Congratulations team! Rooting for you as loudly as I can!
We truly appreciate it!!
Launch HN: Queenly (YC W21) – Marketplace and search engine for formalwear
31–38 of 38 posts
Re: Launch HN: Queenly (YC W21) – Marketplace and search engine for formalwear
#32Go Queenly! Happy to see the product launch.
Thanks so much!
Re: Launch HN: Queenly (YC W21) – Marketplace and search engine for formalwear
#33Congratulations on the lunch. Upvote!
Thank you!
Re: Launch HN: Queenly (YC W21) – Marketplace and search engine for formalwear
#34Congrats on the launch! Here's a niche worth looking into: Women's attire for formal music recitals and performances. My experience is limited to being a parent of a classical music student. Every musician ends up needing a variety of outfits for performances of different kinds, and for women, a solo performance tends to demand something akin to a formal dress. Shopping for such a thing is a pain in the arse, but the…
Oh also, we thought of this when we met a user on our platform asking about attire for ice skating competitions! We figured that we can also expand this to competition / performance wear like what you had mentioned. We started talking to some users who perform as ballroom dancers, pianists, etc., and they all told us how expensive these garments are and how difficult it is to find them online. Thank you so much for this recommendation, we really wanna work hard this year to expand to this fully.
Re: Launch HN: Queenly (YC W21) – Marketplace and search engine for formalwear
#35Really cool to see! Congrats on the launch! > buyers on generic marketplaces like eBay or Poshmark tend to not focus on giving a safe and easy shopping experience for this type of inventory Can you speak towards what you do to improve the buyer / seller experience for these sorts of items?
That's a great question!
A little background: before we started Queenly, our users would often send payments and dresses to each other within large Facebook groups. As you might expect, very often it's hard to ensure security when you're shipping your wedding gown to a complete stranger across the country, or vice versa for a buyer sending money through Paypal. Queenly provides designer brand verification, shipping logistics, and quality checks, as well as our payment integration options (Stripe, Paypal, Quadpay installment payments) to take the burden out of that.
Alongside this challenge is the user needs of searching for a dress. Many online platforms don't handle the NLP search needs of needing to find a "size 6 off the shoulder lace wedding gown". In fact, if you search this dress size or category on Macy's, eBay, or Poshmark, you'll get inaccurate results. What we're doing at Queenly is putting those search needs as our top priority in our data pipeline, (shown in one example here: https://queenly.com/search?q=size%206%20lace%20wedding%20gow...)
Re: Launch HN: Queenly (YC W21) – Marketplace and search engine for formalwear
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Haha thank you. For context, we launched on iOS, Android, and web within the same year, which has helped our marketplace grow, but we’ve since realized that we are outgrowing our engineering capacity (all done by me, a proud but headstrong full stack engineer ). Definitely maintaining a high sense of UX quality is one of our priorities, especially as we are trying to hire and dedicate better engineering resources to…
I'm curious, which framework are you using?
I'll share but these are not necessarily strong recommendations haha—many of these decisions stemmed from what I used in the last few years as a full-stack eng at Pinterest, and being able to move quickly came from muscle memory from using these dev environments.
iOS - Objective C, UIKit, IGListKit web - React on next.js and native css Android - Kotlin
Re: Launch HN: Queenly (YC W21) – Marketplace and search engine for formalwear
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Haha thank you. For context, we launched on iOS, Android, and web within the same year, which has helped our marketplace grow, but we’ve since realized that we are outgrowing our engineering capacity (all done by me, a proud but headstrong full stack engineer ). Definitely maintaining a high sense of UX quality is one of our priorities, especially as we are trying to hire and dedicate better engineering resources to…
hi kathy, congratulations on the site launch. there's one thing that stood out when I opened the site that you might want to take a look at. the 'onmouseout' behavior on the menu at the top seems like it needs to be reworked a little bit, because there is a tendency for the submenu to get 'stuck'. (its especially noticable if the mouse is in that position when the page loads). here's what i mean specifically: https:/…
Thank you for the thoroughness! I appreciate any technical "eyeballs" on the site for finding bugs, and this context helps speed up the fixing process. Much appreciated!
Re: Launch HN: Queenly (YC W21) – Marketplace and search engine for formalwear
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Haha thank you. For context, we launched on iOS, Android, and web within the same year, which has helped our marketplace grow, but we’ve since realized that we are outgrowing our engineering capacity (all done by me, a proud but headstrong full stack engineer ). Definitely maintaining a high sense of UX quality is one of our priorities, especially as we are trying to hire and dedicate better engineering resources to…
Congratulations and Good Luck! Curious about your tech stack choices that allowed you to cover iOS, Android and Web, with a team of one!
Thank you! Haha I'm not entirely sure I recommend my approach. Obejctive C + IGListKit + regular old UIKit on iOS, React through next.js (for SEO) and native css on web, and Kotlin on Android. As to why: I've gotten a bit brash from my college hackathon years, as well as worked on a similar stack during my time as a full-stack eng at Pinterest. From sheer muscle memory and domain knowledge, building out Queenly on these three platforms was quick. Regarding mobile dev, on native dev vs. using React native, I'd say there's an advantage to being able to handle native navigation and animations, a wall that one might run into when developing on a hybrid app platform like RN. Additionally, a little company history: Queenly was an iOS-first app, launched first to prioritized our power sellers in our community. The React web app followed that, with enough user growth in between to shelve any considerations for a migration to RN.