Ask HN: Has our startup failed, and what now? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Has our startup failed, and what now?

3 pointsselbyk2 comments

I have been one of the lead developers at a local startup, Sparehanger, for the past few years. We are a non-profit organization that enables users to build virtual wardrobes and share their style with friends, family, or the world. All surplus revenue was to go to charity, and we had hoped to create a charitable organization called the “Spare Two Project,” encouraging people to volunteer two hours a month for the good of the community.

We have a vision that people seem to love, women in particular, and a mostly working product, but we recently exhausted all of our funds and have to close shop. We made a few mistakes in the beginning not capturing a small userbase with an MVP early, which hit us hard building without solid user feedback and the poor numbers didn't help with finding investors. We have scrapers to continually harvest new apparel from across the web and have affiliate programs active to generate revenue if there were active users. For now, we have decided to cease development but keep the site live.

Our CEO, Peter Hubbs, is one of the most kind and commendable people I have met, and I don't want to see him completely down and out with nothing but experience and lessons learned if there are any options we have yet to consider. So HN, I ask: do we actually have a solid idea? Is Sparehanger good enough to capture users? If so, how do we capture users with no capital? If not, is Sparehanger even worth the cost of keeping live? And what should we do now?

Thanks in advance for any advice you may have.

https://www.sparehanger.com/

http://www.lsureveille.com/daily/lsu-graduate-creates-interactive-fashion-website/article_46dfa3be-7b57-11e4-811c-3313a5c10fa6.html

I think you made a pretty big mistake making the charity a built-in component of your company. The better move would have been to make a for-profit and then to donate to charity from your take-home or an exit somewhere down the line (assuming the product is solid). Making the whole thing non-profit makes it a lot harder to get funded, since you're effectively telling any supplier of capital that they won't be seeing any returns and this is a very high hurdle to overcome if your core mission is not directly related to the charity (see for instance Watsi for an alternative on this).

So, if you want to rescue your project and assuming there really is a market (which I can not see from where I'm sitting, I know nothing about your chosen field) I'd suggest transforming the business into a for-profit if a solid business case can be made and funding can be secures. And if you can't secure funding then it looks as if this is the end of the line.

Best of luck with all this, and hats off to you for trying this to begin with!

First, a disclaimer: I'm very unknowledgeable when it comes to the business side of these things, so all I'm possibly good for here are more feature-focused observations (although instinctively, I'm in full agreement with jacquesm's point about restructuring this into a for-profit business).

For me personally, I think the real value of using something like Sparehanger would come from being able to follow and shop specific brands and designers. This is something you can technically do on Pinterest, or by following designers on Twitter/Facebook, but often, their updates get buried by the avalanche of stuff these large websites are constantly pouring onto your news feed. Having a place to go to that specifically updates you about whatever-clothing-brand-rollouts-are-called, and that keeps you updated on the designers you love, is very cool, and could be delved into a little deeper.

I'm just throwing things out without having any idea how practical or realistic they are, but if you could make a deal with XYZ Designer which would allow Sparehanger users to purchase or browse new XYZ styles and lines a couple days before the general public, that seems like it would be a neat incentive for people that are into fashion to actively use the site.

The other thing that stood out to me is, using a website to simply keep track of the items in my closet seems like it would just be a hassle, BUT if I could create categories of outfits and/or occasions ('my party outfits', 'black-tie affairs', 'first dates', etc), and store pictures I've snapped of myself in specific outfits under those categories, I could return to those later when I'm trying to compare outfits for whatever-occasion, without having to try on everything in my closet to make a comparison.

If anything/everything I've said is already a feature, then that's awesome- I just didn't really gather that from the time I spent checking it out.

I wish I had more genuinely helpful things to say. Just wanted to offer my two cents.

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