Like.com Live with GA now

Like.com 1.0 GA

It is finally out.  You can see it here.   This new release is the culmination of 1 year of tweaking, hard work, and learning from our entire team.  I sure it won’t be perfect but am still so proud of it and our team.

The parallelism of my personal and professional life right now is uncanny.  As I write this post I am on Sofia (my new 7 day old daughter) duty tonight.  She is just the cutest thing – I love her so much that I don’t even mind that fact that I’ve had to change her diaper several times in the last hour and gotten poop on my shirt already once.  I guess for love you’ll suffer through anything.
This new site represents our key strategy for the year.  Focus, focus and more focus.  We launched Like.com in Nov 2006 and immediately lots of folks asked us if we were going to follow with generalized visual search, with visual search for dating (which we know doesn’t work), or with visual search for stock photography sites.

We decided instead to keep focused on shopping.  In fact we didn’t just focus on shopping we focused on just on soft goods (clothing, shoes, handbags, jewelry, etc – things that are largely aesthetic and hence hard to linguistically describe – perfect places for visual search as they are places were text search falls down).  Finally, we didn’t just focus on soft goods we picked 2 categories of products and just focused on creating the best user experience possible and the best business possible in those areas. 
I remember the first time I did a startup I was afraid to focus this narrowly because it might mean that we became a niche and my visions of grandeur would not emerge.  Now I realize that you first have to be really really good at one thing to ever be great at many.  2007 was all about focusing on one thing for Like.com

This release embodies much of that learning:

New UI: It contains a whole new UI designed by Pedro our UI designer, an outside consultant, and Jacquie.   Jacquie has been screaming for a year that our site looks like Walmart from a fashion sense when instead it needs to look like Macy’s or Bloomingdales.  The nerds amongst us were a little slow to understand this, but eventually we realized they were right.  They chose a design direction where the product (being sold) is king and where the rest of the UI fades into the background.  They chose purple – a risky color and dark tones because that is what most luxury sites do.  Jacquie calls it the Like.com makeover from Ugly Betty to … well… you decide.

The 2nd change in this release is the focus on detailed features that really matter in shopping for soft goods.  We now let you choose the material type for many items in the left drill downs (try it in shoes).   Very few shopping comparison engines let you do this.  They let you choose megapixles for digital cameras but have not done this level for work for soft goods.  Tanvir and our new expanded feed team made this possible.

Third Baris, Navneet, & Diem used our visual and linguistic artificial intelligence technology to create a new set of style clusters.  We are the first shopping engine to have these.  You will see these on the top left.  They analyze your search results and visually group items into styles and let you select the style of shirt you are looking for.  This is a great feature that shows off the Like.com “beauty and the geek strategy”.  Jacquie developed the style ontology and Baris, Navneet, and Diem worked to analyze text and images to determine which style each item fell into.

Fourth, we are adding lots of new niche merchants. Not all of these are live right now but over the next few months we will bring many of them online.  One of the people who has just blown me out of the water over the last year is Mehul Nariyawala.  He has turned out to be one of best hires we made in 2007.  In fact, if you remember he found us and said he would work for free, we didn’t hire him.  Now he our Dir of Merchant Operations and is just driving things forward at a rate we have not seen before.  Together with Wil, Calvin, and Tanvir, Mehul has become someone I trust implicitly and someone whose leadership skills I wish I could replicate.  I love his sense of ambition and risk taking.  He is truly a rockstar.  Combined with Jillian our new rockin merchant sales person (she literally has called hundreds of new merchants in just 6 weeks) and several great new partnerships with feed aggregators, we have gotten a whole host of new merchants on the site.  Again we focused on building out the categories even deeper instead of broader.

Fifth, we have the first color search that really works.  Color search reinvented if you will.  Yes everyone else lets you choose the color of the item from a color wheel only to realize it doesn’t exist in that nuanced shade of purple.  Like.com is the first to only show you the color swatches of the colors available.  This is the brain child of Jacquie and Baris and implemented by Robert, Diem, and Eric Lee.  Try it and let us know.

Sixth, we now cross-merchandise matching shoes for a number of clothing items.  I think it is fair to say this area is in alpha (the matching is not that fashionable yet).  However, we are the first site to automatically show you the “visually” matching shoes.  It is a simple feature we plan to expand more.  A recent addition to our team is Marissa Goodman.  Marissa was a clothing designer for Old Navy, Gymboree, and Espirt for years.  We are literally creating a whole cross-merchandising algorithm based upon her expertise.

Seventh, we have updated out core relevancy and visual algorithm and will make even more changes later.  Ahmet, Baris, Navneet, Xioafan, Diem, Jacquie, and now Marissa have been working to make more and more fashionable items come to the top and hence help folks find what they are looking for, and to make the visual search better.  Our visual signatures are now 10x larger (hold more information about the item) that when we first launched a year ago.   I won’t go into specifics here but we are very excited about the possibilities.

Eighth, we have redone our visual search results in formatting based upon user feedback and more importantly just in-lined the results.  I don’t remember who came up with this idea but we realized that why should people need to click the visual search button.   Why not just show them a few right here in the results.  This seems like a simple feature but the back end server requirements were significant.  We are now firing off hundreds of extra similarity searches per second.  Dan, Diem, and many others worked days on the right technical solution.  Like.com was already the fastest visual search engine in live product, now it is even faster to allow us to inline the results.

Nineth, our business is all about testing and we buy traffic from Google and others so we need to make sure it converts.  With this release we will have a brand new multi-variate A/B testing system.  We have learned so much by just rolling it out to 50% of the audience and seeing if out performed.  Our world class SEM team of Ph.Ds have figured out how to grow our business, but I won’t go into that either, except to say that Vikas, Danny, Achal, and Sam are so scary smart – sometimes I wonder if I am the dumbest guy in the room.

Tenth, we realized that there are lots of features that matter so much in soft goods that we had to do them right.  We let you show only what is on sale.  We dynamically generate price ranges so you can only see items in the range you want.  We let you only see items with free shipping.  This is critical in buying these items as they don’t fit much of the time, we tell you which merchants have return free shipping for the same reason – almost no comparison shopping engines show you this.

Finally, we added lots of merchandising.  Search is great once you know what you are looking for but we realized lots of folks wanted more guidance.  You will see this in the menu items and in the category pages when you click on an item in the menu drop downs.

Thanks to the entire Like.com team …  for helping us to grow in 2007, for setting us up to do well over $10MM in revenue in 2008, and for taking this site out of Beta and into GA.  As always my special thanks to the two professional pillars of my life without whom there is no company here (just a dream) – Azhar Khan an Burak Gokturk.

I’m sure the next few days will be rocky as not release it perfect, but for things you love a little poop is worth it… ;-).

Comments

[Andrew laffoon]

Congrats, Munjal! The new site looks great!

[Nathan Snell]

Congratulations on the new version launch :)

"but I won’t go into that either, except to say that Vikas, Danny, Achal, and Sam are so scary smart – sometimes I wonder if I am the dumbest guy in the room."

I think that's a very telling quote of a person's confidence and ability to assemble a team that is smarter than himself (or herself). Look forward to seeing what you all do in 2008.

[Munjal Shah]

Thanks for the words of support guys.

[Luke Pat]

Munjal, I have been reading loads about your website for a few months now and I must say things are coming along really well. I looked at the website recently and it seems a lot of the likeness searches are much more accurate. Keep up the good work and I wish you the best of LUCK.

[Tyler]

Hey Munjal, just stumbling onto your blog having watched Like.com fairly regularly over the last year. The new look is GREAT. The Walmart - Bloomingdales thing is spot on and you guys really delivered. I'm very impressed. 10MM in revenue too? Congrats!

Looking forward to lots more from Like.com.

[Glendon]

Hi Munjal, having watched like for a while now I have to say I am seriously impressed with the version you have up w. Deserve the financial success that comes with unique innovation. More power to those that tweaked the look and feel of the site aesthetically it's bang on.

I would really like to make contact with you or your business development director but am finding that contacting you by phone or email is impossible to achieve ( does this make me the new dumbest guy in the roon :) ) Would appreciate it if you could point me in the right direction concerning a contact point. Cheers, Glendon

[RC Roeder]

I however would be nice to be able to search by size for shoes.

[sheila kiser]

I had no idea Aldens was still in buis. I have a 1957 fall and winter cat. its great!

[RC Roeder]

Great site...almost...you can shop by every possible means but...size..size does count.

[JoJami Tyler]

Just found your site, when I saw your ad. It is great! Congradulations...we will be blogging about it!

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[A. Lukehart]

I agree that search by size for shoes is nice -- and while you're at it, please remember that shoe size includes WIDTH!!!

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