How to Reapply to YC | Hacker News Reader

How to Reapply to YC

medium.com

80 pointsmpenn14 comments

Great story. Your pitch for the product on the medium article is better than your pitch on your homepage, btw.

Agreed, from the home page I imagined I would have to do measurements by myself and input them into the app, which sounds like a pain. This sounds a lot more appealing, especially the accuracy claim:

> We sell men’s custom shirts by measuring you with your phone’s camera. We’re scientifically proven to be 20% more accurate than a professional tailor, and our shirts start at $69, half the price you would typically pay for a custom shirt of our quality.

Exactly, edit that up a little and put it on the homepage, first thing user sees.

We'll have to work on our website then! Probably losing sales due to a poor explanation of our product.

Neat.

As others have noted, the product could benefit from promoting the "camera + smarts = faster, easier and better than visiting a tailor" aspect more.

I'd use this if it could do pants as well.

Marketing materials are always a work in progress!

We're very excited about pants; we don't have them yet, but it's most likely our next product.

This looks really neat! Here's some unsolicited feedback:

> "Scientifically proven to measure you 20% more accurately than a professional tailor."

This probably isn't a priority for you guys, but it would be cool to see the data on this. You could easily make a white paper without releasing your actual ML process - how big is your sample set, were your control groups "blind" when they reported which shirt they like more, were the tailored shirts the same fabric, how did you pick your "average" tailor, etc.

The biggest reason on why I don't try a new clothing store is A) I don't know how well it'll fit me and B) returning things, even with prepaid slips, is still a hassle. For me, any little thing that convinces me I don't have to worry about returning goes a long way for trying a new store.

We've thought about releasing a white paper but haven't gotten around to it. We brought it 35 people and 4 professional tailors. We had each tailor measure the subjects and then we measured each subject. We compared the standard deviation of the 4 tailors vs. the average of the 4 tailors vs. us. Our std was 20% smaller -- for the stats people out there, we're 20% more precise. Apologies in advance for anyone who wants to yell at me for the misleading use of "accuracy."

I encourage you to give us a shot and see if we can nail the fit for you!

Don't think of it as marketing, think of it as talking to your users (talking to us). You explain things much better here in HN and in your writing than on your website.

Interesting... I work in computer vision and I use body measurements to identify people (as well as features). Its an awesome idea and wish I thought of it!

Best of luck!

Thanks! The machine learning has been incredibly fun :-).

What stops you from starting similar company now? I guess nothing but passion.

Good advice aside, this is some great use of computer vision techniques to solve a real problem!

Great advice, just applied ourselves looking forward to receiving whatever feedback we get.

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