[whirlycott1]

I started StyleFeeder in January, 2005, built it into a profitable company of 8 people and sold it to Time Inc in January 2010.

From January, 2005 through May, 2006, I worked on StyleFeeder on the side - while I had a pretty demanding day job, mind you - as I built up the basic business... until I had invested so much time and effort into it that I was maxed out and needed to find a way to work on it full time with the help of others.

I don't see any plausible way that I could have made it into anything significant while at the same time working a day job. I think some people can do it with some businesses, but I think it would have been impossible in my case.

But the bootstrapping phase, yes, I think you can do that while working a day job. That's very common.

More details here:

http://www.whirlycott.com/phil/2011/08/05/stylefeeder-histor...

[geoffw8]

Hey - we're building a similar site (fashion search, UK based), and yours has always been one of our comparison sites. Nice job, didn't realize you were a HN'er :)

[whirlycott1]

Good luck to you with your new venture! I'm easy to find online and will be happy to answer any questions if you like.

[Liu]

Very interesting post, is there a one detailing how you started?

[whirlycott1]

Sorta...

http://www.whirlycott.com/phil/2005/10/17/stylefeeder-step-1...

LMK if that's not what you are looking for.

[Liu]

Well, I would be happy to hear about things such as: * Which features did your first version have? * How did you get your first users? * Did StyleFeeder rely on B2B connections, if so how did you find/create them? * What was StyleFeeder's business model? * When did you start looking for funding/why/how? Thanks for the time and experience sharing!

[whirlycott1]

Those are short so I will just answer them here:

* Basic social sharing of products, fancy bookmarklet, following other people and then we quickly moved into some high-end realtime recommendation technology.

* At first, it was just friends and family spreading the word. Our first big jump came after our bizdev guy joined and he did a deal with Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen to feature us on their homepage and for them to create accounts and share products they were interested in with their fans. We did a bunch of other celebrity stuff. Then, we really grew right after the Facebook platform launched. SEO was also a major factor.

* B2B connections were largely a waste of time.

* 90% affiliate, 10% advertising.

* Funding: I didn't pursue it at first, but smarter people than I saw the bigger opportunity that I hadn't tuned into yet and made introductions.

[rokhayakebe]

Do you mind sharing how raising money helped you guys? You were only 8 people and raised $4M.

Edit: Had you reach 7 figure revenue yet?

[whirlycott1]

Easy: without venture funding, I would have just been a guy sitting on the couch at home with nobody to work on this with. And the hosting costs alone to run a site that large are around $25K/month.

Yes, we had reached 7 figure revenues many years ago, long before the acquisition.

[AznHisoka]

25K a month? Really? That's like 50 medium Amazon instances.. all for at most a couple million uniques a month? What were you doing that required so much servers?

[marcc]

Hosting options and costs were radically different a few years ago.

[whirlycott1]

If you're all presuming that EC2 is some magical pixie dust for reducing the costs of running a large site, that's not the case. We had ~10 EC2 boxes and 15 managed servers at Contegix, CDN, Dynect, email service provider and a few more services thrown in.

It's not any less expensive today because those numbers I gave are current numbers.

[rokhayakebe]

How did you know it was time to raise? Was it because you could not afford the hosting bill anymore, or that you were getting lots of traffic and not enough time to build out the product, or...?

[AznHisoka]

around how much was Stylefeeder acquired for? I always thought fashion search/bookmarking was a commodity...

[whirlycott1]

http://www.quora.com/How-much-was-StyleFeeder-acquired-for

Sure, fashion search/bookmarking is a commodity - that's why those sites don't succeed.

I think discovery services are more nuanced than this and it's easier to understand the value they bring both to users and retailers, so we positioned ourselves as a "personal shopping engine." The goal was to shift users away from the Google search box towards a service geared towards shopping. I'm sure you can see value in that.

Hot company du jour is Pinterest... probably headed towards 3B pvs/month and recently closed a round of funding at $200-250M. Keep an eye on them if you think it's all still a commodity. It just depends on what lens you look through. Part of the challenge is putting aside one's cynicism and trying to positive about what your company _can_ be or _could_ be if people take it seriously.

[AznHisoka]

Very true... it depends on how you look at it...

Also, it seems you sold StyleFeeder at the right time: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/stylefeeder.com/ Looks like Time Inc isn't doing a great job with maintaining and increasing users.