Wanelo: The First Million Users | Hacker News Reader

Wanelo: The First Million Users

slideshare.net

253 pointskristynazdot153 comments

I am Sarvjeet Ahuja, on which this whole thread started. Want to clarify the following:

- Me and Deena are known to each other for many years - I did the initial coding without being the co-founder and executed it as a services business - I built the product with Java(Struts2, Hibernate, MySQL) and worked on it single handedly for few years. - Lately, when we started getting some traction, we decided to persue it together full time, by taking equity and to work as a co-founder and CTO of the company - We got the first terms sheet when I was the co-founder of the company. Someone has given the link to TMT investments, which is correct. - Due to some difference on how to grow the company (particularly some investors were against me being in India), we decided to separate. The entire discussion was initiated by me and I am the one responsible for split. - Deena is a wonderful entrepreneur and I have very high regards for her. And I am proud of what Wanelo has become. Entire credit goes to her. - Constantin is an awesome Engineer and the current team of Wanelo is killer. They have done a phenomenal job and much better than I could have done it. - I am currently working as a general partner with The Morpheus, kind of YC of India. - I still hold a fraction of percent in the company.

Hope that clarifies everything. Please stop making un-necessary comments against her and stop digging the past.

Out of curiosity, why did VC firms not like you in India? What were their real objections?

Thanks for the good post and clearing things up.

Probably there were different reasons for different VC Firms. Let it go, let us not talk about them anymore :)

Hey guys, I'm the CEO and Founder of Wanelo, so I'll jump in here.

In 2007-2008, I actively searched for a technical cofounder, but I couldn’t find one. I did have a false start of working with two great engineers, who in the end weren't interested in taking this on full time.

In parallel, I started consulting as a UX designer to make money. I eventually took on more projects that led me to hire a small team of designers to support all the client work. The income generated from these projects made it possible for me bootstrap Wanelo on my own and hire an engineer in India and a couple people under him to start building Wanelo. This was a direct contracting situation (he got paid and there was no equity involved) which went on for a couple of years.

We built a bunch of features that nobody cared to use until, finally, at the end of 2010, we launched a version (mentioned in the presentation) which people started using for the first time. At that point, I closed down my agency, which ended my source of income. I then asked the main engineer (Sarvjeet) if he would come on board as a CTO/cofounder (since I could no longer pay him or anyone else) and he said yes. This didn’t last for long. After a few months, it became clear very quickly that we were not a good fit for a cofounder relationship. We mutually agreed to end his involvement with the company (there was a 3 months transition period for which he got paid), and I went on solo to raise funding and build a new team, which took over the technical platform. Two months later, we fully rebuilt the website on an entirely new stack, leaving all the old code behind.

To elaborate on the “no team” comment, that comes directly from investors who refused to consider me and a remote engineer in India as a real team. This was the main challenge in raising money. Investors would literally call me a solo female non technical founder because it was just me with no engineering background and some remote contractors, and it took 40 rejections from investors to close my seed round.

Still somewhat amazed at how discussion around a successful example of product-market fit degenerated into such bile, but glad to see clarification from you and Sarvjeet.

Congrats on your hard work.

>> "Still somewhat amazed at how discussion around a successful example of product-market fit degenerated into such bile"

The original title was the problem. Unfortunately the original title was created by the HN submitter (as far as I can tell) and it wasn't 100% accurate. If there's one thing people on HN do well it's pick holes in things that aren't 100% correct. It doesn't excuse some of the bile you're referring to but I think it reinforces the need not to create our own titles when submitting and to follow the HN guidelines around submissions.[1]

[1] http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

>and it wasn't 100% accurate.

The title came from slide 12 of the presentation. Based on the recent posts by the parties involved, it seems that it was accurate with respect to the hurdles encountered in getting funding, but the presentation slides didn't express the context of how this event fit into the history of the company.

Thanks. Indeed a lot of hard work has gone into the initial stages when there were only two people working, Deena as product and design and me as a techie. And hard work still continues. And glad to see that our clarifications saved further degeneration.

This is an entirely bogus history. She had a tech co-founder and cut him out. I met him back in 2009. https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=8860093

Why lie about it?

Because that's how you get in the news.

And no self respecting tech news site will admit its wrong once it's got that ad revenue

Does anyone have evidence of this claim that doesn't require a LinkedIn account to view?

Try http://in.linkedin.com/in/sarvjeetahuja (works for me without being logged in to LinkedIn).

You and this LinkedIn user don’t know anyone in common

Thank you HN for instantly voting this up to the top.

A woman builds a big business from scratch and rather than wondering why it took so long for her to get funding we instantly latch on to a second-hand report that she might've had a falling out with someone before her site even started taking off.

Ignoring the fact that this isn't incompatible with the presentation at all or that there's plenty of male founders who we know pulled shitty moves in the beginning; why exactly did we vote this up this quickly?

I think HN has a very low tolerance for bullshit, no matter what your background or situation is. If you had a tech co-founder, then parted ways with them before getting funding, then advertise yourself has being solo with no co-founder people are going to call you on it.

She says "no tech cofounder" when she was looking around for funding, and mentions it only to the extent that it makes it more difficult to get funding. The next slides are all about the technical team.

Plenty of "co-founders" disappear in early stage startups that take a long time to get going, and at that point they're no longer co-founders, they were just associated people.

I think that HN has a very low tolerance for some sorts of bullshit. But it apparently it has a high tolerance for bullshit questions about people that aren't involved with a startup's current success.

It's a sad, sad state of affairs. Especially seeing the points for my comment cycle up and down as rapidly as they are. 12,4,7,4,7,1 so far :(

After reading Sam's last two blog posts I just decided to reconsider and apply to YC after all; but the atmosphere here is so toxic that I can't help but feel that I'd spend more energy on dealing with YC misogyny than actually participating.

If I may, I would dearly hope that YC itself, rather than a loosely affiliated internet forum where anyone can participate, has orders of magnitude less misogyny.

Also, if anyone was wondering why pg was trying out comment endorsement, this is why. I wouldn't be surprised if Hacker News was shut down entirely in the future. I wonder if it is the principal discouraging factor for female applicants to YC.

FWIW, why not apply, go meet the people in person, then decide if there will be more misogyny than useful participation.

the atmosphere here is so toxic

1. I can't say since I haven't been through YC, but I imagine that HN, a site that's open to every joe schmoe on the internet, is not a good reflection of the population that's accepted to YC (probably the most exclusive start-up accelerator).

2. I don't know the truth of the original claim (presumably neither do you). My question is this, if the original claim that there was a technical co-founder that got pushed out is true, is it toxic for dogfood123 to state it?

I guess I'm saying it seems like its premature to say it's 'toxic'. I agree that if there are malicious users making up lies about female founders, that's toxic. OTOH, if the claim is true, I struggle to see how talking about reality is toxic.

I wouldn't let the atmosphere on HN deter you from applying to YC. YC is far from perfect, but it's a heck of a lot better than a semi-anonymous internet forum.

I had a female (technical) cofounder, and her general take on YC was that she was treated well by the partners, and didn't encounter any blatant sexism from the batch, but many founders in the batch were young techie guys who gravitated toward conversing with other guys, so she really only got to know a subset of the batch (other women, plus the minority of male founders who were comfortable talking to women). Also, she felt there was a general assumption (among the batch, not the partners) that male founders were technical, but female founders were non-technical, which affected how people interacted with her in subtle ways. YC could do more to educate founders about unconscious bias (and for all I know, they have), but at least in our batch, I think that would have been considered somewhat beyond the scope of the program. I don't think she'd ever characterize it as "YC misogyny."

HN, on the other hand, is probably more representative of the attitude of the tech world at large, and possibly a bit worse. YC-founder HN comments are almost universally more civil and enlightened than the bulk of the comments on the site.

Apply to YC, or don't, that decision is yours. But as long as you're in the tech world, you're not going to avoid any extra sexism by avoiding YC.

This is a very informative comment. Sounds like a familiar environment to me. To the person you were responding to, sounds like YC still may have a lot to offer but you'll have to figure out if you can deal with the low-grade non-intentional but still-present social exclusion.

You are a guy[1][2]. Why would you "spend more energy on dealing with YC misogyny" (assuming that it even exists)?

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mtrimpe [2]https://interactly.com/company

Thanks for checking out my profile. If you'd dug a bit further you'd have found [1] that I am indeed a transgender [2] bisexual male.

That means that unless I closet myself for YC, which I'm getting a bit old for, I'm likely to have a significantly worse experience than the average woman would.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7098056 [2] Gender-dysphoric to be precise, but that isn't meaningful to most.

It's important to get your facts right before you leap to someone's defense, or castigate others for withholding judgement. If you look at vadsye's link[1] to the Nov 2011 investment announcement, you'll see that Sarveet is given equal billing as the then tech leader.

Something - I don't know what, but she's certainly not being forthright about it - must have happened between then and the new "this is what a real CTO looks like" guy took over.

So there's enough there that merits hesitating before making a woman-in-tech hero of her. It's not misogynistic to say so either.

[1] http://tmtinvestments.com/i/pdf/Wanelo%20RNS%20(22%20Nov%201...

Suspicion of impropriety heightens concern, probably due to self-preservation instincts. Someone you don't trust implicitly is more likely to seem suspicious to you if there's a claim of impropriety that can't immediately be explained away by any other currently-available information. When you do implicitly trust someone, much less concern is attributed, even without additional information. This applies uniformly without regard to gender - unless the person viewing the claim is biased towards a particular gender, such as misogynists and misandrists.

It was upvoted because it's weird, there's no simple explanation, and people are concerned.

Because the title was: 'Single, female, non-tech founder with no team...and her first 1 million users' and HN thrives on drama and pointing out things that are inaccurate.

Sorry, when someone writes a presentation or do a talk, he's probably being pushed by something:

1. To get his self-esteem to a higher level. Lots of people do talking for this. And they say lots of bullshit to attract your attention and boost their selves.

2. To genially tell the truth and help people. My guess is that this is the minority.

So I'm always skeptic about these stories.

On slide 14 of the presentation, there's a screenshot of an email thread that he's part of.

Mirror, in case it gets taken down: http://i.imgur.com/OmultA0.png

The person at the LinkedIn link is Sarvjeet Ahuja. He claims [1] [2] to be a co-founder of Wanelo, and former CTO. I haven't found him mentioned in any documentation from the company, as opposed to just being from him - except one. In the company's CrunchBase profile, he is listed as being a co-founder back in 2009 [3]. I don't know enough about CrunchBase profiles to say whether this should be considered reliable evidence; can someone with more experience confirm?

Additionally, a VC report from 2011 talked about how "both founders have extensive knowledge of the high-tech industry" [4]. Another described Sarvjeet's extensive experience [5].

[1] https://angel.co/sarvjeet

[2] http://www.crunchbase.com/person/sarvjeet-ahuja

[3] http://www.crunchbase.com/company/wanelo

[4] http://gecr.co.uk/file_download/45/

[5] http://tmtinvestments.com/i/pdf/Wanelo%20RNS%20(22%20Nov%201...

The first email shown in slide 14 of the OP slideshare [1] has "me, sarvjeet, Ann" listed as recipients...

[1] http://www.slideshare.net/500startups/eric-koger-cofounder-c...

The phrasing entirely bogus seems hyperbolic. She may have left out a (key?) piece of information, but does that invalidate the summary of what the team achieved?

Agreed. I would rewrite on hindsight. This is an artful retelling that misleads via omission.

The comment you're replying to was referring to the original, now redacted, title of the HN Post, which was "Single, female, non-tech founder with no team...and her first 1 million users", which makes the phrasing less hyperbolic.

I'm not sure that she - the founder - is lying in this presentation (though she fails to mention her technical cofounder). I think it's more that the title of this submission, which was presumably not made by her, was inaccurate (and has since been changed to its current title which is more accurate).

Lots of companies screw their technical cofounders. I was the technical cofounder of a company that was later acquired, but never received the $12.8 million check I was supposed to and didn't have the resources to fight back against a maniacal cofounder flush with $60+ million in new cash from the acquisition. That doesn't mean that others can't learn from the company's story, even if only told selectively. It just means that the people that wound up in charge are perhaps not the kind of people you would want to do business with.

> I was the technical cofounder of a company that was later acquired, but never received the $12.8 million check I was supposed to and didn't have the resources to fight back against a maniacal cofounder flush with $60+ million in new cash from the acquisition.

Not to derail, but let's hear that story. Seems like hiring a lawyer would be a no-brainer if you were due $12.8m.

My bet is that he's already explored that avenue, and that the business relationship was not properly specified in writing and that it's the unsolvable "my word against your word" problem now.

Hoping that everyone get's that right the first time is of course illusional; may you all learn that lesson by being screwed out of a moderate 4 digit amount early in your careers!

It's a long story, but I am still in the process of pursuing it legally. When I first learned of the acquisition, I didn't have the resources to pursue it, and even today don't have millions sitting around to pay attorneys. I sent a letter to the acquiring company explaining the situation and demanding that I receive my cut, and they actually responded with an extortionate threat in writing. We are now pursuing a civil federal extortion case against both the acquirer and my cofounder.

But, as of this moment, despite my name being on the company's first and primary patent, having written all of its initial code, having envisioned the entire concept of the company myself, and even having named the company, I have seen exactly $0 from an acquisition I was supposed to receive 20% of. Even better, with $60 million in his pocket, my womanizing, alcoholic, conniving cofounder suddenly found Jesus and now fancies himself a televangelist of sorts. At last contact with him, he was "praying for me". Go figure.

So yeah, be careful when working with others. My cofounder would have been considered by anyone that looked at him to be beyond reproach. He was not.

Any name?

I probably shouldn't say here, but since I've posted the info before here years ago, I guess it doesn't really matter.

http://anakam.com (redirects to Equifax, who bought the company and tried to extort me, original company was Anakam LLC).

As much as I'm interested and curious to hear the details, I really wish you would delete all the comments you've made about this. I would hate it if they were able to convince a judge that your case is invalid based on something careless you said on the internet.

you should probably have made sure your name is on all the dozens of 20-page security contracts you signed when creating, incorporating, running, and selling the company.

I don't understand. Did you not have company equity in your name? As far as I understand, it would be impossible to acquire the company, its patents, and associated technology without proper paperwork?

We believe what happened is that he tore up my contract without telling me, established a new, clean corporate entity after pushing me out (though my contract was supposedly still valid, it was with the old entity), and simply transferred all intellectual property to the new entity. He kept the name the same but changed it from LLC to a corporation. The acquiring company claims never to have heard my name, other than seeing it on the company's primary patent. It's a big legal mess.

All of these things should have been notarized and filed in the state you formed the LLC in. There are records for all of this, and if the IP was in the name of the old LLC, which you were a Member of, he shouldn't have been able to do any of these actions unless he just forged your signature.

Seems odd to me. Find a lawyer, if you have a convincing case they might work pro bono at first if they can foresee a big payoff.

Just a word of caution, if you're pursuing legal actions, you might consider not posting about any details publicly. Talk to your lawyer before you do anything...

I thought about that, but I've said nothing here that would hinder my case. They outright stole from me, and then when I called them on it, they responded with extortion. They aren't in a great legal position.

> I've said nothing here that would hinder my case

Any good lawyer will tell you the same piece of advice: "never say anything." It does absolutely zero positive good for your case and can only serve to hinder it later. It's very difficult sometimes to keep from providing what you consider to be valuable feedback for others, but you have your own interests to consider first.

If you have any evidence to your claim of $12.88 mm, I imagine there are lawyers that would be willing to take your case on contingency...did you not even try to seek one out?

Have you thought about hiring a lawyer on contingency?

Technical folks screw business cofounders too. Look at facebook.

Perhaps her comment that she was single and non-technical is true. She could have found her co-founder on her own and gave it a shot, but that relationship didn't work out for any number of reasons, leaving her on her own again. Who knows. Finding co-founders that fit isn't easy!

This is a really impressive story. I wish we got more background about the 2010 era, before she hired engineers in San Francisco? Was this site completely freelancer developed initially? How many users did she get before shipping out to cali?

BTW, this site is really taking off with young, social-media crazed teenagers, so keep an eye on it! Already at 8MM users, it's similar to pinterest with a business model that really makes sense.

According to Wikipedia they passed 10 million users in August 2013, 90% of which are American women.

Very cool site, seems to be very well implemented. I can see it becoming a much more "useful" Pinterest, at least to me. I love cruising around for cool stuff to buy, and it seems to make good suggestions of related items based on other users' likes (which I'm guessing is weighted by your friends list).

Yes, completely freelancer developed. I closed the agency and moved to SF from LA when we got to 30k monthly uniques.

Overall, the two years prior to the inflection point and the first users were pretty inefficient. The vision was actually always the same (a universal social platform for all of shopping), but the execution changed dramatically. We literally just kept launching features around this concept, but they were pretty unfocused, until the minimalist redesign.

On the other hand, this 2 year period allowed me to make lots of product design mistakes and learn from them and to develop a personal philosophy and approach to product design.

6 years. That's my favourite part. Kudos for sticking at it throughout when I'm sure there were times it felt less than certain it would work out.

Been working on my own startup for (what feels like) too long, having to actually earn a living in the meantime, so appreciate seeing another business go from seed to growth in a similar time scale.

People always laud the internet for allowing ordinary people to do all sorts of exceptional things. This is an example of one of those things, and it shouldn't be taken away from its creator for any of the infinite trivial reasons that could be imagined.

One thing is to keep ongoing tech (servers etc) costs low so it can simmer. Shutting apps down just destroys value.

Slide 8: no one cares. Slide 9: not interesting. Slide 10: 30k monthly uniques. What happened there? That is all I really care about.

I asked her this question directly. She claims she did it via $20 a day on FB ads for a few months: https://twitter.com/siberianfruit/status/447961840090218496

Awesome. Thanks! I don't know if I believe it but that's another story.

It is a bit hard to believe. As another person pointed out that equates to 16 users for each $1 spent, assuming she ran the ads for 3 months or so. Must have been very viral to maximize the return on each dollar spent.

Damn good value when you consider the price per user Facebook paid for WhatsApp...

:) What happened was that we removed the crap that was built before. Only 2 things could not be removed: products and people, so the homepage became a precursor to what it is today: a minimalist grid of products posted by users.

I then spent $20 a day on Facebook ads. The goal was simply to get a small stream of people to check out the website and to see if they would use it. I didn't think I could actually grow a community by spending on ads since I didn't have that much money to spend. To my shock, people actually started using it and were sticking around. The reason was that the website exposed them to surprising, unique products from stores they've never heard about.

It's also worth noting that I optimized the ad a lot, tweaking all the details (targeting, image used, copy, where the ad clicks to) until I had an ad that was performing really well, meaning that I was making that $20 count.

It is great to know that FB ads do work well under the right circumstances. Great story.

Thanks for the reply. I appreciate it. It is amazing that you got the growth you did by only spending 20 bucks a day on FB ads. People must really like the product! Great job.

I saw Deena's presentation at 500's Commercism conference and it was really inspiring. An entrepreneur that doesn't fit the stereotypical valley entrepreneur has executed an idea that users really seem to use and love. Good for her.

Slide 5, is not identifying Amazon there some kind of joke? I know they're not the same but I'm not sure how you say online shopping is completely without any answer without looking daft.

Anyway they seem to be doing well and they have amazing reviews and a great brand. I'd really like to know how they decided not to show pricing in their feed though on the mobile app. When I joined I followed lots of companies, those I shop at and those I'd like to shop at mainly - it got really old really fast clicking through to see pricing. Just my opinion though, like I said they get great reviews so maybe these people use it differently, only following stores they use or are less price sensitive. Also I'm male so I know I'm not really their target audience, but they do have a lot of men's stores on there.

Amazon is not a social platform.

Fair enough if that's what she was going for, I didn't see the talk so I'm just going from the slides. Interestingly shopping is probably where the new players have made the biggest impact on the 90s players (where they existed) in that list though.

It's not? It's got an interesting community of commenters. The Tuscan Whole Milk and Three Wolves product pages are legendary, and I personally check out any product George Takei comments on.

Non-tech and the first site was made using what? Her mind power? Wordpress?

That's what I wanted to ask.

All that "single, female, non-tech" doesn't make much sense to me if a team of developers was hired to create this website.

And she takes credit for it personally.

Gotta promote the team members or it looks like they're replaceable cutouts.

But even that is still tech. I mean _someone_ had to download the source, install it on a server, activate the theme, etc. I'd like to see more about the initial site.

Non-tech just describes the founder (although in this particular case she may have actually had a cofounder.)

Any kind of success by a nontechnical solo founder can be an inspiration for other nontechnical people who want to build their own companies.

First site built in Java. Second in Ruby. I think there was some tech knowledge there. http://blog.wanelo.com/post/31534906083/the-big-switch-how-w...

As referenced elsewhere, she did have a technical co-founder.

Even if that wasn't the case, could easily have gone the oDesk route. (Personally I think the idea of doing this and keeping all equity is a bit of a pipe dream, but I hear enough folks pimping courses that advocate this, so surely it works, right?)

I enjoy seeing the holistic progress / story of a startup. It's comforting to see for others that things do take a long time.

Wanelo has a great conversational tone in it's copywriting. Check out the iPhone app update descriptions: http://www.appannie.com/apps/ios/app/wanelo-shopping/

I believe I've read somewhere that Deena writes those descriptions herself. She doesn't talk about it, but I think this personality goes a long way with her audience.

Can someone tell me why it could possibly be relevant to say that she is single?

Is it referencing her status as a founder(a single founder, versus having a co-founder)?

Well in joshbert's defense the original phrasing already says "single, female, non-technical founder with no team" which would make this interpretation slightly redundant, so I can understand why he read it that way.

The slides say she got a team...?

A solo founder can have a team (of non-founders), as the founder in this article does.

So they're employees. Paid / unpaid, stock?

Exactly, that was the original title.

Because it's about not having a co-founder; not her marital status.

It's minus half a credibility point for being a lone wolf founder. The reasons to have founders plural are countless.

As are the reasons to not have a cofounder. There is no pure formula for success.

Never said their was.

The wrong cofounder/s is like the wrong spouse.

The right cofounder/s is like the right spouse.

Best to know them previously, it helps a lot.

Further, the biggest point of having other people around is killing off bad ideas quickly because people won't see the entire picture themselves but they will believe their own bullshit. It's harder to delude yourself in the wrong direction of thought if your cofounder/s are there to help you keep you honest.

I think that it's about the single founder but even besides that, if you're married there's a good chance your spouse can provide a stable household while you're working on the company. This means you have a longer runway and more support than if you were socially single.

A better choice of words would have been "solo"

Why is it relevant that she's female?

That's the real question. It's not like being a female is a handicap or something.

It isn't but VCs have been known to avoid female founders for fear of them not working as hard as men since 'they'll have a baby sometime' or some nonsense like that [1]. Also women face gender discrimination in the bay area. [2]

source: [1] http://www.businessinsider.com/pregnant-founders-response-to...

[2] http://valleywag.gawker.com/this-is-why-there-arent-enough-w...

It's ever since the pg incident and reinforced by the github gate, the valley is in a "see we welcome women, women are great and we've always loved them" mode. Folks are already calling it "gender washing."

Let's hope it becomes one of those 'fake it until you make it' stories then...

Anything but folks arguing sex politics.

Did anyone even bother to look to see how this site compares in their market? Who's their closest competitors even?

Gender Baiting. It goes along with the whole Silicon Valley is Misogynistic theme.

Why is it not?

It's about as relevant as what size shoes she wears.

Except the fact that one is (most of the time): - a characteristic that is outwardly visible and generally perceivable -a characteristic upon which many societies have historically (and/or currently) organized biases around

While the other is generally related to how big one's feet are.

I would gather the submission intend to point out that this 'news event' was 'rare' and therefore worth submitting (rare because of the success, being a single founder, and being a woman in a field where (I presume) women are significantly less numerous). Anyway, looks like there were issues with the submission for some reason since it has been edited.

Specifying characteristics of exemplary people, can serve as an encouraging example for others with those characteristics. Maybe another potential future female founder will read about her example, and decide to pursue the same path. Not everyone needs that, but sometimes it helps.

Which is a great thing, due to the massive lack of female founders in the tech world.

Males and females look at things differently, too, so there must be huge markets for female founders, who really understands women much better than males does.

This was a perfect example, too, as shopping is something the female population really... Excels at. :)

It's also pretty common in headlines for all sorts of demographic characteristics. For example, just taking a random example from the HN search: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4830140 ("22-Year-Old Irish-Born Founder")

This is a really good point. In the context of the headline however, it's listed in a string of characteristics which would normally be considered obstacles which the founder overcame, and I do not see gender as an obstacle.

It's only relevant because in today's startup environment, "single female, non-tech, no-team" is considered an outlier regarding the characteristics of a successful (subjective) founder.

Mentioning the female gender (I am assuming cis-gender sex/gender terminology) is an identifier that points to the added difficulty of starting a company in a culture where women are treated as inferior or have less social power. So they're pointing out how the company was created under potentially difficult circumstances. The idea that it's difficult for women to start companies turns gender into a kind of 'selling point', as in, because this company was started by a woman, it's clear the founder must have extra-ordinary abilities to be able to survive in a culture that often treats women as inferior, and this company may have properties that make it "better" than any other average company not started by a woman. So gender mentioned here is not only falsely attributing greater business acuity to the company, it also acts as a PR flag to attract attention to the company. People therefore perceive it as important that the founder is female, hence mentioning it in the title.

That was a typo. I did actually mean to say "solo" rather than single.

Loved a particular slide about how they (she?) did it: "The right people: builders and get-shit-done-ers, pragmatic, non religious about tech, move fast, team over rockstars"

I saw a few projects where "developers" were not religious about tech.. they still using ftp for php files deployment, "BUT HEY! THE SHIT IS DONE!" :). I don't want be sarcastic, but i think every startup team should have at least one engineer who will know what to do, at every iteration of the project.

Yup. 'sama tweeted something similar about users not really caring about underlying tech. None of it matters if users don't love the net result. JFS - just fucking ship. Worry about delivering a compelling product, why you are building it and monetizing to stay fucking alive. Bikeshed on which testing framework to use another day.

whats the "preferred" way nowadays? commit source using git to server and let it autodeploy?

If you can deploy: fast, atomically, without downtime and can revert your changes at any given moment, then it is not that important :)

About rebuilding from scratch: Most of the time this is a big NO in software. But I think a demo product is an exception.

A demo is just a demo. Quickly put together as a proof of concept. And I think going from demo to product is the one and only time when rebuilding from scratch makes sense.

So I think they made the right choice.

Call me skeptical, but it reminds me of http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tO5sxLapAts

Like other commenters have said, how did she, being a non-technical founder with no team, could set up the (what appears to be custom-made) website? It's like going to a hackathon and claim that you build an app within 24 hours, but actually have implemented majority of it beforehand and making it a "library".

Anyway, looking at the positive side, had the slides contain more detail, I believe it can be inspiring for many people and not received with skepticisms.

at the presentation (not the doc, but the video) she is pretty clear that she didn't built the thing. she says this a couple of times at least

Very interesting, although someone claims the history to be bogus.

I currently have a website that gets over 500k Uniques per month and over 5m pageviews a month, so it's interesting to see what the future could hold!

I'm curious. What's the website? How'd you reach that audience? Short story?

A little luck and a little experience. Plus 4 years of community growth.

I prefer not to say the site if you understand.

Of course. Thanks for the response.

PS. How's the Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan?

"I am not tech, but i started with doing tech (website?) stuff". Am i missing something?

Deena Varshavskaya (Wanelo) at Startup Grind 2014 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgtHV8DSrgI

Glimpse Conference SF 2013: Fireside Chat - Wanelo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1g4s4HmLIU

Look up their stats on quantcast and compete, tells a different story.

"This publisher has not implemented Quantcast Measurement. Data is estimated and not verified by Quantcast"

Please post your homework.

Churchill was right. Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.

Seems like a cool tool for people who like to shop for visually appealing stuff, but I don't think it's really "fixed" any problems or truly modernized e-commerce.

It's basically a clever front for a ton of affiliate programs, which interests me because my startup does something similar. I just wouldn't go so far as to consider it the "YouTube of Shopping" (slide 5).

If anything, Amazon Prime belongs in that position on slide 5.

We're just getting started. Amazon Prime is not a social platform. Slide 5 is all about the web becoming social.

It's a nice assertion you make that "Amazon prime is not social".

I find the opposite to be true.

Yeah I wouldn't call it social in the 'growth hacking' sense... but it's certainly social in that it comes up in conversation nearly as often as Facebook or Twitter (in my non-tech circles).

It's been around since the 1990s, so it's not "sexy".

Even though Amazon has been an important part of my own business for actually selling stuff, Amazon Prime has revolutionised the ability for small sellers to move volume (and solved the logistics hurdles), and Amazon's cloud computing is critical for tons of other startups to run their infrastructure--not to mention is being chosen by established players.

But, no, it's not "social".

What would be really cool is if I could use wanelo as a search engine for something I'd like to buy but I don't know where. Like I want to buy a pair of striped shoes with butterflies on for a kid. I put the description somewhere -and I get pictures of the products available. Is it something you are planning to add?

Great deck. Congrats on your success. I briefly met your sister in a ruby class a couple of years ago and was impressed by the work ethic both of you displayed.

Could you talk more about how you got from "nobody cares" to the first funding that attracted your CTO? Was that the $20/day in FB ads?

The video of this talk is available at http://livestre.am/4OaXa

Deena's talk starts at 31:00 mark.

It's really inspiring to see an idea go from conception to 'success'! Thanks for sharing your timeline!

Having to sign in to view a single product flies in the face of everything Ive read about successful ecom sites.

Just tried signup and sign up is over http and https... ooops that does not sound good.

$20 a day on FB ads for a few months. This.

There was a period in time when $500 or so in FB ads would result in a $5000 sale, so the math worked for me. FB ads work surprisingly well if you target them properly.

In my case, targeting males who were either married or not in a relationship, age 21-40, and then had a variety of interests really narrowed things down.

I gleaned the approach from looking at our 50 or so past customers who all fit that demographic.l

Title changed now?

The original title was linkbait.

Lesson learned: Don't upload a fun, story-telling presentation online for fear that a third-party may submit it to HN where you will likely be ridiculed not only for not applying scientific-study-level-rigor to every bullet point and image you've placed on your slides, but also for events of your past that are constructed from nothing more than tenuous inference and speculation.

You guys are a lovely and welcoming bunch. I'm sure YC, successful startups, and potential founders really desire rockstars like you who've got this wondrous natural ability for unnecessary criticism.

More like Lesson learned: Don't upload a story board full of blatant lies, misrepresentation of facts and half truths and expect people to just fall down and worship the ground you walk on.

Big words for someone who just created an account to critique this submission.

Most people (I hope) were only commenting on the title being misleading and not trying to ridicule you or the presentation.

So, she's non technical and somehow has a website that someone presumably set up, installed on a server and maintained etc? Or she's 'solo'? There's talk of a founder being cut out early on (cannot confirm or refute)... In short, there's parts to this story that are missing.

You can't just throw up your favourite flavour of CMS with a theme from themeforest and magically hit it off, there's technical considerations that need to be made.

3 Options really.

1. She is technical and knows all about web development (no idea why she'd lie about that though)

2. She did indeed have a founder she cut out.

3. She wasn't solo on the project.

Something doesn't gel here.

She was running an agency before, it's possible she just just hired people to do work for her but they weren't a permanent part of the team.

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