I'll make an alternative suggestion. Hire management. You want to sit in a box and code. You want someone to handle business, support, etc. People who can do that are a dime a dozen.
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.
> You want someone to handle business, support, etc. People who can do that are a dime a dozen.
Is this really true? I mean that as an honest question, because, while being a coder with a typical distaste for shallow marketing folks myself, I think these "business things" actually constitute work, if done right (first and foremost good user support).
I would imagine that there exists a similar comment in a board for marketing guys and gals, where they say:
> You want someone to program the database. People who can do that are a dime a dozen.
I'm sorry, but this is a terrible suggestion. I ran a company successfully for 8 years and at times made this same mistake in thinking.
The only time you can hire above is when scaling a successful product + sales model - essentially when you are no longer a startup and are becoming an established player.
This video has been making the rounds. I call bullsh*t.
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).
There is a large market. How are you planning to reach it?
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.
Unless you're planning to raise very substantial amounts of money, advertising might not be the most effective tactic. It's worth perhaps playing with, but not doing more until you've seen it work. You're a small business. You've got a highly unsegmented market. In unsegmented markets, advertising is mostly about brand building. That works well if you're Coca-Cola, but much less well for small start-ups.
Word-of-mouth can work well, but you've got to understand your customers, the networks, and the levers you can tweak to change rate-of-growth. I was suggesting price/quality/margin as one of those levers -- you want to be appealing to as many customers within your customers' networks -- but there may be others if that one is unappealing.
That is a true statement, about Wall St. Less true about C-level, until you hit pretty big companies. A typical C-level or VP-level earns between $200k and $500k, typically towards the lower-end of that (obviously, Fortune 500 would be millions for CEO -- I'm basing this on companies of ~100 employees).
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:
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.
Wow. I'd really appreciate it if you didn't condescend me by trying to explain my own wealth percentile, as if I'm completely oblivious to being showered in money (as you're implying), when I've simply made a remark about the average price of an item of clothing. That was quite an insulting comment to get through, and I hope you realize that even if you didn't intend it.
I'd also challenge your assertion that the majority of the HN audience is elite, as that's a bit of projection, but that's not a fight I'm prepared to get pulled into right now.
I've spent my entire life at just about every notch on the wealth spectrum short of having seven figures in the bank (and I came from stretching $10 for a family of three over two weeks), and I would consider myself upper middle class at this very moment, yet one constant for me has been the price for an average article of clothing even if the purchaser had to save up for it.
Someone might buy 1-3 nice shirts and take good care of them and they'd last a long time, provided they didn't buy a shirt with a trendy design that will be useless next year.
Amazon is the new socialism. There are basic services which the government ought to provide -- access to unlimited books, movies, music, software, and similar. It's dramatically more economically efficient that way. The governments won't, for a whole range of reasons. Amazon seems to be stepping up. You pay a private tax, and you join a private government.
Wrong conclusion. There's a difference between bad idea and bad execution.
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.
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.