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Startup Name: Fabulyst
Tagline: Be Fabulous, Be Exclusive
Founders: Komal Prajapathi, Vikas Jethnani, Raj Parakh and Vishal Chitravanshi
Year of Founding: April 2016
Funding Status: Seed Funding
Online shopping is tedious task, especially for women who wants to purchase clothing or fashion accessories. There are 100s of websites and millions of products in it, you never know which suits you the best unless you wear it. And none of the sites provide you personalized search, for e.g. If you have thin leg and narrow shoulders which dress suits you well? Can you filter only clothes which can fit this requirement in e-commerce sites? NO.
So what can you do?
Download Fabulyst. Fabulyst is an AI-based personal stylist for women to make their online shopping experience more personalized and simpler. Till date, personal stylists were available only for celebrities or people who can afford them, but this startup wants to make personal stylists available for each women.
How Fabulyst Works?
Fabulyst has tied up with 30+ e-commerce players to handpick the best product for you. Fabulyst is powered by patent-pending technology which uses advanced machine learning technology to create a virtual stylist.
- You start with signing up where you create your profile. Fabulyst understands your style statement, aspirations, body concerns and what you want to shop for.
- Fabulyst then scouts entire internet to generate to-the-point recommendations that work for you: complement your style, accentuate your personality and address your body concerns.
- After signup, you get recommendations along with stylist’s take for you. Also get your personal stylist on Chat.
About Fabulyst
Fabulyst was co-founded by Komal Prajapathi, Vikas Jethnani, Raj Parakh and Vishal Chitravanshi with the vision to make finding the right clothing/accessories from millions of products online simpler and personalized. Prior to Fabulyst, Komal, Vikas and Vishal co-founded startup named Doctl which they exited to start Fabulyst.
- Komal is founder and CEO at Fabulyst, Other than the 5 years of core development experience at Microsoft, Komal has founded a non-profit healthcare organization – dlpmcs.org.
- Vikas is Co-founder and CTO at Fabulyst, he has wide range of experience with technology giants like Adobe and Microsoft, he holds expertise in web search technologies and data science.
- Vishal is CXO at Fabulyst, he has co-founded two startups as a CTO and has 7 years of industry experience with giants such as Microsoft and Cisco, he is also an expert in agile and lean methodology.
- Raj is Co-founder and CPO at Fabulyst, prior to Fabulyst, he co-founded Lakecity Tutors and successfully converted it into a self-sustaining business, co-founded Magisters an innovative advertising medium aimed at reducing the cost of stationary. He also has 3 years of experience working as a Business Analyst with multinationals like Accenture and Cognizant and as Assistant Manager with Reliance Jio Infocom Ltd.
The founders have done innovative strategy to test and validate the product idea,
- They set up stall in Shoppers stops to understand how users interact with stylists/salesman before purchasing product. They interacted with around 500 customers, gave recommendations and got around 90% of conversion.
- Before creating MVP, they used WhatsApp to test the product. They created an individual group with users and gave recommendations based on users need.
- They created user focus group to interact with users and identify the pain point of users which purchasing online and created the product based on the feedbacks. On each stage of MVP, they interacted with users to create app based on user’s feedbacks.
Komal shares, they had gradual iterative growth so far, the app was launched in April 2016. They have around 1000 downloads, and out of which 10% are daily active users and 10% purchase on a monthly basis. He says they want to create most sophisticated app for users, focus on one thing and do it right, then expand aggressively.
The biggest challenge they faced was to create a perfect app, they have a very focused set of users (Women who shop online) and create a technology which will have a personal touch and give recommendations based on users need. They want to create an app which answers natural questions of users. Their user focus group played huge role in shaping the product right, they incentivized their focus group to participate in giving feedbacks to develop the app actively.
In upcoming few months, they want to focus on creating a product which gives value to users and then conquer 100k customers down the line. Currently, Fabulyst’s main source of income is from affiliate marketing with e-commerce players. In future, they are planning to have Brand partnership to promote the branded products to users and also bring premium service of interacting in-person with stylist over an app.
Fabulyst do face competitions from startups like isytleyou, but Komal feels their AI based tool is far most advanced comparing to their competitor’s operation of manual suggestions from stylists and it can help them scale faster to outpace the competition.
Fabulyst has raised Seed Funding and they are looking to raise another $300k. Komal says,
2016 has seen a slowdown in funding, only startups with right business model gets fund and they get right amount of fund. When you are up for raising fund, make sure you have done a proper execution plan. Talk to users, create MVP, play in the market then go to raise funds.”
He shares that at Fabulyst, they created users focus group to validate MVP, so they know how many users engaged, how many users left, how many users made purchase, what’s the user acquisition cost; so it helped them in better planning. They got a clear idea on how much money they need to acquire how much customers, this made their plan and strategies easy.
He shares his biggest learning from his entrepreneurial journey is to be aggressive. You may not have all the resource to execute the plan, but you have to be smart enough to figure out a way to overcome it and deliver value to customers. He advises young newbie entrepreneurs that,
Think in terms of creating value to the customers, talk to a lot of people, understand their pain points, get feedbacks by creating MVP. Talk to as many as users possible to validate the idea, at least 30% of users should get excited about your idea. Finally, deliver value.”
The article was first published in The Cofounder. The Cofounder is India’s first print magazine which writes about early stage startups and entrepreneurship.
