ShoeKicker

@chuck_petty I love it. The mechanics of automatically ordering are a bit intimidating, but it's something we've been thinking about for a few use cases. Maybe one day :)

@stuartcornuelle Hey Stuart! Thanks for checking us out. The reason we focused on runners that knew exactly what shoe they wanted for beta was because that was the problem we initially set out to solve. Just for context: I'm a somewhat picky runner when it comes to shoes and I had been running in the Mizuno Wave Inspire 9's for years. All of a sudden, they went out of stock in pretty much every retail store in Boston in my size. That was the lightbulb moment of "Hey, these shoes actually probably exist somewhere in the country in my size and finding them really is a technology problem". We heard similar stories from other dedicated runners and so we felt like focusing on this specific segment of hardcore athletes would be a good test of whether what we're building adds enough value to exist in the world. The word is still out but we've been getting some great traction. Now the question becomes, how do we broaden our product to accommodate those folks who are looking to find a shoe that works or switch to a new shoe!

@stuartcornuelle Imran already answered this, but I'll add that I think we wanted to focus on doing one use case really well first. We're not quite done, there's some data quality issues to work out. But we have planned since the beginning to do a feature set tailored for people who don't know what shoe they want yet. Perhaps that's directing them to their friendly local running shoe specialty store, or perhaps that's showing them the various features of different models, or perhaps it's just letting people browse the inventory, or maybe some combination of all three... not quite sure yet. But I think we'll be working on this over the next few months.

@rtortora @imrankk I understand. Thanks for the thoughtful replies guys.

@jesse_miller Great idea! Yeah, there are a ton of applications of the technology to other fitness products -- especially supplements. We're runners at heart and started off building for people like us, so could see us taking on endurance-specific supplements to start like Endurox, gels, etc. If there's traction there's definitely potential to spin off a separate standalone brand in the future. Question for you though: would you be willing to sign up for a subscription for something like that? What about for shoes?

@imrankk see my comment below about subscription for shoes. I'd do it if it was smart. My mileage varies widely by season and for other reasons, and I would hate to get a backlog of new shoes.

@chuck_petty Yeah we had similar concerns when we were thinking about the idea of a subscription. What if it was opt-in instead of opt-out? It would be pretty easy for us to ping you every X months with a Yes I'm ready for new shoes vs. hold off. Thoughts?

@imrankk I dig it. Two-button email with yes/no (remind me in a month) options.

@kkdub Thanks Kelly! Yeah one idea we have is using some kind of "sponsored gear" feature as a way to test receptiveness for other niches. We're hoping to roll that out in the next few months. Another thing we really need to figure out is how to drive retention when we explicitly don't require user accounts. We really want to keep a clean and simple user experience. Any ideas on that would be super welcome 😄

@imrankk Sounds like y'all have things on the run. Many good options for retention but nearly all require that you be able to contact the customer. Perhaps users of your product would register for a "price drop" notification for their favorite kicks? You could test obtaining opt-ins for email, SMS, Facebook Messenger, and any other channels as appropriate. This audience might respond well to a "new kicks" notification when their fave brand releases a new line. Just some quick ideas to get you started.

@kkdub Agree with your thoughts! Price tracking, new release updates, extinction/out-of-production warnings, etc. would really help with retention. Of course, the ultimate retention hack is creating a social community, but that's incredibly work intensive.

@paul_hq @kkdub Yeah! User accounts are something we want to be really thoughtful with as we think it should be opt-in, not required. As you suggest, we have price alerts available now on the results page but I think we need to make it way more prominent because it seems like people aren't seeing it (our fault!). Did you happen to notice the link? It's only email right now so totally dig the suggestion for text, fb messenger and the different types of notifications. Thanks!!

@jason_ephraim great point! We're definitely thinking about ways we can connect runners to other shoe models that could work for them. One of those ways is through sponsored options as you mentioned if we feel the shoe really could be a good fit for that runner. Another is viewing cheapest shoes across shoe categories like Motion Control, Stability, etc. I like your idea of being able to compare across and within categories too though!

@jason_ephraim Totally agree that people love browsing. Surprisingly, the vast majority of people who have visited the site so far have had a specific shoe to search for - I assumed this would be a bigger problem than it's been so far. However, even for some people who search for a specific shoe, I'm sure some of them had to pause, go find their shoe, look up the model number, etc... I've wanted to do browsing since we started, but we want to do it "right" and make it really valuable. Thanks for the suggestions!

@imcatnoone sorry I responded to you in standalone comments :)

@imcatnoone Oh, ha, you know, we should totally make the list of all our retailers more visible. This is definitely something people would wonder. When you search for a shoe, it does show you all the retailers where we found offers and lists the ones we didn't, but it's not very explicit. Thanks!