Proposal:
Corporate Strategy & Mission: Build a public social network to capture and share the world’s fashion moments and easily shop for them, meet InstaFashion.
Observations:
Fashion industry is growing 4% to $2.4T in 2020. However, the market is fragmented. Users switching cost is low, since people get inspired and shop from multiple locations.
Inspiration happens from Instagram but also from fashion blogs, movies, street, runways, brands sites, pinterests, blogs, etc. Businesses are using social platforms for attention grabbing as the users are overwhelmed by choice (e.g. TikTok, Instagram).
In addition, users shop from multiple locations (23% Brick and Mortar, 27% Amazon, 28% Brand, 22% other). However, the experience is not personalized by their interest, style, personality or context. (more details see Appendix 1):
Customer Problem:
As a user that wants to dress appropriately for each occasion, in accordance with my personality & style, I want to get inspired for outfits and shop them easily.
Business Strategy:
By building a social community around fashion, users will be able to easily find and inspire each other with outfits ideas and also conveniently purchase them by linking consumers directly with the brands.
Business Metric:
MVP: Reaching Product Market Fit by acquiring users that get value from the product, where value is inspiration and easy shopping.
Primary: MAU (Monthly Active Users)
Secondary: DAU/MAU, Return Rate, Engagement Rate
Product Strategy (MVP): Allow users to share and browse fashion related photos while helping them to buy it. (based on Customer Journey see appendix 2)
The MVP has two phases:
1. Discovery Phase: This is the phase where we validate the biggest assumption before we invest in development.
- Problem Validation: Validate our biggest assumption that users do want to shop directly for the outfits that they see in the social media. For this, we will do users research and talk to customers.
- Solution Validation: Validate different prototypes with users. For example, have users click a point on the outfit and show the item brand, price and direct link to buy it. (see Appendix 3)
- Feasibility Validation: From a technical perspective we need to know if this is feasible. For example,
- Can we scrape online fashion brands ands tore everything locally for training?
- Do we have the technology that does object recognition on a photo to match items or similar items that we previously scrapped?
- Do we have a recommendation engine?
2. Development Phase: MVP will entail building the minimum E2E experience where customers can get the value prop.
- By helping users browse photos with outfits that match their style and interest, they will stay engaged and return more frequently.
- By having users easily create an account on the platform, it will remove the signup friction and have them faster engage.
- By helping people share their outfits, they will be able to become influencers on the platform, stay more engaged and keep the others engaged.
- By allowing users to tell their preferences (e.g. like/not like), they will get a more personalized experience and it will increase their engagement, time on site and return rate.
- By helping users find right away where they can purchase the same or similar articles from the photos they like, they will use the service more often and return more frequently.
- By notifying the influencers when their outfits/posts were liked, we will improve their return rate.
- Nice to Have: By allowing people to save their preferred outfits, it will increase their usage and return rates.
Appendix
1. Opportunities & Threats
2. Customer Journey
3. Example of Solution Validation
