Curtain falls … on the AskAnna stage

Here it is, after 3 years of AskAnna, AskAnna no more.

After 3 years as co-founder of AskAnna with Vincent Deloffre, working to bring digital innovation to the world of fashion and retail, we decided to end our adventure and take what we learned in a new chapter of our professional lives.

It has been a very exciting 3 years full of reward and joy but also full of doubts and failures, many mistakes and a lot of learnings.

Here is a very brief synthesis of my learnings and perspective over the last 3 years.

Let’s build an app

We started from an idea of sharing fashion advice as means for fostering social interaction around apparel choice, that idea grew into AskAnna becoming a top Apple Store and Android Store app with over 200K registered users. This was a success.

How do you make money ?

We built an app without having given enough importance to its financial viability and sustainability, this was a mistake. A mistake that was to carry us into a very delicate position. My learning from here is that a business (in a sustainable financial sense) is only as good as its capacity for making a buck. There is a lot of debate and unicorn chasing on this topic in the startup world, as far as my experience goes, a healthy business model makes you sleep at night, the lack thereof makes you (and your investors)… stay awake, and sleep is not overrated. In hindsight we should have spent more time building a business model on top of a behavioral trend. Lesson no 1.

If this was the main strategic learning of our app phase, there were many more operating mistakes that I wish I could have avoided sooner, I’m listing a few of them here briefly as I see them now.

1. Focus on resources not on features.
   Building an app (the technical part of it) is not a game, is not easy and for the most part is not intuitive. There are 2 ways of doing it, (A) you, as a founder, know or learn how to do it (B) you get the professional resources to do it with you. In our case, we decided on doing most of the work ourselves and I took on the role of the “product guy”. Without any previous knowledge in the field and a lot of faulty intuition this proved to be a very long uphill battle of constant on-the-job learning and mistake making. My key insight here is that as a co-founder and CEO, your job is for the product to work and be shipped, that does not always mean you have to be the one doing it all. I focused a lot on features and then “ran” behind the development to make sure they happened (and they did not always happen right). In hindsight I should have invested in ressources of experience in product management from the kick off and be wise enough to listen to them :).
2. Be humble (yeah, there it is, I heard it before too, but hey — you learn it the hard way).
   The reality of being a startup founder is that YOU ARE THE BOSS OF NO ONE. Your client/user is your boss, your investors and associates are your boss and your collaborators/team are also your boss. And wherever the proverbial s*** hits the fan, the only fault is yours. Whenever you deny that reality you are bound to go wrong. One example for me was not taking user feedback in a granular enough manner. User feedback is very hard. It makes you doubt yourself, your intuition and your capacity to deliver. Not listening to it tho, is a straight path to … the fan. My key learning here is that it’s important to be humble enough to listen to the hard remarks, the ones that make you be WRONG. Because it’s always better to be wrong and know it than stay stupid for a long time. Make a point of finding out where you’re wrong in your intuition.
3. Think small
   When it comes to building a product, there are really a lot of things that you can do wrong. And the reality of the fact is that the more things you do at a given time, the higher the chance that you do something very wrong (ie: develop the wrong feature, address the wrong client, sell the wrong value prop etc.). The issue is that with ambitious, first time, founders like I was there is a huge overconfidence bias in setting the scope of ones work (and hence the focus of the teams). Yes I had read all the Agile development paperwork — and still ended up over-biting on our initial product iterations. My learning here is that intuition can only take you so far when building a new product (and sometimes in the wrong direction), in hindsight I should have been more selective in the features that we built soon in the product. We could have done better on both development money employment and delivery quality had we done so. So, think small, deliver like a rockstar, small BITES.

At a certain point after reaching around 150K registered users we really came to terms with the fact that a B2C focused app without a monetization capacity was not going to fly. Thanks Christophe Courtin here for driving the point home, we could probably have spent another 3 months fighting it.

We need to make money, what now?

At that point we looked for a strategic acquirer that could monetize the B2C community better than we did. This came in the form of Jalou Media Group, the editors of Jalouse magazine and l’Officiel magazine series. We were lucky to meet Benjamin the CEO of JMG who saw in AskAnna a potential for diversifying the channels reaching the audience of its magazines (mainly print back then). So a deal was struck and AskAnna became AskJalouse.

This move helped us from a B2C product with no monetization to developing a B2B focused product that could (in theory) make bank.

I’m going to make the business case thinking here in short. Our key insight from our B2C adventure was that “qualitative” feedback in the form of comments increase conversion rates. In other words when someone asks “what do you think of this “___” (insert -> dress, shirt, glasses etc.) and a coherent qualitative advice is provided within less than 90 seconds, the probability of purchase increases by almost 30% on average.

Based on this we tried to develop a product that could bring that advice (and conversion rate increase) close enough to the purchasing act, and track it. We evaluated several options online/offline, comments vs binary reply etc. In the end we found that the lower hanging fruit was for us to help offline apparel retailers provide customer advice to their clients in the fitting rooms, via an AskAnna powered solution. The economics work out as follows, in an average apparel retail point of sale, 60% to 80% of revenues are generated by traffic from the dressing rooms (which represents no more than 20% of total traffic). Average dressing rooms convert half their traffic, if you improve the conversion rate on dressing room traffic by say 10%, you have a high impact on the overall revenues of the point of sale.

Illustration of in-store trafic funel

To top it, we saw that retail point of sales foot trafic was going down (thanks Amazon) and that as a response physical retailers were cutting costs on, most of all, in-store staff. This created a vicious circle of less, traffic, less service, less conversions. We built AskAnna to be the solution to break that circle by providing additional service even without increasing in-store staff needs. At this point we were very excited about the business case. So much so that before rolling out we did not factor in the industry’s ridiculously long adoption curves (and hence sales cycles), the relatively low (and decreasing) margins that our to-be clients are making, the overall concentration of the market (less than 75 potential clients in France overall) and the difficulty of building user behavior in a space that is highly regulated by a third party (the store).

This led us into 2 years of market evangelization and product development that were both very tough and an amazing learning experience. We got to work with 5 of the largest apparel retailers in France who trusted us to deploy our solution and take over their in-store customer interaction. Incrementally we went from a very rough approach with little data and a lot of promises to a data driven machine that on top providing an increase in conversion rates provided a window into in-store customer behavior and preference. The key learning I take from here is that when doing B2B sales, DATA IS KING. It is very difficult to convince organizations, if the arguments are not objectively strong, convincing complex organizations becomes mission impossible. Get the data, show the data, repeat until sold.

After 2 years of B2B activity, our initial oversight into market size, market dynamics and customer behavior turned out to be… well fatal. In December of 2017 we took the time to analyse our business “a froid”. There were 3 reasons that les us to close down our B2B activities and de-facto AskAnna.

1. Length of sales cycles in a relatively small market. Our sales cycles from initial contact to development (+40 stores equipped) were above 14 months.
2. Slim margins. We were making less than 20% gross margins as a consequence of our platform model used to crowd source advice from our over 100 professional stylists (humans not robots).
3. Low likelihood of improving any of the two above within a 2–5 year time frame (low industry innovation appetite and budgets, replacing stylists with robots is still a long way away technically speaking).

We could not have gone so far and learned so much without…

I’m taking advantage of this last section to mention the people who believed in us and supported our project from the start.

Our investors and financial backers!!

Vincent and I were very lucky to be supported by Michel de Guilhermier and Juan Hernandez of Day One Entrepreneurs & Partners together with Céline Lippi and Francesco Maio of Fashion Capital Partners. They invested in us when we came with nothing more than an idea and some (not beautiful) powerpoint slides. They supported us both financially and with advice through our entrepreneurial labyrinth.

We were fortunate to have met Guillaume and Pierre Antoine who joined ranks very early on and brought their expertise and benevolence on board, together with their capital.

I was lucky to be able to count on the support of my friend Alexandre Miauton who invested his personal capital, his time and a lot of emotion into AskAnna very early on. He brought us lessons that have been very precious in all from product development to team management. Many thanks for your support Alex.

As I write this article, with a positive regard on our AskAnna experience, not a small part of that is due to it having allowed both Vincent and I to meet Christophe Courtin. He invested in us as much financially as humanly and helped/challenged both Vincent and I to grow in ways we probably would not have done otherwise. I’m happy that regardless of a less than favorable turnout of AskAnna we had the opportunity to work with you and I’m happy for all the many other entrepreneurs that are fortunate enough to have your backing.

M6 through Valery Gerfaud, Charles Edouard Monier and Julien Smadja, was also a very helpful partner that allowed us to accelerate our B2C growth when we had to and was also flexible enough to help us reinforce our technical resources when needed by making use of their own internal staff. Thank you for your support.

I am lucky and we were lucky as a team to be able to count on the support of Vlad Gheorghiu, my twin brother, who took time off from his MBA to bring about his very valuable advice to AskAnna. We would not have seen as clearly and as soon without your help.

As many of my fellow entrepreneurs in France today we were lucky to be able to count on the backing of BPI and more particularly very lucky to have the backing of Société Générale via Vanessa Osdoit who took the time to understand our business, its opportunity and risks very early on.

This said, still we owe most of what we’ve done to our team and collaborators that worked days (and sometimes nights) to help get AskAnna out there. Thank you Marion Lesaigle, Haithem Ben Hamouda, Erwan Mason, Frederic Deloffre, Arielle Valdelievre, Héloise Baton, Dominique Kelo, Pauline Borgogno, Charlyne Urbaniak, Andrea Brigandi, Peter Jafferdeen, Marius Constantin. I hope I get to work with you again in the future.

Moving forward

As one chapter closes, another opens. If there is one lesson more that AskAnna brought to Vincent and I as is shed its last light is that time is never lost and that an entrepreneurial experience is highly valued on the job market today.

Vincent has taken over as Head of Sales with Hyvency, an ultra high growth startup. On my end, I will be joining Mckinsey & Company as senior consultant, bringing onboard my learnings in the startup world to help solve problems for the bigger folks (that were once the startups of their day :)).

See you soon. Tudor

Using the first photo I could find from 2015 of the AskAnna founders and our first collaborator (from left to right — Vincent Deloffre — co-founder and Head of Sales, Marion Lesaigle — Community Manager , Tudor Gheorgiu — co-founder and CEO)