

Ask YC: Feedback on idea - pjharrin

Since this community seems to be the greatest thing since sliced bread, I thought I would ask for some advice on an idea.<p>The problem that I've identified is the extreme difficulty of finding indie fashion designers online. Unless somebody directly tells me about them, there is no way I'd find them.<p>I was thinking of creating a platform where users can create a brand page giving information about the brands history, products, reviews etc. Each brand will have links to "similar brands" so that they can all be connected in  one giant web of insanity :p (my biggest struggle is that once i find a cool brand, its hard to find others like it).<p>I think a cool business model would be something similar to Yammer and giving brands the ability to claim their page, they can then produce updates and notifications for users who are interested.<p>I know fashion is about as far away as you can get from hacking, but this is a super group and I'd appreciate any help you can  give.<p>Thanks
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kleneway
You might want to check out <http://www.smashingdarling.com>. Not saying that
there's not room for multiple competitors in this space, but thought it might
be a good place to see what's working, what's not, and some areas where you
might be able to make improvements.

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pjharrin
Thanks for the link, I will have to look over it in more detail. My intent was
to have more of a focus on brands then individual products, although products
could be added to the brand pages.

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joshsharp
<http://etsy.com> has a category for clothing. I'm not sure of your definition
of "indie fashion designers", but since you mentioned difficulty in finding
them, that might be a good place to look for new users/contributors.

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noodle
i'd like to point out that this would work for other things beyond fashion,
like local/indie/small-time bands. if you're going to build it, why restrict
it

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yan
Restricting it might be useful as to not dilute his idea and make it
unappealing to die-hard 'indie fashionistas'. Perhaps making his code generic,
were this to ever be completed, would be useful in creating spin-offs.

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noodle
well, i wasn't necessarily implying to have one site that dilutes the idea,
but the solution for fashion could be cloned into another app for music, and
so on.

the idea itself is reusable. suggestion engines could always use improvements.

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pjharrin
Yea the real idea is to help people find hidden gems and from there find
similar gems. The music scene is already pretty crazy though with last.fm and
pandora and the millions of other sites trying to help people discover new
music

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noodle
true enough about music overload. and also book overload.

if i could come up with a truly good idea offhand, though, i might be working
on it instead of sharing ;)

i'm sure there are other relevant applications for this concept beyond the big
ones.

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ram1024
i'd say it'd be a great resource for people interested in that sort of thing.

i'm not sure how large a market it is, so i really can't judge how successful
it would be, or what you would even consider successful in that niche. it's
definately a step away from your standard hacked news startup, i think you
have a good idea on your hands though, that's a gut feeling hehe

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pjharrin
It is rather hard to tell how big the market would be since its hard to find
the designers (hence the idea). But I think a lot of designers could use it as
a marketing platform and to market beyond their geographic location, which is
what a lot of them have to do.

Now I just have to learn to code it hehe. I know, I'm on HN but I don't code

