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In fairness, I might have built this specifically for me. I wanted something that required no homework and no stress and maximum easy purchasing...but that still results in great gifts from cool small brands.
We built an SMS-only shopping platform.
We make shopping as dead simple as humanly possible by sending you a text messages featuring a great product from a small brand with an awesome story and literally all you have to do is type YES when you see something you like and the rest is magic.
We're the calling the holiday campaign "Holiday Shopping on Easy Mode" and once a day at noon Pacific from Late-Nov to mid-Dec, users will get a message featuring a curated product from one of 40+ brands we’ve partnered with. (Including a couple celebrity brands. )
Reply YES a half dozen times and BOOM, Christmas shopping is done! No homework. No stress. And you still get to give your friends and fam great gifts with fun stories behind them.
Did I make this specifically for me? Maybe. But I can't imagine I'm the only person who wants this brand of perfect.
A bit on my background: I started my career as a theme park designer at Disney (like you do), but then one thing led to another and I became a game designer, helped start an e-commerce company that got me acquihired at Twitter, and then left shortly after Elon took over (of my own free will) to start Yes, More & Co.
It's been a wild ride, but looking back, amazingly, it's been a straight line to this. Yes, More & Co is all about customer experience with a splash of game design, all wrapped up in short form messaging and e-commerce.
Feel free to drop everything and go upvote our Product Hunt page: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/yes-more-co
Good questions. We could certainly build the features ourselves, one of the time constraints we're trying to battle is a self-imposed deadline to relaunch before the end of the year. We saw a large bump at the end of last year, before we had started working on telling anyone we exist, from users looking for interesting ways to do 365 Projects for New Year's resolutions. This year, knowing that's coming and a proven use case, we'd like to amplify that effect as much as possible.
The other piece of the puzzle is that we know we're pretty good at what we do but I'm a former theme park designer and that doesn't necessarily translate to UI and graphics 1:1 so it would be nice to bring someone in to up our design game there, likely on a short-term contract.
And finally, we'd be learning a completely new skill to rebuild the backend and get us off Parse by the end of January when they fold. There are bandaids available for that situation but if we're going to go through the time and expense, we'd prefer to do it right.
So ultimately, my original question plays into your last question, "Why would an investor want to invest unless they believed you were at excellent growth?" I'm hoping the answer is something like, "because these other metrics and circumstances point to a high enough likelihood of excellent growth being right around the corner." But I don't know if that's how the funding market thinks right now even if I can convince someone to believe that to be the truth as much as I believe it to be, so I'm hoping to gain a little insight there.
That's an interesting take. Thank you. Yeah, there are definitely plenty of "inside the box" routes that often seem like a known quantity but that doesn't mean they aren't worth discussing and exploring.
Right. And obviously the plan is that we would be ramping up growth with these iterations. Of course, that means someone with more money than us also has to believe those plans will work.
It makes $0. It's a social app just getting its legs so we're focused on growth right now. We do have some outside the box ideas for monetization down the road though.
We've reached a manpower ceiling with just two of us working on it daily so the 200k is about double what we need for a few hires that would allow us to build out the desktop experience, some general design/UI updates, get off of Parse and onto our own backend and complete two large features that will make the overall experience a more shareable and viral experience. It should also be enough to take us to our first 1mil users.
The other half is a buffer against the 1000s of things that can go wrong and to give us a little runway while we raise a real round if things go right.
We're two months deep with our first kidlet and The Wonder Weeks has been pretty great at preparing you for the next step. It's a little heavy on "mom stuff" but I still highly recommend. http://amzn.to/2c3M70d
We created this New Year's resolution challenge as a way to bring non-iOS people into the Mission: Pic fold in a fun way. :)
The last year on M:P has been a blast and resulted in a lot of great photography. If you have any interest in photography, mobile or otherwise, I'd love it if you checked it out and let us know what you think. Available on the App Store.
We're plugging away at this mobile photography game. New update went out today! http://missionpic.com