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.
Thanks for the reply. Its great to know that networking and meeting developers at meet ups can lead to partnerships. I will be looking out for these events in my area. I'm working as a IB analyst at the moment, so I'm always a bit worried about meeting the tech side. Thanks!
Why is it important that the founder is from Goldman Sachs?
I'm especially curious because GS is mentioned in the title of the post, which suggests it must be important to the poster and perhaps relevant to HNers.
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.
Will it ever be possible to import my Svpply feed and distribute those into collections? It'd also be nice if there were some grid presets for creating a new collection, since how someone organizes/presents their set has a lot to do with whether or not someone clicks on it.
Thanks for the reply - those would both be really helpful!
Actually another question -- my boyfriend (http://www.lastplacefootwear.com) is currently trying to get a feel for what designs of his people are into before he sets out to spend money on production. Right now we're just building a voting-type system into his site, but is there any likelihood that your platform could assist in helping people determine market interest of their wares or will it always purely be for products that are already on shelves?
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.
Did you have programming/web design skills beforehand or did you join up with a technical co-founder? How did you guys meet?
Thanks