likedan5

Recorded this at 5AM after losing my phone. Couldn't sleep.

The thesis: every early-stage startup needs one person who is both responsible for the outcome and has the right to make the final call. Not consensus. Not a vote.

The group decision argument sounds reasonable — more knowledge, more guardrails. But under real pressure, self-interest dominates. And when nobody owns the outcome, nobody cleans up the mess. After my last startup wound down I spent over a year returning $1M to stakeholders as a volunteer. Everyone else had moved on. That's what ownership actually looks like.

I think of it as a trust test. One person has to be willing to hold full liability. The other has to trust that person's judgment and integrity enough to give them the final call. Not all co-founder relationships can do that — and the ones that can't eventually blow up.

Curious if others have seen this play out differently, especially in cases where consensus-based structures actually worked long-term.

I'm definitely aware the kind of thing you're talking. We're lucky that with our solution, we deal more with retailers than designer brands. So far it's been not that bad for us.

Curious what's the name of company you are at?

Gotya, we'll check that. The selections are some time pretty random, since we have a large model pool.

They wouldn't be our competitor on B2B, more like a user of this tech. They might have it at some point (either through us or in house), but only available for merchants on their platform.

Frankly, I think it's just very hard to get the kind of effect you're imagining. https://www.formatech.com I know this company that does what you want, but I don't think their rendering is close to what you're imagining. We recognize it's difficulty, so want to start with a more constrained case, maybe will eventually get there :)

haha yeah, there's a lot of nuance about a fitting room that's hard for 1 product to solve. Our current product focus more on the styling / outfits / engagement, not claiming on the exact fit. Hopefully it brings positive value to conversion and AOV, which would be enough to justify a B2B case. We've also build an app (Style Space), but are not experts in running it.

Yeah, it's slowly getting there but hard to reach 100% so will need QA to touch up for a long time. But the hybrid approach gets better rendering than photoshop vendor image (at least shopper have difficult spotting).

You right, we don't handle fitting at the moment. It's difficult bc most e-commerce don't have diverse body shape model and many other reasons. We are working on it, will take some time for sure.

Haha yeah, photoshoots are definitely not the first thing in our mind, but seems like there's real need for it.

It's possible, and I imagine would be a very cool feature for a shopping app!

We went to the B2B path after launching Style Space (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/style-space/id1535818149) and realize we don't know how to run e-commerce haha. Might revisit the shopping app / marketplace idea once we have more validation and tractions.

Haha, cool idea! I thought we might had this discussion sometime internally. The truth is we haven't got time to explore it yet.

One possible difficulty I see is still how do we collect the face data / body data. Image generation has a strong bias toward domain -- meaning if we use one kind of faces during training, we will need that same kind of face during inference (with the same angle, lighting, etc..). It's possible but need more thoughts on how to ask users for good image.

I think that's one reason we avoid user uploaded images so far, bc it's hard for users to understand exactly what kind of image we need, and why their images doesn't work well sometimes. There's a lot to explore on this front before we can get a market ready product.

Regardless, cool idea, appreciated:)

We're considered the 3D option, it's difficult bc most retailers don't have 3D garments and it take very long time to create them. Maybe when that content becomes more available, we'll eventually replace our current system with 3D.

Interested to learn more about the type of 3D model you make. Drop me an email [email protected] if you're interested to chat :)

Thanks!

1) would love to rotate the model to see how it looks from all angles.

This our current product can do, if we were are able to get the side and back garment image from retailer (surprisingly a lot of them don't carry these images).

2) being able to customize the model to look similar to me (so I can get a sense for how the clothes would fit on my body) would be awesome.

This one is very hard, despite a lot of ask on it. We're working on it!

Boo.com!

This is our ultimate goal! It will take some time :)

It's very hard to ensure good quality rendering on user uploaded image (a lot of out of distribution). We've seen others who try to do that, but quality not yet great.

wow, that's awesome, thanks! Any suggestions / improvements? Most retailers are asking for diverse body shape supports -- super hard, we're working on it.

Ah, the bag feature is very new, and sth we're still working on to improve. Sorry for the disappointment, but thx for the feedback.

Yeah, we are gonna do it for a few clients and see how well that works. Could be a quicker way to market than the dressing room.

"I personally don't find a ton of value in this as a consumer. I want to see how the clothes look on me, not on a model. I can see people wanting to throw together pretend outfits on a model, but I'm not sure how you monetize that."

Agree, I bet everyone wants to see outfit on themself or a person that resembles themselves. It's just HARD to build such product, period. I think at least for some people if not for everyone, styling is a important part. Also, style color mismatch accounts for about 18-20% of the returns. So far, we see a substantial conversion rate increase from the dressing room on our clients' website. Trying to get more validations to figure out the actual value of the dressing room.

True. We actually didn't thought about this, but some of our client we try to sell the dressing room ask us to make photoshoots since it's more urgent. So now we are doing that too haha. How large do you think the total addressable market is for this?

Haha, because we build the first virtual try-on system that's fully automated! We've seen 50+ other companies doing virtual try-on, but they need a lot of manual work to process each garment, thus have difficulty scaleing.

"product images with models" Some of our customer has requested this service and we are doing it for them. There is difference: we use a large deep learning model that has higher latency and we do more QA on these images.

The pricing will be obviously more expensive. We charge slightly cheaper than market rate with more realistic image quality.

"Also, what's the smallest store you're willing to work with (min # of SKU)?"

There's not strict line. a store with a few hundred SKUs would work well. It depends on how shoppers's shopping habits: we noticed for smaller shop, shoppers more often come looking for specific items than browsing. Our product is more valuable for shopper with exploratory mindset.