I have been studying the “entertainment” of shopping for five years now. At Electric Sheep, we focused on the virtual side, studying places like Second Life, Stardoll, and Polyvore, and advising large brands and ad agencies on the topic. We embedded ourselves within the vibrant Second Life design and fashion community. We designed and built many virtual entertainment experiences. For …
The hackNY summer intern program, in our words
Hilary asked what participation in the hackNY‘s 2010 internship program meant to us at Aprizi. Here is what Liz and I sent her. We cannot stress enough how important the program is for the nascent NYC startup ecosystem, so I wanted to share these words publicly: Aprizi was honored to take part in the 2010 hackNY internship program. Our intern, …
The “anything” job (and our new product)
Big company people are used to delegation, resources at their disposal, and the benefit of a strong brand name. As startup people, we have none of that. Our job description is “whatever it takes.” Like most founders, I wear a lot of hats at Aprizi. While I had been creating the product mockups in Balsamiq and Photoshop, I had not …
Post-mortem on a UI “input” screen
Today I am working on some UI/UX changes to our product, and thought I would quickly talk through a UI example (soon to die under my axe) from our beta. Some context: in the spirit of getting a beta up as quickly as possible, our first user experience (FUE) was pretty crude. After registration (also soon to disappear), the first …
Into the Deep End: Notes from Julie, our HackNY intern
This is a guest post from Julie Dinerman, the Columbia University student interning with Aprizi as part of the HackNY program, which paired area students with startups. I think HackNY’s organizers Hilary, Chris and Evan are creating something very important to the NY startup ecosystem, and we are really pleased to be among a great list of startups to get …
Our Customer Development Journey, Part 4 (8 thoughts from our MVP beta)
Aprizi has been in open beta for six weeks now. These last six weeks have been an intense blur, a fire hose of information, and going open beta was the best possible thing we could have done. We are making some fairly big near-term changes because of this process. Here are 8 thoughts on the latest phase of our customer …
Monday Musings and The New York Times
Aprizi appeared in The New York Times today, in an article on privacy and innovation for consumers. In my quote, I tried to emphasize that this is about an honorable agreement with the customer, not some kind of bait and switch. There is a new wave of startups where everything is above-board and totally opt-in. As a consumer myself, I …
Our Customer Development Journey, part 3
Aprizi is about to enter that crucial phase of open beta, so I wanted to pause and write down the latest installment in our customer development journey (part 1 and 2). For anyone new to the blog, Aprizi is building a personalization engine for online shopping — a Pandora for e-commerce, if you will. My thesis is that the intersection …
Advertising & eCommerce: Respecting the Consumer
A few entrepreneurs have written lately about the blurring of ecommerce and advertising (albeit advertising that is about driving a sale rather than building brand affinity). I agree; Aprizi’s attempt to build a “Pandora for online shopping” shares some traits with ad targeting efforts because in the end we’re all trying to improve relevance. I want to highlight a key …
Investors & Customers – sometimes there’s an early stage disconnect
peHub just wrote an article titled “VCs love Blippy, but do users?” Some of you correctly guessed that Blippy was the company I was referring to when I wrote, “Don’t let another startup throw you off your game”. And it’s true, there are a lot of VCs really excited about that company. Aprizi, Blippy, Bynamite, Swipely and a number of …