Meet Wheretoget, a community of dedicated fashion enthusiasts. Whenever you see an outfit that you like on the web or in the street, you upload a picture. Wheretoget’s community will take care of the rest and find where you can get this very same outfit. There is no secret sauce, no magic algorithm, just dedicated human beings. And the French startup just raised $2 million (€1.4 million) from Alven Capital, Fabrice Grinda, Emmanuel Brunet and other angels.
“We define ourselves as a Shazam for fashion — that’s the most effective way to describe what we do,” founder and CEO Romain Moyne told me in a phone interview. “In my previous company, a fashion magazine called Hypeed, the most frequent question was ‘where can I buy this dress?'”
The company has been around for years, slowly but surely building an efficient community. It’s a good bootstrap story, but now it’s time for the team of 8 based in Paris to grow to the next level.
The hundred most active users answered 120 questions on average last month.
Initially, Wheretoget was just a website. You can send pictures to get answers, help other people by finding things others are looking for, like stuff, discuss and more. Every time you find something, you get points. The more difficult it is to find, the more points you’ll get.
The company now gets 2.2 million unique visitors per month — not bad for a startup that has been flying under the radar. Another company has been doing something pretty similar — The Hunt. But, even with $16.2 million in funding, The Hunt seems to be stagnating on the web. While Alexa is nowhere near accurate, it can give interesting trends. Here’s what it looks like when you compare The Hunt and Wheretoget:
Now, more than half of Wheretoget’s activity comes from the iPhone and Android apps. But the startup doesn’t seem to be as popular as it is on the web. This time, when you compare The Hunt and Wheretoget on App Annie, the first app is much better ranked and has more downloads. The Hunt has steadily been in the U.S. top 500 for a few months now. There’s still work to do on this front for Wheretoget.
The Hunt:
Wheretoget:
When I asked how Wheretoget’s response rate was, Moyne said that on average, you get an answer within 24 hours. A third of the questions get an answer in less than 36 minutes.
“Around 10,000 people answer. We reward our members with points, which lets them compete in the weekly, monthly or yearly leaderboards,” Moyne said. “The hundred most active users answered 120 questions on average last month.”
Eventually, Wheretoget is a curated fashion e-commerce website. You can find nice outfits on the website, and buy them in a third-party store in no time. Every time someone does that, the startup gets a small affiliate fee. The startup got a lot of positive feedback with merchants, and will certainly work on improving relationships with these merchants to get more money from them. This is a clear revenue path for the startup.
Wheretoget is also a social network for fashion enthusiasts. The mobile app looks and acts a lot like Instagram for fashion. People come back to the app to look at new photos, comment and like. You can follow a tag, like Rihanna, or TV shows, brands and even trends (vintage, Coachella, etc.). This is the other key strategy when it comes to user growth. “People only post one or two pics, but they won’t use the Shazam feature for a few months,” Moyne said. “The social and content features are what make people come back in the app every day.”
Photo credit: Michael Mandiberg under the CC By-SA 2.0 license