[rattray]

Yes, a very clear answer! The problem we were solving was that apparel firms have really long lead times: they design their lines for a season 9-12mo before the customer buys it. That means they can't iterate on their designs; DecisionCandy would let them do so in a lightweight way, by showing their sketches/previews of pieces to their customers, and doing a "which do you like more" survey to score the items.

The problem here is that it takes 9-12mo to find out whether the app does any good, and YC is a 3mo program! We were only just about to sign a pilot deal at the time, so the timing wouldn't have made sense.

And indeed, that long of a feedback loop is realistically too slow for a VC startup. We closed up and I "pivoted" to something totally different a few months later.