drapie

July the 13th was the day we decided to launch drapie. We did it kind of in a hurry so it wasn't perfect at all but we were trying to symbolically launch, if it makes any sense.

See, we had been postponing the launch like 4 times before this date so we decided to just launch it and see what happened.

I'm really happy that we did that because even though you can say we took a lot of time, we learnt a lot from the initial batch of users of the app (mostly friends and friends of friends).

They were using our app and we were basically detecting bugs that we hadn't even though of.

Also, launching gave us the confidence that we could do it and that we couldn't wait until the perfect product was ready (everybody knows the perfect initial product fallacy).

I would say that, in hindsight, we should've released the project way earlier: we found that a specific payment feature we spent 3 months implementing (mostly because of bureaucracy) was basically useless: nobody was using it and that was one of the factors of the constant delays.

I think that everybody knows the "if you're not embarrassed of your MVP, you launched to late" phrase by Reid Hoffman. I don't know if I would say that you have to be necessarily embarrassed but sooner is almost always better than later.

So to put it shortly: listen to the people that were in your place before.

Turned out that I was completely wrong about the fact that I could build an MVP in a couple of weeks.

By October I had some basic functionality going on but I didn't really have the amount of time that I wanted to dedicate to the platform because I was working a full time job by then.

Even though development was slower than we initially thought it would be, it proved to be useful because we were learning a lot of stuff in parallel, mostly stuff related to the clothing business in itself (neither of us had any experience with it) and the operational side of it.

During this time I was also anxious about making technical decisions. That uncertainty didn't contribute to the velocity of the project but helped me better understand the role I had and why it's important to act quick in the initial stages of building a product.

I worried about stuff like scaling, the error tracking platform we should use and even the front-end framework I would end up using for some parts of the app. Nowadays, I wouldn't think twice about stuff like that and I would stick to what I know best and the quicker solution.

Like I said, this situation helped me learn so I wouldn't say it was bad to experience it. Good thing is, competition was nowhere to be seen so that made the situation bearable.

We started building our platform, we already had the domain name but we decided to sit and try to put our ideas into paper.

While doing this, we were both working full time jobs so it was mostly me coding (I used Rails by the way) while Ivo, my co-founder, tried to scout physical used clothing stores in order to build our initial stock.

We also bought a Canon camera and started learning how to use it because we know that the quality of our pictures was going to determine how our users perceived our product.

I would say August 12 was seminal because we even changed our original focus (we were thinking about making a simple ecommerce, where no one could sell except for us) and decided to build a marketplace where people could buy AND sell.

We didn't have the domain name yet so trying to name the platform was kinda difficult because we had no idea where to start, luckily we didn't spend that much time on it and found the name we're currently using: drapie

My co-founder and I had dabbled with the idea of founding a startup in the nascent bolivian market (it's a pretty young country internet wise) but we didn't seem to be able to coordinate our efforts so this ideas went nowhere, we even saw some guys successfully implement some of this ideas later.

So this time he came to me with an idea he had: what if we bought some clothing and use the web as a way to sell it. The idea seems banal and all but I was in because I wanted to build a project with my co-founder and the idea would mutate on the way to being a reality anyways

I had some experience with internet projects and marketing and I could code but he was really savvy when it came to accounting and establishing a physical business which would come really handy in a bureaucratic environment like the one we were dealing with.

We talked a lot about our vision and the objectives we had. I told my co-founder that I wanted to build the platform from scratch because I had never done that and I wanted the experience as a way to learn, I was pretty upfront about the possibility of using solutions like Shopify in case he didn't want to but he was ok with the idea because he also wanted to learn in the way.

That day was pretty important to us because it wasn't our first "What if we build this" conversation, but it was definitely the one that would stick.