...

weiming 7y ago

Cool idea but, from watching the demo videos: (a) That's a messy, unappealing closet. (b) The Alexa interaction felt awkward. Probably a touch interface would've worked better. (c) Ugh, (used?) boots on the TV stand. (d) Many of the clothing items we own are Asian items without barcodes. Wonder how the import would work on those. (e) The website (chicisimo) could use a lot, and I mean a lot of copywriting love. So many walls of text. Some fashion photos should be front and center. It is hard to understand what is going on in the animated iOS screen.

choward 7y ago

Those arguments for acquiring patents are as weak as the patents themselves. I'll admit that I only skimmed and read parts of them but nothing seems patentable or particularly innovative to me. It just looks like standard software engineering. > as a startup we need to create value and this method has proven successful in the past This means nothing to me. You did something I'm not a fan of in the past (patenting software) so that makes it okay to do now? > we’ve never thought of using patents against others It doesn't matter that you've never "thought of using patents against others". Things change. And the way that business is going it seems inevitable that these patents are going to end up in the hands of patent trolls. Patent trolls don't usually come up with their own patents. They buy companies that aren't doing well just for the patents. > And now, our number one driver for building IP: companies sometimes need leverage to negotiate or deal with the big tech players I don't understand this one at all. What negotiations are you having where patents help?

AndrewKemendo 7y ago

I empathize completely with this team because my company was in a very similar situation in 2018. We had two very technical computer vision products, had found traction and a growing enterprise user base but revenues didn't grow fast enough and all of the major companies were entering the market. We were lucky enough to find an acquisition off ramp last year but all of the feels are the same. The big takeaway I learned is, if your differentiating product/service could be classified as a feature (which most ML or CV products are) inside a platform or application, you'll be run over by the major platforms who rebuild your product/services inside their platform. Your only hope is that your team/data/IP is so far ahead and the acquiring company can't build what you're doing in-house more cheaply than what you're willing to sell for. Unfortunately it seems like there are fewer and fewer cases where major players can't rebuild your work more cheaply. Second, it's excruciatingly difficult to prove the value of your product/service to a potential acquirer because you don't know their metrics, and if you do, you don't know their acquisition strategy. We did an intensive integration of our product with a Fortune 50 retailer, and based on their own numbers showed (using their own A/B tests) that our service provided a statistically significant lift in a core metric that they cared about, in this case paid conversions. Their CEO even talked about it at a public summit. However their acquisitions strategy didn't include small companies that aren't major strategic partners (Only >$200M+ acquisitions). The worst part here is that, the founders (like I was) are absolutely in love with the technology and how amazing it is. The problem is, from a business perspective, that basically doesn't matter. You could be doing the most amazing work in NLP token inference, but if the product doesn't fit perfectly as an acquisition and it's not so compelling as to build a huge platform around, it's probably going to fail. I wish it weren't the case, but it leaves me questioning what the value of doing really hard technology is as a startup. It seems clear that the most financially successful startups aren't solving fundamentally hard technology problems until they get to scaling something with broad product market fit.

aldamiz 7y ago
Hey AndrewKemendo, such a great comment, so many points to think about. Thanks for sharing!
tachyonbeam 7y ago

excalibur 7y ago

> One of our processes. This process needs some work. It replaced the girl with an entirely different girl, and swapped her Metallica tee for H&M, effectively removing her taste.

williamstein 7y ago
Indeed -- I found it difficult to read the post after studying the first mangled diagram.

j45 7y ago

If there is a smaller part of your business that can generate $, it can be a good way to help you stick around/simmer until the timing is right for the demand to increase. Products are about as much as deciding what part of your solution you're building that lines up with what the market is ready to actually do and growing from there incrementally. A neat example of this I read about was how the iPad was designed for many years before the iPhone came out, but the iPhone in a way was a starter/training device for a larger touch computing experience.

devit 7y ago

Assuming this can recommend clothes that someone is going to immediately love based on previous purchases, this seems incredibly valuable for all the fashion e-commerce sites starting from Amazon, and could in fact turn any large site with this technology into a monopoly at least until someone replicates it. Of course it needs to actually work though, which is not clear from the article (categories like "comfy" aren't going to cut it, you probably need a sophisticated deep learning approach on product images plus brand identity data and maybe Instagram posts with a lot of training data). Obviously you can also run a store or an affiliate-based site yourself with it, but the problem is that you are going to be missing data on customer's taste; maybe you could exclusively cater to people who love posting their photos on Instagram, connect to their Instagram account and understand their fashion taste from their posted photos - or you could even support imitating someone else fashion's taste by looking at their Instagram profile.

ezzzzz 7y ago
Yeah, this is sort of confusing to me. I know that B2B/SAAS is a preferred model for VC these days, but I'm sort of baffled that you wouldn't just take the tech that's been developed (assuming it works) and just integrate it with your own e-comm platform. Like, couldn't something be bootstrapped here? Maybe add a subscription/service model to create revenue?
josephjrobison 7y ago
I agree with you, the product looks pretty cool and promising, and seems it could be a good fit within Amazon or something with a vast array of clothes.
- saalweachter 7y ago
  There's kind of three problems you run into with that sort of thinking. 1. Is there a difference between great recommendations and random recommendations? Maybe purchases are bottlenecked on money rather than desire, so your customers can already find as much stuff as they can afford to buy. Maybe your customers want to browse and look at literally every product on your website and will find it on page 1 or 100. Maybe your customers need to see a lot of options to realize how much they like the perfect recommendations, so showing them what they'll end up purchasing first doesn't really make a difference. Maybe your customers are lazy and will buy the first shirt you show them regardless of how good it is. 2. Can you get by being dumb if you have enough data? A company like Amazon has soooo much data on shopping preferences based on past purchases. They can construct extremely naive models from their 20 years of logs and expect them to perform very well given your ten years of personal shopping data with them. 3. Does your superior algorithm create a moat? For any interesting problem, you can get like 80-90% of the quality while spending 1% of the programmer-hours as the best of class. So if you're best of class, does your extra quality buy you anything, or is 80% as good as you good enough for most customers? Eg, can your potential acquirers just halfass something and get all the value you provide for a fraction of the cost, or do they need your extra years of experience to compete?

dazhbog 7y ago

Haha, that is exactly what is going on with us now. We just launched our first Kickstarter[1] and its not going well. We will go ahead, eat ramen, and pursuit this, and its a HW product. Wish us luck. [1]: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pycno/pulse-building-smart-devices-the-simple-way?ref=pyc&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=h.getpycno.com https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pycno/pulse-building-sm...

koverda 7y ago
Just a heads up, there's another IoT product called pulse: getpulse.co
hrydgard 7y ago
You need to begin the Kickstarter page with way better examples of problems you can solve.

thepratt 7y ago

For the patent section, I don't understand how any of the 3 are worthy of a patent or were able to be patented. I'm not sure of timelines, but for the 3rd[1], isn't that what Instagram integrated ages ago with circles linked directly to a checkout - prior art? [1] system to automatically match an item in an image, against its equivalent in a database with ecommerce links to purchase that same product.

dboreham 7y ago
I haven't read these claims, but I have been involved with patents here and there and: aren't almost all granted software and business model patent claims bogus in one way or another, usually either obviousness or prior art?

HenriNext 7y ago

> "We are a team of 8. We are 2 full-stack, 1 iOS, 1 Android and 4 product people." And that leaves 0 for business + marketing + sales. Maybe you didn't find the right business model during 5.5 years because you had nobody working on finding the right business model?

paxys 7y ago
"Product people" is a very generic term, which likely includes some of what you mentioned.
- HenriNext 7y ago
  Fair point. But if after 2 years you haven't found a business model, it might be better to fire couple of the product people and get dedicated biz people, as opposed to waiting 5.5 years and then go belly up.
  - alexpetralia 7y ago
    Out of curiosity, do you have direct experience with entrepreneurship? This is extremely easy to say from a distance, and so naturally everyone does, only to bite their tongue once they've gone through it.
    - edoceo 7y ago
      I've built a few companies. I think it's super valuable to have some on the team who doesn't give shit at all about the tech and only cares about a) is this the right problem and b) who cares (read: pays). This person helps you focus, forces (if given authority) the tram to focus on "things that move the needle". Devs and designers simply lack that customer-development focus. I think every team would benefit from a qualitative analysis role like this - regardless of title. I have one now. We argue every day, but the balance of perspective is key.
      - jiofih 7y ago

alexis_fr 7y ago

“Blogger” started like this, according to the interview in “Founders at Work”, an interesting book. The guy of blogger had to fire pretty much everyone, and it was on bay still running, and everyone angry at the former employer. A few months pass and Blogger took off.

thysultan 7y ago

Start minting believe coins.

paulie_a 7y ago

Move on. It's a bitter pill to swallow but that's the reality. It's game over. You might be able to scrape some cash together and you will be in the same place 6 months later.

Animats 7y ago

"An In-Bedroom Fashion Stylist that understands the user and her taste and knows what clothes she has in her closet." That's from Clueless.[1] Is there anybody who really wants that? People with too much money and no fashion sense? Is that a market? [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNDubWJU0aU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNDubWJU0aU

zuhayeer 7y ago

We need an inverse of this too "How to proceed when you're flush with cash, but don't believe"

sombremesa 7y ago
Put the money in a CD. Probably better than anything else you can do when you're about to flush someone else's money down the toilet.

look_lookatme 7y ago

According to Genius you sue google.

gerdesj 7y ago

"If you read all the way until the end, I appreciate it. In return, I want you to discover a song in a language you’ve probably never heard before: Basque." I've heard of Basque, off of Northern Spain. Also isn't there a bit of France involved? Good luck for the future.

theicfire 7y ago

Wow, thank you for this. I admire your team's dedication and bravery. I found the details of all the assets of your company fascinating, since I myself know very little about classification or fashion. This is a bit of a business review type article, and I hope you write more about this and things go well for you all.

aldamiz 7y ago
thanks theicfire :) maybe in the future!

jakobmi 7y ago

FIRST build a successful business, THEN try to sell it. You try so sell something that's essentially worthless, and even worse: you have zero negotiating power. So at best, you would accept an offer of ~10'000 USD. This is the cold hard truth in this case, and I don't mean it in any bad way.

1_over_n 7y ago

There are other ways to proceed when your running low - in my experience it depends heavily on how hungry a bulldog you have built (i think paul graham said this) which is often a function of when you raised cash. If you have to make payroll and can't proceed without all those people sat in their we-work seats with computers you need to buy them thats a difficult spot. We have tried to stay lean for as long as possible and avoided taking cash because we work in medtech and don't want investors that do not understand our roadmap and milestones. We have found partnerships with academia, government, and research institutions have helped drive our project forward without needing to play the VC game. We advance our product and havent given equity away.

tomrod 7y ago
Are you comfortable sharing what you've built? I'm in the non-profit side of medtech and love seeing well-built products.
- 1_over_n 7y ago
  Happy to talk about it offline / privately as we are quietly working towards releasing something. Not sure how is best to reach you?

goatherders 7y ago

So they built some tech with no business model? Ooph

idorube 7y ago

I'm reading about your product and can only think one thing: "But, why?...."

z3t4 7y ago

The most important factor of product success is probably timing. If you have had a problem for years, you are not likely to adapt a solution. But if you've only had the problem for a short time, like from one day up to a month, then you are much more likely to adapt the solution. So you basically have to be lucky, or go to market fast (within one month).

Aeolun 7y ago

If you run out of cash, maybe you shouldn’t still believe. I don’t mean to tear it down, but the idea as it stands apparently isn’t a business. You must change the product if you still want to achieve market fit somehow.

jbduler 7y ago

We were in the same situation 4 years ago for our computer vision company, same team size. We targeted the wrong industry (beauty) and that was a mistake. Lessons to be learned and plenty of contacts for you as we went through the process of an acquisition. PM me, I am easy to find.

krn 7y ago

> We finally found the right path 36 months ago, but we haven’t found a relevant business model. The best use case for such technology is a B2C fashion app targeting 16-36 women with an extremely well-designed UX, that doesn't force to signup or enter any payment details. Look at the Fashion Finder[1] by Daily Mail, and how it was successfully monetized via affiliate networks[2]. I could easily see such an app being acquired by one of the latest unicorn fashion startups, such as TheRealReal[3], Poshmark[4], thredUP[5], or Vinted[6]. [1] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/fashionfinder/index.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/fashionfinder/index.html [2] https://skimlinks.com/resources/case-studies/case-study-the-meghan-markle-effect-on-daily-mail-fashion-finder/ https://skimlinks.com/resources/case-studies/case-study-the-... [3] https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/23/luxury-consignment-e-tailer-the-realreal-to-enter-the-unicorn-club-with-new-funding/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/23/luxury-consignment-e-taile... [4] https://www.forbes.com/sites/bizcarson/2018/12/14/next-billion-dollar-startups-how-a-serial-social-shopping-entrepreneur-built-poshmark-from-used-clothes-into-a-625m-retail-empire/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/bizcarson/2018/12/14/next-billi... [5] https://www.forbes.com/sites/glendatoma/2019/08/21/thredup-resale-175-million-funding/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/glendatoma/2019/08/21/thredup-r... [6] https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/27/vinted-the-second-hand-clothes-marketplace-raises-141m-at-a-1b-valuation/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/27/vinted-the-second-hand-clo...