After proclaiming that she deserves extra money to compensate her for the displeasure of working in Austin, she shouldn't expect to feel welcome here. She made her bed, and she can lie in it. The hostility and disrespect I communicated were intentional, not motivated by her sex, and, in my opinion, a modest and proportional response to what she wrote.
@a3camero, I admit that as someone from the south, I should know better than to say "darling." I reached for a patronizing term and used it without ism-checking it. Serves me right for being nasty. It's hard to be offensive to one person without inflicting unintentional and regrettable collateral damage. I apologize.
I meant the "darling" thing, but I'm from Ontario where that would be an unusual thing to say and probably sexist.
Maybe it isn't in Texas, in which case, my apologies. Texas is on my list of places to visit and if darling is actually used in a way that isn't sexist, well you just bumped it up a bit more on my travel list!
I think a more interesting question is what sort of responsibility Gowalla founders had to its employees. I've noticed that a good number of employees aren't staying on with the Facebook transition (by my count, only a small minority are going on to Palo Alto). Maybe they had better offers elsewhere, but considering some people are opting for uncertainty / unemployment, my speculation is that they got the short end of the stick with this one.
I use Facebook to administer our business page on there. We have 70K+ users, and we get a lot of spam that is not automatically filtered out. I'm on there a lot cleaning things up.
Otherwise, I don't really add any content to Facebook much considering how often I log in. Most of my friends (professionals in their mid to late 30s) have more or less stopped using it, except for women with small children.
Exactly. If I look at the recommended friends page, people who defriended me are often near the top (probably because of the high number of mutual friends).
I started Blogthings.com (a personality quiz site) in 2004 by myself, and I've never had a job while working in it. It makes enough money for both my husband and I to live off of, and we split the work on it, which ends up just being a few hours a week (no more than 10). I spend my free time working on my programming / math and figuring out what's next.
I ran a similar quiz-site for a while before flipping it a couple of years ago. It had heavy integration with facebook, and well was rather spammy (I know I might go to hell).
I just visited your website, I was wondering whether you manually create all the quizzes, or whether you have started outsourcing it seeing that you have been at it since the beginning of time?
Also, I am assuming that all your revenue at this point is from the ads on the website?
Thanks! I write them all myself, but I use a lot self-written software at this point to streamline the writing process. And yes, 100% ad based. Adsense actually probably pays us the most we could get for our traffic with the least amount of intrusion.
wow that's great. An inspiring story. I am doing a similar casual location based quiz/queries site and soon a mobile app with findero.us and I am pretty excited about it. Whether it becomes a success story like yours or not, but I got to learn a lot out of it. I hope my passion pays off.
"In fashion, trust me, that are MANY problems that need to be solved: a highly antiquated supply chain, non-standard, un-linked computer systems, non-standard sizing that varies even within the same line, inefficient pricing methods."
I don't see why internet fashion companies couldn't take a crack at solving / mitigating at least some of these. For example, there are some sites (like zafu.com - no affiliation) that help women find jeans that fit. They can't change the sizes on the jeans, but I'm not holding my breath for the fashion industry to make sizing any easier any time soon.
I also disagree with her claim that discoverability is not a problem. A lot of people are trying to solve it, but I don't consider it solved for myself (or other women I know). I find the choices in women's fashion to be overwhelming (to say the least), and I'm still looking for the more efficient ways to find clothes I like.
I agree with her overall point that the number of trendy affiliate fashion sites is getting tiresome, but that doesn't mean that they couldn't be developed in interesting ways. It may be true that affiliate sites need to sell a ton more in order to compete with "click-and-mortar" fashion companies, but I'd argue that affiliate sites can also be more innovative, flexible, and forward thinking. If you're not shipping or manufacturing, you can iterate more quickly.
I was actually discussing this very point with a good friend of mine who also runs a fashion startup the other day.
To refine what I said: it's not that discoverability is not a problem, it's that all of the new fashion apps (from Lyst to Fashism to Inporia to Svpply to Google Boutiques) seem to have only increased the "noise" versus decrease it. In fashion, customers pay for the edit: a small, curated collection of products that an editor has determined best fits her customer's profile. To argue that we can somehow replace this very right-brained activity with crowdsourcing or algorithms is untenable.
> To argue that we can somehow replace this very right-brained activity with crowd-sourcing or algorithms is untenable.
For now maybe. Ten years ago if you asked me if I'd spend 2 hours watching a movie because a computer said so, I'd laugh. Netflix recommendations, while not perfect, are still very good. Had I not told Netflix that I loved District 9, it would not have suggested Torchwood: Children of Earth to me. Had it not suggested Torchwood, I wouldn't have discovered that Doctor Who was back on air. Right now I get about 50% of my entertainment discovery done via algorithms. Sure, fashion is difficult and subjective but I don't see it as being any different from music or entertainment in the big picture sense.
Btw, that was a very well-written article. Thanks for sharing.
It is different. When buying clothes people ask questions like "Will my girlfriend think I'm sexier?" or "Will the kids at school think I'm cooler?"
Fashion is a kind of performance -- people see what you wear, after all -- so there's an inherent social dimension that isn't obviously present like it is with movies on Netflix, which you watch in the privacy of your own home.
People, not robots, will win the day when it comes to shopping online.
The core of these recommendation algorithms is often a flavor of nearest neighbor analysis. In this case, the computer is using attributes to find people who are similar to you, and then suggest to you things that they liked.
All the "robots" do is find people who it thinks you would like to emulate. That sounds like the same thing the fashion industry has been doing for decades.
I'm not really opposed to what you're saying, but it does seem to me like you dismiss the big human factor in these algorithms. It's not like it's just a system saying "You bought a red dress last year, here is a list of other red dresses you may like" -- Because the quirky frock she bought for work last year doesn't mean she wants to see cocktail dresses that just so happen to be the same color, or from the same designer, or in the same price range.
Instead, it's correlating prototypical woman A to prototypical woman B based on available demographic data and past purchase history, and suggesting to "A" some of the things that "B" purchased. The emotion and intimacy there was the human act of "B" purchasing clothing that she connected with.
What I'm trying to say is this: it's not about a "match" between the product and the potential consumer.
The who, what, and how of the recommendation matter almost as much as the product itself. Just the fact that I know this recommendation came from a human counts for something, especially if it's a human I trust or respect when it comes to fashion (not necessarily a friend).
e.g., a celebrity wearing a shirt and having it sell out the next day.
Movies are different because their consumption isn't inherently conspicuous. I do it alone and talk about it with friends if I choose, but everyone sees the clothes I wear no matter what.
For example, I can choose to hide the fact that I love Katy Perry, but I can't hide the fact that LVMH made my handbag.
How you dress is a performance, and so the decision to wear something is filtered more rigorously through a social dimension than watching a movie or listening to a song is.
In the context of my most previous reply above -- how would you feel about reccomendation algorithms that pull more visibly from your own social graph -- Friends, yes, but also people you follow on Twitter and Like on facebook.
That seems almost a perfect marriage of my comments on the innate human quality behind a nearest-neighbor algorithm your comments here.
Whether it's a friend or an impersonal algorithm making the recommendation, you're still watching the same trailer before deciding to purchase a film. On the other hand, no amount of precise algorithmic matching of tastes and sizes can substitute for feeling the softness of the fabric and being reassured by your reflection that your bum doesn't look big in it before you buy. The costs involved are quite different too...
I suspect the simple solution to that is to have low cost models in a range of sizes try on each item. Let's say it costs 100$ a per size * 10 sizes = 100$ per item in your catalog * 10,000 items in the catalog = 10 million. Which is within the range of a well funded start-up. So it adds 1k/item and some lead time it's also a huge barrier to entry and probably well worth it.
PS: Don't forget Zappos sells shoes online where fit is both harder to come by and more important.
If I'm in the target market for high fashion, I'd probably list "clothes shopping" as one of my hobbies. I don't; I buy cheap clothes which retailers make minimal profit on. If I was in the market for designer clothes then my tastes wouldn't be price elastic, so saving retailers' costs by substituting cheaply made model videos for the user experience of actually seeing and touching the clothes in a stylish location isn't much of a purchase incentive. By contrast, unless the local Blockbuster outfit offer exceptional advice, actually going and physically picking up DVDs is a mere inconvenience and I'd much rather pay less to skip it altogether.
I'm not arguing it's impossible to sell fashion items online; it evidently is. It's probably also possible to sell wallpaper over the telephone. That doesn't mean the economies of selling over the internet necessarily lend themselves well to disrupting a sector that enjoys massive profit margins through making far more effective emotional inducements to purchase than a photograph and a like button.
I would argue that there is a huge market for people living in Arizona that can't get to any of those high end stores without flying there that still buy 'high end' fashion. The market is fit 34 year old doctors making 300k that don't live near such stores it's really poorly catered to. When a catalog sell 5,000$ dresses based on pictures that look nothing like the customer that's just ripe for disruption over the web.
You could also do the same thing for the mass market, but I don't think the average American really wants to see someone that actually looks like them trying on the clothes. Granted, there are main stream markets other than fat that this could work just fine, baby clothes, teens, big and tall etc.
Yep - there is a huge market for this, one that Net-A-Porter and Mr. Porter dominate (~$200 million in revenue). They take care of the sizing issues with flexible returns and personal stylists. Since 80% of their revenue comes from only 2% of their client base, they can afford to hire personal stylists for higher-volume clientele. Check it out.
I totally agree about the increased noise making discoverability worse. In fact, I have spent very little time on any of the new sites we're talking about just due to sheer exhaustion from market oversaturation. And that's crazy, because I'm probably their ideal customer.They definitely aren't reaching me, and they should be.
I tend to agree with you about curation versus AI, but I am not 100% sure. Years ago I was skeptical that collaborative filtering would ever work at all. As the poster below notes, it does pretty well for Netflix and sometimes for Amazon too. I could at least imagine some sort of AI recommendation system working for the masses, but I doubt it would ever appeal to the highest end customers.
Is this a symptom of startups wanting the homerun rather than building a smaller business around the edit? Seems to me that a business built around an edit fit to a customer's profile takes a personal intuitive touch or time and a ton of data whereas the current crop of fashion apps is throwing everything against the wall in hopes of attracting large numbers (of less discerning) users in the belief that # of users = high valuation (as opposed to the quality of users).
I hate to read startup blogs/news and they talk about exit strategy. What if Jobs, Gates, Page/Brin, and Bezos worried more about the exit rather than building a sustainable business. (I know it's off topic, just irks me.)
What are your thoughts on Pinterest? I use it all the time - recent purchases as a result of Pinterest include a bunch of apartment furnishings, an iPhone case, some new t-shirts, etc. And now when I need something I have started using it as a search engine. I do think it has solved the problem of both breadth of options and targeted results.
Pinterest is one the coolest/simplest site I've discovered this year. I have yet to buy anything straight from it, but I search for styles through it before going out and buying clothes.
I haven't gotten my hands on this book yet, but his talk was probably the best thing I saw at SXSW this year. I personally find design to be a hard nut to crack, but the way he thinks is appealing to my very logic-y brain.
I disagree. The most successful entrepreneurs learn quickly and iterate quickly. You usually can learn something in two weeks - even if it's just that certain language you use is unclear or a turn off. And that's a start.
Quick iteration is the goal, but in two weeks you can't possibly gain enough data, experience, and mindshare to properly build a conclusive picture. Sure, iteration means making quick tactical decisions and conclusions, but business is about strategy and that often moves on the scale of months (even in lean startup land). Those that try to make strategic decisions faster than they can figure out what their data and experience means always end up falling over (I've worked for companies that have done this - twice).
I agree, but I don't think that the original poster was claiming to have a conclusive picture. He had a few observations from the first two weeks, and I'm arguing that they were valid. Was it a good idea to act on them so quickly? Possibly. In my experience, (nine years of running the same business) intuition is sometimes enough.
