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Launch HN: Tress (YC W17) – Online community for black women's hairstyles

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Re: Launch HN: Tress (YC W17) – Online community for black women's hairstyles

#31

Post by vidarh »

koolba wrote: post #11

Interesting topic and I can see how this is a daily issue for some, but I don't get the startup angle. What's the eventual monetization angle? Referrals for hair stylists? Paid membership to get new lists of or customized styles? Which of the pictures of the girl (linked to the dropbox share) is closest to her natural hair? The styles are so varied it's impossible to tell! On the aesthetic front (obviously IMHO) it's…

Here is a UK chain catering to black hair. Their page of products related to chemical relaxing (straightening) of hair alone has more than hundred products (sidebar on right):

http://www.pakcosmetics.com/hair-care/relaxer-n-texturizer/h...

And that's just one category of types of hair products that are rarely used on white hair.

That should give a slight idea of the referral opportunities..

Re: Launch HN: Tress (YC W17) – Online community for black women's hairstyles

#32

Post by gcav »

This is brilliant - your target market is passionate and spends serious money on a pain point you are solving. And while I'm sure you are well connected in Accra, I can't help but mention Ashesi University. Super talented engineers coming out of that school

Re: Launch HN: Tress (YC W17) – Online community for black women's hairstyles

#33

Post by pryelluw »

dang wrote: post #28
pryelluw wrote: post #12

Why are you launching here and not on a facebook group dedicated to such market? There are also instagram micro influencers (less than 10k followers) you could also leverage... Not being a hater but launching here seems silly from the POV of marketing. This seems like something that would get traction rather quickly if pushed in the right context. Trust me. Put ads on facebook with your target demographics and search…

YC startups are doing Launch HNs these days, which is a new mechanism that we intend eventually to replace some of the job ads that appear on the front page. It's all a work in progress. But we would have invited Tress to post even apart from that, because it's so off-the-beaten-track for HN, and that's what keeps things interesting. You're right that HN isn't the best place to launch consumer products for customer a…

Thank you, dang. Last thing I want to do is rain on someones parade. Startups are hard enough already.

Re: Launch HN: Tress (YC W17) – Online community for black women's hairstyles

#34

Post by pryelluw »

dang wrote: post #29
pryelluw wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, so they have to launch here? Didnt know that. Makes lots of sense. :)

Not have to! Just can if they want to. Let me dig up the links for you where I posted about this... Edit: here's the rundown so far: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=... . Those comments trace the history of how the idea is evolving. I like explaining it to the community this way because the minute we announce something formal, people forget that it's all experimental and subject to change.…

Oh ok. It does make sense now that Im past the initial shock of the post. This might produce a good initial buzz on social media.

Re: Launch HN: Tress (YC W17) – Online community for black women's hairstyles

#35

Post by mseolatunde »

rockmeamedee wrote: post #15

Cool! Sounds like you have many interesting problems, on top of the usual fun challenges of running a social network+cross platform app. Computer vision, recommenders for hairstyles, products, stylists, and probably many more. Then you have usage information about all of those you could use in a bunch of ways. And you can monetise with simple, relevant, products ads, or get a commission off booking a stylist, or coll…

Hi, I'm the Engineering Lead at Tress and we're a lean team of 3. Right now, we're looking to hire 1 Front End Engineer as we want to launch our web version for SEO (we realised that Google App Indexing is not enough and we're missing a lot of SEO opportunities on the web), 1 iOS engineer and 1 UI/UX designer.

Our top level stack is Ruby on Rails, Postgresql, Redis, AWS, Heroku, Java, Objective C & Swift.

We initially tested our product in Ghana. But our user base has grown since and our users are from all over the world with a significant majority from Africa and the US. We are and will be based in Silicon Valley going forward. It's a global app and our goal is to have our foot placed globally

Re: Launch HN: Tress (YC W17) – Online community for black women's hairstyles

#36

Post by notlisted »

Great idea. You mention how much time is spent on looking at/for styles (incl. members of my family) but I'm not sure everyone here is aware of the average spend on hair and hair-related products: Mintel estimates the 2016 spend on black haircare products is about $2.5BB.

Not included in this number (and typically underreported because many services are rendered in non-official salons) hairstyling services. When family members go to the 'salon' it often involves many hours and hundred(s) of dollars for a single visit. Haircare expenditures are a significant budget item - no matter how wealthy.

I'll pass the app on to my family. Let's see what they say.

Re: Launch HN: Tress (YC W17) – Online community for black women's hairstyles

#37

Post by mseolatunde »

claytonjy wrote: post #8

The computerized detection of hair type and style sounds really interesting. How far down this path are you now, are you planning on a deep-neural-net (e.g. CNN's) or something simpler? Would certainly make for a unique image-classification problem, with its own interesting challenges; a collection of images of black women with different hairstyles will be a lot more visually similar than a collection of dogs/cars/mo…

Yup, it's interesting! We're in the early stage of this, currently experimenting with [Keras](https://keras.io/) and focusing on the inception pre-trained network. Our goal is to retrain the top layer of the network using the tags/hair types/categories we're collecting on the app as labels.

Re: Launch HN: Tress (YC W17) – Online community for black women's hairstyles

#38

Post by priscahazel »

pryelluw wrote: post #12

Why are you launching here and not on a facebook group dedicated to such market? There are also instagram micro influencers (less than 10k followers) you could also leverage... Not being a hater but launching here seems silly from the POV of marketing. This seems like something that would get traction rather quickly if pushed in the right context. Trust me. Put ads on facebook with your target demographics and search…

We are definitely launching on all those other platforms and some more. We also thought it will be great to launch on Hacker News partly because we are in YC but also because of the rich discussion and feedback we could get from the Hacker News community. We would be happy to email you and would love an intro.

Re: Launch HN: Tress (YC W17) – Online community for black women's hairstyles

#39

Post by pryelluw »

priscahazel wrote: post #38
pryelluw wrote: post #12

Why are you launching here and not on a facebook group dedicated to such market? There are also instagram micro influencers (less than 10k followers) you could also leverage... Not being a hater but launching here seems silly from the POV of marketing. This seems like something that would get traction rather quickly if pushed in the right context. Trust me. Put ads on facebook with your target demographics and search…

We are definitely launching on all those other platforms and some more. We also thought it will be great to launch on Hacker News partly because we are in YC but also because of the rich discussion and feedback we could get from the Hacker News community. We would be happy to email you and would love an intro.

Cool, pryelluw at gmail. No bs or strings (thumbsup).

Re: Launch HN: Tress (YC W17) – Online community for black women's hairstyles

#40

Post by purple-dragon »

Congrats and good luck!

One minor issue I noticed with your website: most users will expect that clicking on the page indicator in your carousel (where you feature testimonials) will trigger the appropriate content change. Nothing happens when I click on these indicators and there's no obvious way for me to flip through the testimonials other than to wait with my mouse hovering over an adjacent section (since it seems the carousel is paused when the mouse hovers in that section).

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