I have always been a blogger, writing content on entrepreneurship, PR, and branding for the past 7 years and I landed an internship at the South African Broadcasting Corporation which is the public broadcaster in South Africa and provides 19 radio stations as well as six television broadcasts to the general public. It is one of the largest of South Africa’s state-owned enterprises.
My job entails creating content for Corporate Communication & PR and covering events for their radio and TV brands.
Prior to founding this startup, I lacked technical skills and I went out to recruit a technical team and this was via, cold DMs on Linkedin, Twitter, and Instagram — after about 8 months of talking to dozens of software engineers, coders, and programmers, I was able to found two computer science graduate’s and fell in love with the vision.
I have been full-time since January 2021 working on this idea and startup.
What is the real problem your startup is solving?
I call it, “The size problem faced by many online fashion consumers/shoppers.”
Why are you the right person to solve this problem?
I have always been passionate about entrepreneurship — my journey started when I was 21, and I started reading books about successful entrepreneurs, Fortune 500 companies, founder’s biographies, company culture, the Silicon Valley startup ecosystem and I truly believe if you want to change the world; go the entrepreneurship way.
I am passionate, focused, and convicted that entrepreneurship is my calling.
Describe your idea or company in a couple of sentences.
uDraperShop is a fashion e-commerce marketplace platform that allows users to visually fit in and customize apparel from various brand merchants and fashion designers.
Your Company Name is registered as?
UDRAPER TECHNOLOGIES PTY LTD
How do you know that people need what you are building?
Have you talked with experts or potential customers? Gotten traction from an MVP? Faced this problem personally?
Currently, we are at an early idea stage as the startup — it’s just a hypothesis, and we have done our research, the overview of the problem and have seen, mostly through social media complaints, and reviews made by online fashion shoppers in terms of the size problem -mostly the apparel they order online, vs what they get is two different things.
I myself personally have seen this problem, whereby my then-girlfriend ordered a skirt (dress) and when it arrived it was oversized and different from what she had seen online. And moreover, they are faced with the return problem.
We have also talked with online shoppers — and the survey showed that 9 out of 10 faced the size problem when it comes to shopping online for clothing.
So the problem faced by online fashion shoppers is:
The Size Problem
The Delivery Problem
The Return Problem
It frustrates you to order with your hard-earned money, waits for weeks, and only find out, that what got delivered is oversized or too tight and does not aline with your size and measurements.
If we can solve the size problem, we will change the fashion e-commerce shopping experience in a gigantic way and have endless market opportunities.
How have you built your product? Or, how are you planning to build it?
We are definitely in the planning of building it, at least an MVP, and trying to, acquire customers, and find product-market-fit — there’s a lot to work on. Now I see us at an ideation stage or phase.
And you have to keep in mind that coming from South Africa and Africa as a whole, capital it’s the most difficult thing to acquire or get especially when you don’t even come from money and a network of friends, or family money. — we are underrepresented. It’s not like in Silicon Valley — here in Africa we don’t have that culture — it’s challenging to get into those VCs and angels networks.
However, as a founder or entrepreneur; you don’t give up, and since I was able to build the founding team, two technical and one in communications and marketing — I am currently in the works of finding a pre-seed capital and have made a list of about 300 angel investors from abroad, to send the pitch deck to, and try to get a meeting with them.
How are you acquiring users or customers? Or, how do you plan to get users or customers?
Since our Startup is a platform — an aggregator marketplace, we plan on first approaching and building relationships with fashion designers and brand merchants who are already selling merch, and that on its own will trigger the network effect.
Here in South Africa, we have one of the biggest podcasters in the urban culture and they are selling merch to their listeners — and we have YouTubers who are selling merch and Instagram influencers — so the goal is to approach them for testing our hypothesis, by them opening their stores on the platform — then it will get us, users — and trigger that network and data flywheel effect.
Please share any other relevant details around the progress you have made so far with your idea(s) or company that you haven’t yet mentioned.
I have worked on and honed the idea — our business plan is not the same as the first one, same as it goes with our pitch deck, and also, I was able to create our business model canvas on the concept board.
Just to show articulate our hypothesis, that was through the nine business model components, which is outlining our customer segments, value propositions, channels, customer relationships, revenue streams, key partners, and cost structure. — which helped us see and understand how disruptive our platform could be.
I believe that it’s the business model that defines sustainability and the ability of startups to scale — and ours looks clear that the business model is disruptive.
How much capital has been invested in your company or idea to date? Please specify if you have multiple capital sources — e.g. friends & family, angels, bootstrapping, institutional, grants, etc.
We haven’t spent much — since my background is not from money, my mother is a domestic worker, and also my team does not come from money. And my last work was an internship at SABC, so I didn’t have savings.
I laugh when I think of it — currently, I just spend R202.33 for the domain hosting and professional emails, and one of the co-founders, pays R100 for our business bank account to be active.
So that’s R302.33 per month from our personal pockets and it’s $19,17 in US dollars. Included, is the R175 {$11,06} I spent on registering the company.
The reason I laugh is that, to think an estimate of what we need in pre-seed capital is around 400 000 thousand dollars {R6 320 420,00} for the startup to get off the ground and capture first the South African fashion e-commerce market, which is valued at R18 billion {1 billion US dollars}
So the idea or startup valuation I estimate at $11 411 100,00 only for the SA market, which is a 1.8 billion rands valuation. So, the investment or pre-seed needed will be $400 000 at an $11.4 million dollar valuation {R1.8 billion}
Globally calculations by the fashion e-commerce market cap I would say the idea or startup is estimated at a 7.5 billion dollar valuation. I don’t know hey, maybe I am reaching! talk about big dreams hmmm — but we are the future, cause I haven’t talked about the global and custom-made fashion e-commerce market cap.
How did you come up with that valuation?
Lol, that’s the calculation of a 1 percent market share of both South Africa and the global fashion e-commerce market cap.
Geez, imagine when our platform has captured just 1% of the global fashion e-commerce market share and that would mean $7.5 billion circulations within our marketplace — that is the value we would have created for our users, mainly fashion designers, brand merchants, art creators, and our key partners.
The key start by solving the size problem, which is by developing a cloud-based app/web platform for both consumers and creators; actually, a state-of-the-art fashion e-commerce marketplace platform that is driven by 3D modeling, AI and augmented reality. That would save people’s time, create a marketplace for fashion creators, have the ability to sell anywhere in the world, and, moreover engage directly with fashion online consumers in real-time.
We want people when they come into our site, to feel like they are in a shopping mall — can walk through different clothing stores, choose their desired or interesting fashion items, and virtual fit in those items in augmented reality and really see how the apparel will look on them and also have the ability to customize in their own artistic feel, that is; while they are in the comfort of their homes or anywhere in the world. That’s the value we want to create — and I can tell you this is a billion-dollar-worth idea.
What specifically do you hope or expect assistance on in order to your achieve goals?
As I said pre-seed funding — that’s my objective at the moment, is to find an angel investor or investors, who will see the potential in this idea, hence I made the 300 angel investor list. I hope to find one, with a good rapport, and understanding of the frustrations of founders, who have built startups before and can connect us with an incredible network of talents, and other founders.
And also mentorship, but it has to come with money — we see this time and time again. Education is too much in the startup ecosystem, but finding that person who is able to write that check is difficult.
Pitch Deck below
Comments