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Wanelo Blog: How We Rebuilt Wanelo from Scratch and Lived to Tell About It

In early 2012, Wanelo was recently funded by Floodgate, First Round Capital, Forerunner Ventures, Naval Ravikant and other phenomenal investors, and the new Wanelo team was coming together with some incredible engineers and designers joining the team.

We knew that to grow as a social platform we were going to need to be ridiculously agile, with aggressively short cycles of launching features daily, measuring impact, adjusting and so on. It was also clear that our old platform was far from ideal to achieve the desired agility and productivity.

Whether to rebuilt the Wanelo platform form scratch or simply extend our existing platform was an incredibly controversial decision for our new team. Many really smart and experienced entrepreneurs and engineers were convincing us against pursuing a complete rebuilt citing legitimate dangers and risks of such a path.

After extensive consideration and exploring of this question, we decided to move forward with a complete rewrite of the platform on a new tech stack. We froze all new product development and for 2 months I was holding my breath waiting to see if we could really pull this off. The team kicked some serious butt, staying focused, cutting features, making difficult decisions along the way and generally moving forward at an impressive speed.

Two months later, I got up at 5am to greet our visitors on live video chat. I couldn’t believe that this day actually came. The video chat was a blast as we got to talk to hundreds of users visiting the site during the migration to the new platform and the new website was up and running with only minor issues along the way. I was almost a bit disappointed at the lack of dramatic mishaps :)

In the post below, our CTO tells the story of the relaunch, the new architecture and the migration of the full site. Enjoy!

The Big Switch: How We Rebuilt Wanelo from Scratch and Lived to Tell About It

wanelo:

The Wanelo you see today is a completely different website than the one that existed a few months ago. It’s been rewritten and rebuilt from the ground up, as part of a process that took about two months. We thought we’d share the details of what we did and what we learned, in case someone out…

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What is the Problem with Shopping?

Human beings are fundamentally social. We’re born into a rich set of cultural notions that range from when it’s appropriate to yawn to our definitions of success. Our ideas and notions are deeply rooted in social dynamics developed over thousands of years and are specific to this cultural moment in time. We literally make sense of our entire lives through the social context of everything around us.

When we look at a piece of content, we want to know who created it, who likes or hates it, who uses it and so on. The social context around content is a critical source of information about that content and most of us are expert decoders of it.

Increasingly insane amounts of content are being produced and made available online. So the question is, how do we know which of this content to consume and which to ignore. At a high level, there are two ways this problem could be solved: through social context and social shortcuts or through data science. The data science-driven approaches that work are actually rooted in social context (such as Google’s PageRank which relies on people’s decisions to link to particular content, where a link to content is treated as a vote on the value of that content).

So, really, all we have is social context to solve this problem. Without social context, there can be no relevance. And we’re seeing this in play everywhere. People don’t want content in a vacuum; they want content in social context. I don’t go to news sites directly; I get content through the about 230 people I follow on Twitter. The entire web is being increasingly reorganized around people.

Here’s the current taxonomy of the social web:

  • Facebook is for friends
  • Twitter is for news
  • Pinterest is for images
  • Youtube is for videos
  • Soundcloud is for sound
  • __________ is for shopping

That’s right. Commerce (specifically the trade of products), which is one of the most important aspects of the global economy is the one area today that’s really lacking social context. Most of our shopping happens on ecommerce websites where all we get is the retailer’s information about the product (how old school!). Sure, we occasionally get some reviews, mostly from people we don’t know (i.e. we don’t have the social context around these people), but we don’t yet have a platform that tells us what products and stores specific people like (friends or others) and we don’t have a platform that links products, stores and people in a single network.

This is what Wanelo is building. Our goal is to reorganize all of shopping around people and the opportunity we’re after is tremendous. I feel very lucky to be recently supported by an incredible group of investors and advisors who share our vision and to be working with the most amazing team. We have a lot to build and I’m psyched about the next few months.

MORE RECENT POSTS:

Startup CEOs, stop acting like victims People are shortcuts

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Startup CEOs, stop acting like victims.

The overwhelmingly popular top answer to the Quora question: “What does it feel like to be the CEO of a start-up?” has received a whopping 931 upvotes and at least one down vote - from me! (Anyone else down voted that? Let me know :) )

Read the answer and a sad-sad picture of a victim with extremely unhealthy dependencies emerges. As a startup CEO, you can’t sleep! You don’t have weekends! You live with endless guilt (assuming that you spend any minute of the day on anything other than work). You can only relate to people through business opportunities and you can’t enjoy vacations. Sure, there are some nice upsides and you may learn to have fun or enjoy working with people, but the general sentiment is that you’re quite a hero and you work oh-so-hard for your startup that you don’t really have a life.

Sleepless nights, endless worrying, perpetual dissatisfaction, always searching for more and better, no time for anything outside of work. The startup CEO is glorified as a victim. This is a position of weakness and I want to have nothing to do with that.

MY TAKE ON WHAT IT’S LIKE TO BE A STARTUP CEO

It’s incredibly fun. You’re passionate about a problem and an opportunity and you don’t need any reasons to pursue it other than intrinsic enjoyment of building something you love. You’re usually up to some great challenge, but, guess what? - you’ve chosen to have these challenges because if you didn’t have them, you’d be bored to death on a daily basis.

You get to work with amazing people who, like you, love building huge, amazing things. How incredible is that?! It is one of the most wonderful feelings in the world.

You get to question everything, and, in doing so, you get to express yourself and be creative in unique ways. You creativity is in how you choose to communicate, what you share, what company culture you create, what ideas you pursue, how you empower others and so on. It really is wonderful and endless and it becomes an organic extension of who you are.

Your startup is your territory for endless personal growth. You get to push your comfort zone literally every day and that is an incredible opportunity. The challenges you overcome, the things you learn about yourself, the value you create, the people you get to know give you a sense of freedom, play and empowerment.

You get to decide on a moment by moment basis what to do with your time, how to spend it in a way that is aligned with your goals and your startup journey and you get to make bold choices.

MAKE YOUR CHOICES AND STOP COMPLAINING

Let’s stop perpetuating the notion and the glorification of startup CEOs as victims. Yes, we deal with challenges. Yes, we fail. And, yes, it can be really hard. But what’s the point? We are building startups because they offer us incredible opportunity to live amazing lives.

So let’s take an empowering point of view on the challenges we choose for ourselves. Let’s make choices and commit to living the lives we want. Let’s not be victims to startups or foster an illusion that we need success for happiness (all evidence is against that idea anyway). Do you want to sleep well at night? If yes, commit to solving this the same way that you solve problems in your startup. Do you want to be healthy and not go crazy? Then make exercise a priority. Do you want to have fulfilling friendships? What’s it going to take? Choose to spend time with friends if that’s important to you. Do you want to commit all of your time to your startup? Great! You can make that choice as well and there’s nothing wrong with that as long as you know that it’s a choice you’ve made.

Make your choices, live the life you want and stop complaining.

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People are Shortcuts

Have you ever had the experience of meeting one incredible person and that meeting leading to other incredible people or opportunities? I’ve certainly had many of these, but it took me a while to get here.

Until a year and half ago, the concept of spending time on optional meetings with people didn’t actually make sense to me. I was living in LA, running a UX agency and iterating on Wanelo on the side. I was fully aware of the fact that successful startups I was reading about in Techcrunch and other startup blogs seemed to have impressive people involved with them. These were advisors, mentors, investors and teams. Yet I didn’t have those types of people in my life.

My over-simplified view of the world at that time was that if I had a question or a task or a problem, then I would just go find a direct solution. I was incredibly independent. I would work on the problem, research things online, or read books. Talking to people in general as a way of creating value or solving problems seemed like a very indirect way of dealing with the issue at hand. 

Luckily for me, I have since learned that I was 100% wrong. 

Let’s examine what it means to be in touch with a person. Every single one of us has spent our entire lifetimes processing the world and accumulating knowledge. We read books and blogs, watch movies, travel, talk to other people, think about problems, build business, make mistakes, have successes and so on. In every one of these tasks an individual makes choices. I choose what to read and what I read leads me to find and read other things. I choose who to talk to and those people lead me to other people, things to read and so on. The accumulation of these choices represents the world I have created for myself.

Thus, every single person represents a particular set of heavily filtered knowledge, opinions, expertise and connections. For example, if you talk to me about personal growth and ask me for recommendations on books to read, I will recommend a very narrow and specific set of books. This set of books will represent my entire lifetime of personal growth and searching for answers. I’ve read many books, blogs, talked to people, gone through personal growth courses, thought about stuff endlessly and, as a result, I can produce a conveniently packaged and very small list of things for you to read. 

In other words, I have become a shortcut. Surely, you could go through everything I’ve gone through to get to these books. But given the limited number of hours in a day, it’s quite impractical to do so. You’re much better off talking to people who have already done a lot of this work themselves and using them as a shortcut and a filter to get to relevant stuff quicker. 

This is why our Twitter, Facebook and Instagram feeds are so relevant to us. Individuals we follow become the only way to cut through the intense and growing quantity and complexity of data and content in the world. Each individual represents a world of context, and humans have powerful intuition to gauge that context. When a particular individual shares something, we intuitively know the context of that person’s world and thus we know what to make of the thing being shared.

In the last year and a half, I have learned first-hand that the power of human shortcuts is absolutely phenomenal. This is why it makes sense to make finding and connecting to incredible people the absolute top priority in life, pretty much regardless of your goals. Finding a single incredible individual essentially means that you plug into that person’s entire world and that leads to a host of consequences. 

I moved to San Francisco in April of 2011. Since that move, I’ve been having repeated experiences of plugging into the worlds of incredible people. Since I used to have this very limited perspective on the importance of meeting and knowing people, I started out on faith. Essentially, my reasoning was, hey, I don’t really know why I need to meet with this person, but I’ll just do it anyway since that’s what other people seem to do.  And so I met with people in spite of myself and initially those meetings were entirely unnecessary and optional in my opinion, but some of those people turned out to be amazing. And they introduced me to other amazing people and at some point the entire thing blew my mind a little.

A year later, I’m running a ridiculously exciting funded startup with an incredible team and an amazing network of supporters. I continue having regular optional meetings with awesome people who become shortcuts into other great things. Every so often I doubt this strategy (after all, these are optional), and almost every time I’m proven wrong. More than that, the resulting opportunities are often surprising and entirely unanticipated. The key, of course, is finding the right individuals to serve as your shortcuts to all things awesome.

In startups this means that the quality of your network plays a huge role in your ability to succeed. This network will define the level of opportunities that come your way. It will define who else you meet, who joins your team, who advises you, who introduces you to future investors, who puts what on your radar. It’s hard to underestimate and it has a snowball effect.

In future blog posts I’ll write about how this applies to the social web and to what we’re building at Wanelo.

In part 2 of my FounderLY interview, I talk about what users think about Wanelo, the challenge of managing yourself as an entrepreneur, not giving up on your idea, deciding to be good at lots of stuff, minimalism and simplicity in design, dealing with failure, creating your future and creating conditions for success.

Matt Wise interviewed me for FounderLY.com. In Part 1 I talk about growing up in Siberia, looking for my passion in college (and not finding it), stumbling upon my first startup idea, launching my UX agency, and eventually starting Wanelo. I also cover why I’m excited about Wanelo and social shopping. 

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Storytelling for entrepreneurs

Last week I met with a friend who’s a founder of a pre-IPO company. Two things we discussed struck me as fascinating: 

(1) just like every other person (myself included) who’s obsessed with success, my friend, although insanely accomplished by most people’s standards, was comparing himself upwards. He was looking at companies that have achieved rare world-class success and feeling dissatisfied with his progress. What a familiar pattern! And how funny it is that it never ends for ambitious people as we continue finding ever-renewing sources of upward benchmarking that cause us to feel unsatisfied with our progress, while observers would consider us extremely successful.

(2) we chatted about the challenges of managing a post-IPO company, one of which is managing the public opinion that determines the price of your stock. Although I’m nowhere close to dealing with an IPO, this sounded shockingly familiar.  The logistics of an IPO or of managing a public company are very different from raising typical VC funding, the determining factors of success remain the same: you have to tell the story of your company in a compelling manner to get people to see the promising future of your company. If your story resonates, you win and people give you their money. If it doesn’t, your stock price drops. Facts play a role in this, but public opinion is really based on the non-factual factors, such as analysts making statements about your company.

What did this all mean? For one, I was reminded that happiness and fulfillment are not derived from external circumstances. Thinking that they are is an illusion and a trap. More on that in later posts.

The second point was a reminder that the game doesn’t change as you grow and evolve. Regardless of the stage of the company, your biggest job as an entrepreneur is to continuously create and manage the story of your company for the world. 

A critical point about storytelling is that stories are not fact or reality (yet). A story (a term I use very broadly) of a company usually focuses on creating the future to compel some sort of an action (investors giving you money, employees joining, etc.). The story starts as an idea (an imagined course of action) of a better future: a future where a particular problem is solved, your customer is delighted and the world is a happy place. 

This future doesn’t exist. There is no one in the world who can make a reliable judgement on the probability of your version of the future existing (everyone tries, naturally). Investors try to come up with good justifications for their decisions, but they are human like the rest of us and all they have to go on is their judgement (see http://www.bvp.com/portfolio/antiportfolio).

Storytelling is a risky proposition. The future hasn’t happend yet and your story is not reality. You could easily be wrong! You could even - gasp! - fail! It takes real courage and commitment to continuously create your story for yourself and for the rest of the world.

Where do you find the courage to cross the gap between current reality and your vision of the future? You find it in the realization that there is no absolute authority and no one person who knows how things will go. And if there are no guarantees of the future, all you have is your commitment. There’s a gap, and the only way to cross is to jump. 

Commitment is fascinating. True commitment is internally generated and is an acknowledgment of your ability to have agency (i.e. capacity to act), to be the source of experience and reality. It’s also the source of leadership. A leader is someone who commits to a vision and has the courage to put himself on the line for making his story a reality.

Most people want a definitive opinion on how the future will go because uncertainty is uncomfortable and it’s easier and safer to not be responsible for creating the future. Yet realizing that there are no authorities on the future and that nobody can tell you how things will go gives you power. Your power is in your courage to create, commit to, and share your story.

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Wanelo: The Big Picture

from buildwanelo.tumblr.com

We want Wanelo to become the next way people shop, a social Amazon, if you will. Same as it no longer makes sense that media would talk AT us (one way communication which is representative of old media) and we prefer Facebook and Twitter where we own the content, interact and do whatever we want with it, shopping will stop being one way (stores marketing at you) and will become a truly personal and social experience. Wanelo is to shopping, what Facebook and Twitter are to content.


Philosophically, we are looking to disrupt traditional commerce entirely. Retail is fragmented. There are many inefficiencies with too many middle layers (distributors, retail fronts, etc) and the lack of a direct connection between the designer/vendor/brand and the consumer. Technology should make it fully possible to connect buyers and sellers globally in a meaningful manner, so it’s just a question of who will nail a truly rich and meaningful experience first. We have a good shot at it. The general path is quite clear, and the main challenge is really around executing and building a strong enough team to do so.

Living at Peak Experience

I recently attended the Summit Series event near Lake Tahoe. The event had about 600 people, rich content around entrepreneurship, science, and art and music/dancing at night - a pretty solid mix. I had an amazing time, was inspired from the moment I got there and met the most incredible people. All throughout the event I was interested in understanding what makes this event work and what makes it different. This was my first Summit, and prior to the event I noticed that there was a lot of unusual excitement around it. I was wondering what al the hype was about and what the hell was I getting into.

Having attended, I get that everyone at the event was high on what is best described as “peak experience.” The event brings together ambitious, intelligent, and creative people who value experience above all. It creates an environment of trust and openness making it possible for people to connect, to imagine an incredible future, and to have fun. What I’m seeing is that everyone, myself included, is addicted to peak experience as a drug. It’s our favorite thing and we want to know how to get more of it. I believe that it’s possible to live a life at peak experience, and here’s my recipe. 


TELL A STORY ABOUT YOUR FUTURE

The first thing you’ll notice about the Summit Series is that everyone seems to be inspired. How does that happen? The organizers are hugely successful at creating an aspirational vision and story of the future around the event. Talks and presentations create a message that the attendees are amazing people who are up to big things and are fully able to create an incredible future for themselves. It’s a story of empowerment. 

This is probably the most important ingredient of the recipe. You have to be able to consciously and continuously create a compelling vision for where your life is headed and for what’s coming in the near and long-term future. You can think of it as a story of your future. Dreaming (and even better practical dreaming, or dreaming combined with commitment) is a critical skill. Our lives today are fully colored by what we think is possible for us in the future and our future plans. A simple example of this is scheduling a trip or a vacation  - once a trip is scheduled, you start experiencing excitement about it even though the actual experience is not going to take place until later. Keeping aspirational experiences in your future is key to being inspired today. 

Most people live their lives as if their future is predictable and has already happened. The reason for this is that we have a tendency to see our past as definitive. Things have gone a certain way for us in the past, and we naturally assume that this is how things will be. We let our past define what’s possible for us in the future. I’d like to assert that there’s a huge opportunity in seeing the future as independent (after all, it really hasn’t happened yet) and in that getting the opportunity to own or create it. It all starts with telling yourself a “story” about what you’d like to see happen in your future.


CREATE THE RIGHT CONDITIONS

Experiences occur in situations and conditions. For example, if most of your day is spent in a confined work cubicle, that is not a condition for peak experience. If you are not part of an active community that is after big things, you don’t have a condition for peak experience. Here are 3 things I’ve identified for myself that make it possible to have sustainable peak experience:
  • People
    • most great things in life come from being in touch with amazing people. People will surprise you, open new opportunities, result in mind-blowing conversations and experiences.
    • being in touch with incredible people who are up to big things is critical. Logistically, this probably means living in a location full of these people. It also means prioritizing and investing in having relationships as an ongoing effort. There’s no end to it, you’re simply creating a condition of always being in touch with amazing people.
  • Physical health and being in good shape
    • a condition for sustained energy, overall happiness, being up to physical challenges.
    • it’s also a condition for being attractive :)
  • Being up to big things
    • the most interesting people in the world are up to big things and they are interested in being in touch with other people who are also up to big things. So it’s circular: in order to be in touch with people who are up to big things, you have to be up to big things yourself. 
    • being up to big things results in big challenges. Challenges are a requirement for creativity (no challenge = no room for creativity) and for growth experiences.
There can be many more conditions, but the above is a good starting point for me.

BE EMOTIONAL

This last component is something I’m only recently becoming aware of. I thought it was fascinating that, unlike any such event I attended, the Summit opened with a beautiful dance performance accompanied by great music. Right away, this created an emotional charge to the event. I don’t really have a rationale for this, but I know that this works. By comparison to the Summit, I’ve been to events with similar other components: amazing people, great content, etc. But if the emotional connotation isn’t there, the event does not have the same power.  In creating a vision for yourself, or for others, being open to the emotional side of the story makes it possible to have a rich experience, as well as to develop a deep affiliation with the message.

Sustainable peak experience is possible and I have experienced it. It’s also the only life I’m willing to live.

Thanks to kristinatastic for reading this and giving me feedback (and also for being one of the awesomest people in my life)!

Startup founders should eat Paleo

A few months ago I switched to the Paleo diet. My main reason for doing so was curiosity and the fact that I kept coming across smart interesting people who had concluded that Paleo was the best thing for their health and energy. 

The basic idea of Paleo eating is that our bodies are adopted to eating what our cave ancestors ate 10k years ago and that agriculture is a relatively recent phenomenon that our bodies haven’t fully evolved to digest. Note that I don’t claim to know whether these claims are valid. I do like the idea of questioning the status quo diet, as well as relying on my own experience of eating this way.

So a quick summary of what you eat on Paleo: 

  • you cut out grains, beans, as well as most nuts
  • you reduce your carbs to about 25 grams per day
  • eat lots of fat and protein
  • cook with coconut oil, gee or lard, rather than vegetable oils
  • cut out all dairy except cheese and full-fat cream
  • vegetables are fine, as are potatoes (especially sweet potatoes or yams)

The reason for this post is that I was just getting ready to leave the house when I realized that I will not have time to eat a meal between 10am and 5:30pm. In the past this would have been a problem, but one of the effects of eating Paleo is that you can fairly easily go for hours with no eating or minimal food. Since you get your energy from slow-burning sources like fat and protein, you can fairly easily last for a while. (And, don’t worry, I will definitely snack.)

Overall, my experience with Paleo has been very positive. In the past, I ate all the time, I ate too much and thought about my weight. Since switching to Paleo, I feel a lot less dependent on food overall and my weight just feels very stable - none of those ups and downs that I used to experience in a single day of eating really occur any more. Energy-wise, I’ve found that I’m a lot less likely to feel tired after a meal and my energy seems not too dependent on food. 

Paleo guidelines have some gray areas, and it becomes a personal mix of choices that work for you. My tweaks include:

  • I eat a fairly large amount of very dark chocolate (it has lots of fat and not a ton of sugar).
  • I did not give up drinking as some would suggest :)  My drink of choice is vodka-soda (especially with potato-based vodka if it’s available) and occasionally wine.
  • I’ve found sweet potatoes to be very important for me on this diet. Without them I just don’t seem to get what I need from my meals. I eat them almost daily.

The best thing about Paleo is that you become a fat snob. You’ll find yourself going to a coffee shop and requesting full-fat whipping cream for your coffee. Trust me, that’s a request they don’t get often! It’s way more radical than asking for a double-soy-half-caf-moca-frappuccino-latte. Bacon and butter will become your best friends.

So why should startup founders eat Paleo? Because it seems to be the most sustainable diet for your energy and for going through an entire day without eating while meeting with investors, recruiting and running around :)

Oh, and here’s my favorite resource for learning about what real people do when eating Paleo: http://paleohacks.com/.

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The Cult of Done

My favorite part is that this was written in only 20 min! That’s just too great. 

via http://www.brepettis.com/blog/2009/3/3/the-cult-of-done-manifesto.html

I present to you a manifesto of done. This was written in collaboration with Kio Stark in 20 minutes because we only had 20 minutes to get it done.

The Cult of Done Manifesto

  1. There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
  2. Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
  3. There is no editing stage.
  4. Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it.
  5. Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.
  6. The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
  7. Once you’re done you can throw it away.
  8. Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done.
  9. People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
  10. Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
  11. Destruction is a variant of done.
  12. If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.
  13. Done is the engine of more.
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Favorite tip for contacting busy people

My favorite technique for contacting really busy people is to message them simultaneously via multiple mediums. For example, email and Twitter make a great combo. Linkedin is good re-enforcement as well.

The content of your messages doesn’t need to be the same, so you can send a core message by email and follow with unrelated reply on Twitter. They key is recognition via closely-spaced repetition as these people may be so busy that you literally have to earn their attention. 

Similarly, getting intros from 2-3 directions at once works magic and with some people is the only way you’ll get their attention. 

Have fun playing the game.

REALLY excited about my new apron! just got it because cooking with coconut oil was starting to ruin all of my clothes. (Taken with picplz.)

REALLY excited about my new apron! just got it because cooking with coconut oil was starting to ruin all of my clothes. (Taken with picplz.)