cypherpnks
That could be another student at the university; someone with an active Twitter account, good charisma, etc. Offer 25% equity vesting over 4 years. That's pretty generous. Keep hacking and plugging, and do as much or as little of the interacting as you want. If the other person doesn't carry their weight -- which is not uncommon -- dump them or swap them out for someone else. Be very upfront about this when bringing them on (if you want, overly upfront -- pitch this as a short-term engagement, with possibility of going longer depending on how business goes).
Give yourself the title of CEO and CTO. Give them the title interrim president+COO.
Regarding depression, social anxiety, etc., this can help fix it. I've been there. Depression gets better when you have meaning and purpose, and when you're busy enough to not have time worrying about it. Social anxiety gets better with status. When people are competing to talk to you (rather than the other way around), and you're in a position to say yes or no, the dynamic is just different. If this were to grow into a successful company, you might be in a very different position. You've been playing with fixing this for a while. Play with this as an opportunity to try a different approach to fixing it.
Again, I don't know you. This could not apply at all. Take this as what it is -- an idea from a stranger.
1. People aren't idiots. We get the idea that poor people tend to be dumb in the US because, in many cases, it's true. If you have intelligence, work ethic, and grit, in the US, you'll get out of poverty. If you lack those, you'll get into poverty. As you move into the developing world, everyone from some settings is poor. The number of smart, ambitious, curious, hard-working people is quite high.
2. Chocolate in Africa is not 2 EU. Food there is cheap. That includes chocolate.
Background: I spent a lot of time in the developing world, including several ECOWAS countries (same part of the world).
If you cannot go lower, I'd consider a partnership with an existing brand. You'll have to have an insane marketing budget to compete with existing clothing brands without viral.
If you can partner with Brooks Brothers (established in 1818, and part of American preppy folklore), J. Crew, Men's Warehouse, or similar, you'll have an easy time breaking in, although a much harder time getting most of the profit share.
I don't know typical Wall St. income, but the friends I have there are around $300k. You can cite Google and Apple employees too as spending $50+ on clothing. That's all the elite.
Median household income is $51k in the US. That's 1/3-1/6 of a single salary at Google (and most have working spouses as well). It's perhaps 1/6 of Wall St. That translates into many times that difference in disposable income.
I appreciate the appeal of making products for people similar to yourself, but if you think that makes for a good business plan, compare you $750MM in revenue to TJ Max with $18B in revenue, Gap at $13B, Ross at $10B, etc. If you look at relative prices, that's probably about 100x as many items of clothing sold.
Compare the market caps of Walmart, J. Crew (which was recently purchased), Brooks Brothers (from a sane P/E ratio), Armani. Heck, try a TJ Max or similar (to avoid companies with major non-clothing businesses -- which, coincidentally, J. Crew does have).
I'd suggest trying any of the wealth calculator apps, and figuring out which percentile you're in. And please post here once you've done that. Or, go here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_...
Median household income in the US is $51,000. That's household income, not individual income. That's what a family of four gets. Take away taxes, and you're at 37k. Assume $1000 mortgage, and you're at $25k. Car insurance, gas, etc. brings you down to perhaps $20k. Four cell phones? $19k. Internet, property tax, utilities, etc? $17k. Food? $14k. Health care? Putting kids through school? Retirement savings? Once you add in all the bare necessities, you won't find many people spending $70 on shirts, let alone $150-$200.
To run with your numbers. A $200 basic blouse, times 40 items of clothing purchased per year by your ex, is $8000. Family of 4 brings that up to $32000. Perhaps $24000, if you consider kids clothing costs less, or perhaps more, if you consider it wears out quickly, so you buy a lot of it.
Typically, the biggest expenditures are housing, health care, car, food, and similar. Clothing is waaay down on the list.
MailChimp is a business site. Twitter and Facebook are personal mediums. There's a mismatch. As a manager, I wouldn't want my employees using personal mediums for business (I have no control), and conversely, as an employee, I don't want to be logged into Facebook from work, or share my Facebook information with businesses. I would never log in to MailChimp with either of those.
On the other hand, we use Google Apps for Business. I use that as a common login for everything that supports it. Most businesses use Google for business in some form (if nothing else, Google Docs or Youtube or similar), so even if not Google Apps, there's already some integration.
Single sign-on is much more secure than either managing 100 different passwords, or having 100 different businesses managing my password. It's much more convenient. It's just a clear win.
* Udacity really tries to learn how to exploit the on-line medium well. Coursera tosses courses not that different from a capture of the normal university course on-line. Coursera instructors have minimal support in how to put together a good on-line course. This comes across in a huge number of ways (as with Khan, you're being tutored, not lectured at, with tight integration of questions/videos, etc.).
* Udacity courses have massive post-production. There's a big difference between a professional recording followed by editing, and a professor with a webcam and a tablet on which to capture PPT slides.
* Udacity courses target a narrower range of subjects, and so have appropriate technologies to teach those subjects. Coursera is one-size-fits-all. It really doesn't work well in many contexts.
The major downside of Udacity is related -- they mostly target intro CS classes. Coursera has a much broader selection of richer classes.
The Coursera courses I've taken were, by and large, fairly mediocre, and the company is hyper-secretive and hyper-aggressive. I'm worried it might turn into the Microsoft (of the eighties) of education -- grab the market, flood it with mediocrity, and outmaneuver everyone from a business standpoint. I'm also worried that they might burn a lot of people out on on-line courses; they can be very well done (as with edX, Khan, and Udacity), but because of their landgrab model/quantity over quality, most people will probably have their first exposure through Coursera.
The point is that they should be comparing to sinc. They're comparing to a known-stupid algorithm to make themselves look better than they are.
(In CS terms, this is akin to comparing your algorithm to something using a bubble sort, and ignoring the invention of n log n sorting algorithms)
Fact 1: Sebastian Thrun co-developed Google StreetView
Fact 2: Sebastian Thrun is developing the driverless car.
A lot more goes into a self-driving car than data from how drivers drive. That's maybe 3% of the problem. Nevertheless, assuming Sebastian is too dumb to make the connection would assume a fairly high level of stupidity on his part. That's a pretty bad assumption.