adambarber

It could mean less money overall, if advertisers want to target the kind of user who would sign up for an ad-free pro account.

Boutine had an Instagram integration already, but decided to use this instead. It was handy since it saved me from having to integrate with lots of third-party services myself.

Style Owner was definitely an inspiration for us when we started -- I think they're a great site.

The biggest difference between us and them is how we get our products. Each of the designers is hand picked for the site, whereas they partner with major retailers and pull in products from there. In that regard, our catalogue is growing MUCH slower, but we think the careful focus on finding designers our users will love and can connect with makes a huge difference.

Good question about the ratio. In the office right now, there are 3 men, and 7 women. Boutine was founded by guys, but the key branding and merchandising decisions are made by women.

I totally agree with you though - more women in tech is a good thing!

That's definitely in the roadmap for the near future. Would you mind discussing a bit more over email? My email is adam@boutine.com

Thanks!

When we talk to people about the company, the finance to women's fashion part of the story always generates a lot of questions. If other people here are in a similar spot (thinking about making a big industry change for their startup) I wanted to make that known in case they have questions as well.

We're still in the early stages of product development, and all of our designers are hand picked. So we work with the designers we do have on board to give them insight in to how people are using the platform (what people are looking at, what people are sharing, etc...)

Outside of that, we don't have plans to expand to offer those tools to third parties.

Boutique + magazine.

The following is from Pramod (CEO/other co-founder, since he can't comment for some reason...)

Yeah, I was an IB analyst for 2 years. After that switched over to the investing side spending a few years focusing on consumer internet and software companies. Both of these experiences definitely helped me with starting a business. You come across so many different entrepreneurs and business models that you get a good feel for what works and what doesn't work. Granted, every company is completely different and most of the things that work for one company don't work for others, but it just gives you a lot of insight and learnings. You also get an inside look at what investors look for and struggle with in terms of business models and teams which is helpful.

I did not and currently do not have programming or web design skills and it took a really long time to find the right partner to join the business. I started out getting the product outsourced and when I had something presentable, I started getting a lot of interested from the developer community. I spent a lot of time going to meet ups and other events to connect with developers. We met at one of the events, but stayed in touch regularly over a few months. We both had very similar visions for the business and the product and really seemed to work well together. It took a lot of time, but now we have a great team in place that we are both extremely happy with.

We're actually working on tools for collection templates right now - not sure about an exact release date yet.

The svpply idea is interesting. We hadn't considered that! Thank you for the suggestion.

We've integrated with Facebook's Open Graph so we've got a pretty good idea of demographics, and high school/early college are the most active on the social side of the site so far.

Interestingly enough, it's pretty popular in Eatern Europe as well. Women in Poland love discovering fashion.

Adam here - one of the co-founders. I'm happy to answer any questions that any one has!

I agree that being reasonable is the reasonable thing to do. However, censorship cuts both ways, which I was trying to demonstrate with my earlier comment.

If playing the lobbying game works, then no reason not to play.

More to the point, what's stopping Google from declaring war on the MPAA? I imagine a lot of money would be lost if Google just pulled every site belonging to a member of the MPAA from the search results.

Aside from a few people at the top of Google with a sense of restraint and fair play, if Google alone decided to ruin the movie industry, they could - quickly. Obviously an IIAA pays more respect to the current way of doing things, rather than just making a unilateral decree that the movie industry doesn't get to exist anymore if they won't extend the same courtesy to the tech industry.

Slightly less drastically, I wouldn't mind Google making a note in the SERPs about which members of Congress are in favor of censoring freedom of speech. A small note with that person's position on SOPA would be a handy tool to keep the public informed.

I agree it's tricky to start with. Though if you've got a funnel with numbers that work, it's the difference between making a few cents per customer, vs a few dollars per customer.

I don't really see the problem with making the user the product. T.V. does it, newspapers do it, radio stations do it. Either a user pays for a service, or they get marketed to. The one variant that I think we'll be seeing a lot more of though, is instead of advertising, more direct affiliate deals.

WordPress.org, as an example, has turned their web-hosting info page into a giant affiliate ad. They provide useful info about where people can host their sites, and get a referral fee for each signup. Moving from CPM to cost-per-action is something that a lot of companies could stand to do.

If you start without any sense of the competition, you're setting yourself up for failure. The last thing you want to do is find out after weeks/months of development that there is a well-funded competitor offering everything you've got for free. Or worse, there is NO competition, and there's no market at all.

Doing the customer-development first is (sorry to beat a dead horse here) the way to go. For a few hundred bucks spent on adwords traffic and an unbounce page, you can get a sense of what if anything you can do to beat the competition, and see if there is a demand at the same time.

For most developers, a few hundred dollars equals a few hours of billable time, and is worth the investment.

It's right in the uncanny valley for me... The super deep Winklevoss twin voice makes me uneasy for some reason.

I had this same conversation with someone last night.

I suck at meeting new people. But I can email 100 people for a meetup, a few will respond, and the majority will forget they ever heard from me. Ultimately though, there no harm in playing the numbers to make new connections.

aMember does everything but number 3, but there are a ton of download tracker plugins out there. Between the two, you should be able to accomplish everything you need.

Drop me a line at adam.barber1 [at] gmail [dot] com if you have questions.

Paypal isn't ideal for getting money, but for giving money, it doesn't get any easier. Mostly everyone has a paypal account, so adding a paypal email address field to their profile allows for easy scripting of the payment file build process.

Interesting article. My current way of developing wordpress themes is way to time consuming, so I'm always on the lookout for better ways to streamline things.

Looks like the site is down. Here's the google cache - http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:bokardo...

The easiest way is probably mass payments with paypal. https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_batch-payment-ove...

How about a video resource library? If you've got the cash, you can work with people who are experts on particular topics (email marketing, etc...) to prove you the tutorials. Alternatively, you can block out a weekend to put some videos together. It's acts as a marketing tool, ("Learn Everything You Need to Succeed With Daily Deals!") and a retention tool. In fact, having a big link to the video library on the cancel page would probably distract people away from cancelling.