I have been one of the lead developers at a local startup, Sparehanger, for the past few years. We are a non-profit organization that enables users to build virtual wardrobes and share their style with friends, family, or the world. All surplus revenue was to go to charity, and we had hoped to create a charitable organization called the “Spare Two Project,” encouraging people to volunteer two hours a month for the good of the community.<p>We have a vision that people seem to love, women in particular, and a mostly working product, but we recently exhausted all of our funds and have to close shop. We made a few mistakes in the beginning not capturing a small userbase with an MVP early, which hit us hard building without solid user feedback and the poor numbers didn&#x27;t help with finding investors. We have scrapers to continually harvest new apparel from across the web and have affiliate programs active to generate revenue if there were active users. For now, we have decided to cease development but keep the site live.<p>Our CEO, Peter Hubbs, is one of the most kind and commendable people I have met, and I don&#x27;t want to see him completely down and out with nothing but experience and lessons learned if there are any options we have yet to consider. So HN, I ask: do we actually have a solid idea? Is Sparehanger good enough to capture users? If so, how do we capture users with no capital? If not, is Sparehanger even worth the cost of keeping live?  And what should we do now?<p>Thanks in advance for any advice you may have.<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sparehanger.com&#x2F;<p>http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lsureveille.com&#x2F;daily&#x2F;lsu-graduate-creates-interactive-fashion-website&#x2F;article_46dfa3be-7b57-11e4-811c-3313a5c10fa6.html
Ask HN: Has our startup failed, and what now?