Hey guys, I'm the CEO and Founder of Wanelo, so I'll jump in here.
In 2007-2008, I actively searched for a technical cofounder, but I couldn’t find one. I did have a false start of working with two great engineers, who in the end weren't interested in taking this on full time.
In parallel, I started consulting as a UX designer to make money. I eventually took on more projects that led me to hire a small team of designers to support all the client work. The income generated from these projects made it possible for me bootstrap Wanelo on my own and hire an engineer in India and a couple people under him to start building Wanelo. This was a direct contracting situation (he got paid and there was no equity involved) which went on for a couple of years.
We built a bunch of features that nobody cared to use until, finally, at the end of 2010, we launched a version (mentioned in the presentation) which people started using for the first time. At that point, I closed down my agency, which ended my source of income. I then asked the main engineer (Sarvjeet) if he would come on board as a CTO/cofounder (since I could no longer pay him or anyone else) and he said yes. This didn’t last for long. After a few months, it became clear very quickly that we were not a good fit for a cofounder relationship. We mutually agreed to end his involvement with the company (there was a 3 months transition period for which he got paid), and I went on solo to raise funding and build a new team, which took over the technical platform. Two months later, we fully rebuilt the website on an entirely new stack, leaving all the old code behind.
To elaborate on the “no team” comment, that comes directly from investors who refused to consider me and a remote engineer in India as a real team. This was the main challenge in raising money. Investors would literally call me a solo female non technical founder because it was just me with no engineering background and some remote contractors, and it took 40 rejections from investors to close my seed round.
Still somewhat amazed at how discussion around a successful example of product-market fit degenerated into such bile, but glad to see clarification from you and Sarvjeet.
>> "Still somewhat amazed at how discussion around a successful example of product-market fit degenerated into such bile"
The original title was the problem. Unfortunately the original title was created by the HN submitter (as far as I can tell) and it wasn't 100% accurate. If there's one thing people on HN do well it's pick holes in things that aren't 100% correct. It doesn't excuse some of the bile you're referring to but I think it reinforces the need not to create our own titles when submitting and to follow the HN guidelines around submissions.[1]
The title came from slide 12 of the presentation. Based on the recent posts by the parties involved, it seems that it was accurate with respect to the hurdles encountered in getting funding, but the presentation slides didn't express the context of how this event fit into the history of the company.
Thanks. Indeed a lot of hard work has gone into the initial stages when there were only two people working, Deena as product and design and me as a techie. And hard work still continues. And glad to see that our clarifications saved further degeneration.
In 2007-2008, I actively searched for a technical cofounder, but I couldn’t find one. I did have a false start of working with two great engineers, who in the end weren't interested in taking this on full time.
In parallel, I started consulting as a UX designer to make money. I eventually took on more projects that led me to hire a small team of designers to support all the client work. The income generated from these projects made it possible for me bootstrap Wanelo on my own and hire an engineer in India and a couple people under him to start building Wanelo. This was a direct contracting situation (he got paid and there was no equity involved) which went on for a couple of years.
We built a bunch of features that nobody cared to use until, finally, at the end of 2010, we launched a version (mentioned in the presentation) which people started using for the first time. At that point, I closed down my agency, which ended my source of income. I then asked the main engineer (Sarvjeet) if he would come on board as a CTO/cofounder (since I could no longer pay him or anyone else) and he said yes. This didn’t last for long. After a few months, it became clear very quickly that we were not a good fit for a cofounder relationship. We mutually agreed to end his involvement with the company (there was a 3 months transition period for which he got paid), and I went on solo to raise funding and build a new team, which took over the technical platform. Two months later, we fully rebuilt the website on an entirely new stack, leaving all the old code behind.
To elaborate on the “no team” comment, that comes directly from investors who refused to consider me and a remote engineer in India as a real team. This was the main challenge in raising money. Investors would literally call me a solo female non technical founder because it was just me with no engineering background and some remote contractors, and it took 40 rejections from investors to close my seed round.