Simplify and organize your shopping
Do you find yourself shopping online frequently, but being overwhelmed by the amount of email overload from shopping sites? San Francisco-based and women run startup, Hipiti, is your answer. Hipiti gathers e-mails from over 150 national stores like J. Crew and Bloomingdales. You pick your favorites and these listings are then put into your personal dashboard with the stores latest offers.
Hipiti is free and can save you time and money and is even able to predict sales using 1.5 years of sale discount data.
Learn more about how Hipiti began and how it can help you from Co-Founder Rama Katkar.
What inspired you to start your company?
After several years of fulfilling careers in corporate America in retail consulting and investing, Kristin and I felt ready to take the leap and jump into a more entrepreneurial career. As longtime (compulsive) online shoppers, tackling an online shopping problem seemed like a promising venture because we could see opportunities from both the consumer and the retailer perspective.
Tell us something unique about you and your co-founder.
Kristin and I met in business school at Stanford where we became friends on the first day of classes! While we did return to more traditional careers right after school, we made a sort of informal pact that we would one day start a company together. Since then, we've had lots of ideas, but it wasn't until we starting investigating the market for Hipiti that we felt ready to take the risk. Many startups are devised and created in a dorm room - our eventual partnership started in one, but it wasn't until a few years later that the idea for Hipiti came about.
Tell us about your product or service.
Hipiti aims to be the launch point for your shopping habit, wherever you are. Hipiti solves the problem of information overload from retailers. We help streamline your inbox by collecting and organizing all of your shopping information so you can feel at ease unsubscribing from your many flash sale and retailer emails. We're building features to help you shop more intelligently by rating offers and predicting future sales.
What problem does your product or service solve?
As committed online shoppers, we find the email overload from following multiple shopping sites to be exasperating. To alleviate inbox clutter, Hipiti gathers emails from over 150 national stores and curates a personal dashboard showing stores' latest offers. You can also get one daily Hipiti email listing these sales, so you can feel good about ignoring the rest in your inbox. It’s free and will hopefully save you both time and money!
In addition, Hipiti has accumulated about 1.5 years of sale discount and depth data from over 150 retailers and flash sales to build a sale predictive and ranking model. We're just starting to test ways to show consumers this valuable data - we hope that it will help our customers know when to shop and make better shopping decisions.
What are your startup's three biggest challenges to growth?
Our biggest challenges are all around resources! We have a ton of great features and ideas that we're eager to test with our customers, but there are only so many women-hours in the week. Similarly, we're fortunate to have a great product and development resources, but we're always on the lookout for more talent in these areas to accelerate Hipiti's development. And, as a cash-constrained, small company, we have to be pretty cautious with our limited resources.
How has the Startup America Partnership helped you overcome these challenges to growth?
Startup America offers many mentorship opportunities and events that allow us to meet other founders and experts. By relying on mentors & advisers expertise, we have saved ourselves a lot of time & have a better idea of where to focus our resources. Startup America also offers many deals for its members. They have relationships with vendors across a variety of industries (everything from accounting & finance to travel, software & legal). These deals allow us to get more done with less, which is a great perk for us.
What Startup America Member Benefits have you used?
Events, learning library & deals!
Why should startups join Startup America?
It is a great platform to meet other entrepreneurs in your area and nationwide. They offer mentorship and advisor opportunities that can really help you accelerate growth.
What is the startup culture like in your City/State?
We're based in San Francisco, CA. Since this is one the centers of startup activity in America, it's been a very exciting time to work and live here. There's a lot of support for intellectual curiosity, problem-solving and innovation here that helps startups thrive. We'd love to see that support system spread to other parts of the country. That is one of the reasons we think Startup America is such an important organization.
We are an organization founded (and run) by 2 women. In addition, we're building a product for-women-by-women, and we hope to see more examples of that in the future.
Learn more and connect with Hipiti here:
www.hipiti.com | facebook.com/hipiti | @hipiti
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