Like.com and the niche market approach

A new product has been launched using the same technology that was being used to power image search engine Riya. The news is everywhere.

What I like most about Like is that being a shopping comparison site they are targetting a specific target, Women and pursuing a market worth of $15-$30B. Instead of going all the way.

They are following a purple cow strategy and decided to build something truly different and used technology to get [us] there.

Munjal Shah (CEO and Co-Founder) has been writting a couple of articles on the development and launch of Like. On Episode 15 he explains what his business is all about:

Riya 2.0 would help most in hard to describe items for which searching inside photos was most important. Objects that had this property tended to be soft goods like clothing, jewelry, handbags, shoes, home and garden, etc. Looking at Hitwise we realized that while there were $15-$30B worth of these items sold on the Web, almost 65% of the buyers for these items were women.

He explains what he learned from his research on what women are doing online:

we learned about how truly technology savvy women aged 25-30 were and from People Magazine we learned just how popular dressing like celebrities was for the mass consumer market. However I learned the most from the bloggers.

Ahd he shows what the blog fashion business is:

Lesley Scott from fashiontribes, Julie Fredrickson (and her very smart partner Philip Leif Bjerknes) from Coutorture, and Michelle Madhok from She Finds. All three had been building their online magazines and had seen their blogs take off. All three where experts in fashion and style.
[...]
Their audience was just starting to transition from email lists like Daily Candy. All three had experimented with various revenue models, had done great SEO work, and were building traffic month on month. They seemed aggressive and driven. I could relate to them as a fellow entrepreneur. In the 45 minutes we spent together, I learned so much from them and I realized just how little I knew about the world of fashion.

He concludes his post with a smart remark on what it takes: The key to being successful is to learn as much about how you customer thinks as possible… even if you are the wrong gender

Developing Like for a specific audience with a clearly defined market allows the strategy to be much more focused and the problems to be much smaller and thus easier to solve.

Update: Scoble give us much more details here like the $100.000 paid for the domain and the 250 servers needed just for the current setup. Plus some videos too.

November 8, 2006 | Tags: business

comments

7 Responses to “Like.com and the niche market approach”

Robert Scoble on November 8th, 2006

I have a couple of videos with Riya (an interview with Riya’s CEO and a demo video) over at http://www.scobleshow.com — linked to from my blog at http://scobleizer.com/2006/11/08/riya-reborn-is-really-cool-way-to-search/
Sérgio Rebelo on November 8th, 2006

Yes, the concept is very interesting and the site is visually very appealing, but I’m not trully satisfied with Riya’s visual search. They still have to improve it.
Andre on November 8th, 2006

Thanks Robert. Great follow up with lots of information.
See you back at LIFT.
Andre on November 8th, 2006

I agree Sérgio. Still a lot of tunning to do but nevertheless great product.
salgadation on November 9th, 2006

I don´t know if the target women isn´t pursuing “all the way”.
Paul Pruitt on November 12th, 2006

Check http://www.imgseek.net/ for an opensource desktop application with content based image search and its server side version: http://server.imgseek.net/ (may be interesting for those that want to integrate visual search into their website or application)
j.brown on October 26th, 2007

i really enjoy like.com. useful site