Hey guys, I'm the CEO and Founder of Wanelo, so I'll jump in here.
In 2007-2008, I actively searched for a technical cofounder, but I couldn’t find one. I did have a false start of working with two great engineers, who in the end weren't interested in taking this on full time.
In parallel, I started consulting as a UX designer to make money. I eventually took on more projects that led me to hire a small team of designers to support all the client work. The income generated from these projects made it possible for me bootstrap Wanelo on my own and hire an engineer in India and a couple people under him to start building Wanelo. This was a direct contracting situation (he got paid and there was no equity involved) which went on for a couple of years.
We built a bunch of features that nobody cared to use until, finally, at the end of 2010, we launched a version (mentioned in the presentation) which people started using for the first time. At that point, I closed down my agency, which ended my source of income. I then asked the main engineer (Sarvjeet) if he would come on board as a CTO/cofounder (since I could no longer pay him or anyone else) and he said yes. This didn’t last for long. After a few months, it became clear very quickly that we were not a good fit for a cofounder relationship. We mutually agreed to end his involvement with the company (there was a 3 months transition period for which he got paid), and I went on solo to raise funding and build a new team, which took over the technical platform. Two months later, we fully rebuilt the website on an entirely new stack, leaving all the old code behind.
To elaborate on the “no team” comment, that comes directly from investors who refused to consider me and a remote engineer in India as a real team. This was the main challenge in raising money. Investors would literally call me a solo female non technical founder because it was just me with no engineering background and some remote contractors, and it took 40 rejections from investors to close my seed round.
Yes, completely freelancer developed. I closed the agency and moved to SF from LA when we got to 30k monthly uniques.
Overall, the two years prior to the inflection point and the first users were pretty inefficient. The vision was actually always the same (a universal social platform for all of shopping), but the execution changed dramatically. We literally just kept launching features around this concept, but they were pretty unfocused, until the minimalist redesign.
On the other hand, this 2 year period allowed me to make lots of product design mistakes and learn from them and to develop a personal philosophy and approach to product design.
:) What happened was that we removed the crap that was built before. Only 2 things could not be removed: products and people, so the homepage became a precursor to what it is today: a minimalist grid of products posted by users.
I then spent $20 a day on Facebook ads. The goal was simply to get a small stream of people to check out the website and to see if they would use it. I didn't think I could actually grow a community by spending on ads since I didn't have that much money to spend. To my shock, people actually started using it and were sticking around. The reason was that the website exposed them to surprising, unique products from stores they've never heard about.
It's also worth noting that I optimized the ad a lot, tweaking all the details (targeting, image used, copy, where the ad clicks to) until I had an ad that was performing really well, meaning that I was making that $20 count.