How to proceed when you run out of cash, but you still believe? • Hacker News Board

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

#161

Post by saalweachter » Thu, Dec 05, 2019, 3:40 AM UTC

josephjrobison wrote: post #116

devit wrote: post #77

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'…

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.

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?

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

#162

Post by notoriousjpg » Thu, Dec 05, 2019, 3:42 AM UTC

jiofih wrote: post #150

bumblebee4 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually I have looked at chicisimo.com. The page is full of tag clouds. If I am looking for clothes, why should I install the app? I don't know your market well, so this is not deep advice. I just think that people who care about their look don't want to deal with words. They want to 'see' why your app helps them to look better. To convince me, show me before and after pics. I don't care how you label stuff, I just…

I have to second this. The Chicisimo (how do you even say this by the way) site should be the b2b one. Way too technical and verbose for consumers, yet completely misses the visual aspect of showcasing what it actually can do with clothes & people. Did you edit the site to make it more attractive to prospective buyers? I can’t see how “Omnichannel Personalization Platform for Fashion Retail” being the first block of…

Like machismo i assume

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

#163

Post by jakobmi » Thu, Dec 05, 2019, 3:43 AM UTC

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.

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

#164

Post by 1_over_n » Thu, Dec 05, 2019, 3:47 AM UTC

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.

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

#165

Post by StillBored » Thu, Dec 05, 2019, 3:48 AM UTC

munk-a wrote: post #129

petra wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The economics of on-demand are totally different: First, there's a delivery part. Delivery companies often become very big and make a lot of money. Second, centralizing many small dry cleaning places into one has Significant economic advantages. Third, they probably use an asset-lite model like Uber. Fourth, all those make them somewhat similar to some sucsesfull, high growth companies , so it's possible they'll grow…

Does centralizing many small dry cleaning places have significant economic advantages assuming that each location has to negotiate independently for it's space and (to parallel wework) items like cleaning supplies and staff management necessarily vary from location to location due to local regulations? WeWork is sort of the golden example of a business being sold as something that works at scale... except the busines…

It seems in a lot of places (where I live, Austin TX) all the little mom/pop dry cleaning shops are actually shipping the dry cleaning off to a central location. The EPA/etc regulations apparently have forced that part of the cycle to converge.

That is part of why it costs more/takes longer than simple laundry which is frequently still done at the mom and pop location. Although, I think the larger chains (Jack Brown) are entirely just storefronts sending the laundry and dry cleaning off to some centralized location.

So, I doubt there is much advantage to further centralization that hasn't already happened.

Also, I'm not even sure about the hotel bits, most hotel's I've stayed in recently _DO_ their own laundry. They have a couple giant commercial machines sitting in the basement for the sheets/towels. I know this because I always take the stairs and often take a wrong turn and end up in the basement/etc.

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

#166

Post by tomrod » Thu, Dec 05, 2019, 3:50 AM UTC

1_over_n wrote: post #164

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 possib…

Are you comfortable sharing what you've built? I'm in the non-profit side of medtech and love seeing well-built products.

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

#167

Post by asah » Thu, Dec 05, 2019, 3:52 AM UTC

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #59

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 learn…

Agreed but be cautious in the application and don't get jaded.

Microsoft DOS started as a feature of IBM PCs, and Google started as a feature of Yahoo.

Like "tech in search of a problem" IMHO "feature vs product vs company" needs to be applied case by case.

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

#168

Post by goatherders » Thu, Dec 05, 2019, 4:19 AM UTC

So they built some tech with no business model? Ooph

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

#169

Post by areoform » Thu, Dec 05, 2019, 4:48 AM UTC

aldamiz wrote: post #34

bumblebee4 wrote: post #28

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…

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 :)

Hot take: You need a woman to design this website. None of it screams fashion. When I think fashion, I think instagram influencer not "Omnichannel Personalization."

Your killer app could be a simple FB quiz. People give you their FB/insta and you spit out what looks that they'd think are wicked sick. Ideally culled from Instagram.

This web page sounds like nerds talking about fashion rather than fashionistas. I'm fairly sure that the Kardashians can't spell ontology.

Edit: Also why isn't this app hooking into the hauling subculture? This would totes perfect for folks and YTers planning hauls.

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

#170

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Dec 05, 2019, 4:57 AM UTC

asah wrote: post #167

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #59

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 learn…

Agreed but be cautious in the application and don't get jaded. Microsoft DOS started as a feature of IBM PCs, and Google started as a feature of Yahoo. Like "tech in search of a problem" IMHO "feature vs product vs company" needs to be applied case by case.

[deleted]