@chuck_petty I love it. The mechanics of automatically ordering are a bit intimidating, but it's something we've been thinking about for a few use cases. Maybe one day :)
Well done. I notice that I have to have a specific shoe in mind, and know its name, if I want to get past the landing page. What was the thinking behind that choice?
@stuartcornuelle Hey Stuart! Thanks for checking us out.
The reason we focused on runners that knew exactly what shoe they wanted for beta was because that was the problem we initially set out to solve. Just for context: I'm a somewhat picky runner when it comes to shoes and I had been running in the Mizuno Wave Inspire 9's for years. All of a sudden, they went out of stock in pretty much every retail store in Boston in my size. That was the lightbulb moment of "Hey, these shoes actually probably exist somewhere in the country in my size and finding them really is a technology problem". We heard similar stories from other dedicated runners and so we felt like focusing on this specific segment of hardcore athletes would be a good test of whether what we're building adds enough value to exist in the world.
The word is still out but we've been getting some great traction. Now the question becomes, how do we broaden our product to accommodate those folks who are looking to find a shoe that works or switch to a new shoe!
@stuartcornuelle Imran already answered this, but I'll add that I think we wanted to focus on doing one use case really well first. We're not quite done, there's some data quality issues to work out. But we have planned since the beginning to do a feature set tailored for people who don't know what shoe they want yet. Perhaps that's directing them to their friendly local running shoe specialty store, or perhaps that's showing them the various features of different models, or perhaps it's just letting people browse the inventory, or maybe some combination of all three... not quite sure yet. But I think we'll be working on this over the next few months.
We also have plans to include suggested purchases. For instance, if we're saving you on average $30 per pair, maybe that's an opportunity to provide a thoughtful recommendation around some $30 running shorts or other accessories that you might need.
Right now, we also aren't very helpful to runners who don't know what specific shoe model they are looking for. We're already exploring ways to help runners find the shoes that work for them in addition to helping runners who have a shoe find other similar models that work for them :)
Thanks for the feedback! Would love to hear if you have any other ideas or questions :)
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