Ask HN: Our MVP for an ecommerce site (kembrel.com)
Our idea is to apply the successful flash sales model to a large market, US college students and to build a very focused community around it. Like other business applying this model (Gilt, RueLaLa, JackThreads, OneKingsLane, etc), you have to be a member to get access to the sales. Once you are a member, you get regular emails announcing new deals. Consumer brands give us VERY discounted merchandise to get rid of overstock (not defectives, just excess inventory) and to gain exposure/loyalty in a new market.
The challenge in building that MVP is that a flash sales site requires a minimum set of features by definition (e.g., limited access, access to inventory, a minimum member base). The Magento private sales module is only available in the Enterprise Edition ($13k). We couldn't find any SaaS options that satisfied the minimum requirements.
Now we wanted to build a real MVP, not do a dry test (http://yongfook.com/mvp-vs-dry-test). This means that we needed to actually build something that works, not just a landing page with an email collection form. To do this, we needed to work on 3 fronts at the same time:
IT: we built the site using the Magento community edition, bought a couple of cheap plugins and customized the rest inhouse. As you see, we are weak on the design side (working on that now with a pro) and we have a long way to go to make it a . But that's the point of a MVP.
Products to sell: we signed up over 50 brands and are in discussions with many more. This part requires getting on the phone and making calls all day long. There is no easy way around it. We called several hundreds brands to get to the 50 we have. It's hard work but it's worth it. We learned so much about the industry by doing this work (we are not industry insiders).
Customers: we invited all our friends, asked them to invite their friends and experimented with Facebook ads. We have content on the front page that is bringing us decent traffic.
The products and customers portions are a classic chicken-and-egg/marketplace problem. It is difficult to attract lots of customers to your site if you have nothing to sell. At the same time, how do you convince brands to give you significant discounts on the wholesale pricing if you don't have the user base to justify it? It's been a difficult process for us but we are starting to see the results now.
I would love to get feedback from you on our MVP.
If you are a student and are interested in getting deals (up to 80%) on apparel, ipod accessories, etc, please consider joining and telling your friends about us :)