Ask YC: Feedback on idea | Hacker News Reader

Ask YC: Feedback on idea

3 pointspjharrin10 comments

Since this community seems to be the greatest thing since sliced bread, I thought I would ask for some advice on an idea.

The problem that I've identified is the extreme difficulty of finding indie fashion designers online. Unless somebody directly tells me about them, there is no way I'd find them.

I was thinking of creating a platform where users can create a brand page giving information about the brands history, products, reviews etc. Each brand will have links to "similar brands" so that they can all be connected in one giant web of insanity :p (my biggest struggle is that once i find a cool brand, its hard to find others like it).

I think a cool business model would be something similar to Yammer and giving brands the ability to claim their page, they can then produce updates and notifications for users who are interested.

I know fashion is about as far away as you can get from hacking, but this is a super group and I'd appreciate any help you can give.

Thanks

You might want to check out http://www.smashingdarling.com. Not saying that there's not room for multiple competitors in this space, but thought it might be a good place to see what's working, what's not, and some areas where you might be able to make improvements.

Thanks for the link, I will have to look over it in more detail. My intent was to have more of a focus on brands then individual products, although products could be added to the brand pages.

http://etsy.com has a category for clothing. I'm not sure of your definition of "indie fashion designers", but since you mentioned difficulty in finding them, that might be a good place to look for new users/contributors.

i'd like to point out that this would work for other things beyond fashion, like local/indie/small-time bands. if you're going to build it, why restrict it

Restricting it might be useful as to not dilute his idea and make it unappealing to die-hard 'indie fashionistas'. Perhaps making his code generic, were this to ever be completed, would be useful in creating spin-offs.

well, i wasn't necessarily implying to have one site that dilutes the idea, but the solution for fashion could be cloned into another app for music, and so on.

the idea itself is reusable. suggestion engines could always use improvements.

Yea the real idea is to help people find hidden gems and from there find similar gems. The music scene is already pretty crazy though with last.fm and pandora and the millions of other sites trying to help people discover new music

true enough about music overload. and also book overload.

if i could come up with a truly good idea offhand, though, i might be working on it instead of sharing ;)

i'm sure there are other relevant applications for this concept beyond the big ones.

i'd say it'd be a great resource for people interested in that sort of thing.

i'm not sure how large a market it is, so i really can't judge how successful it would be, or what you would even consider successful in that niche. it's definately a step away from your standard hacked news startup, i think you have a good idea on your hands though, that's a gut feeling hehe

It is rather hard to tell how big the market would be since its hard to find the designers (hence the idea). But I think a lot of designers could use it as a marketing platform and to market beyond their geographic location, which is what a lot of them have to do.

Now I just have to learn to code it hehe. I know, I'm on HN but I don't code

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