By Lauren Keyson
Tara Hunt, CEO of Buyosphere, created a sort of Quora for shopping where users can ask for specific items like a red tie and get targeted, affordable choices sent back to them. She worked at 30 startups before she started her own, which launched in November of 2011 and already has seed funding from Real Ventures.
What problem did you solve with Buyosphere?
The plethora of choice online – for me, I don’t know where to begin and this gets me in contact with people who know how to find what I am looking for. It saves me time and money.
How did you come up with the idea?
It was a personal point of pain – I went to look for a black skirt online, and I got something like five million results for black skirts and I was just overwhelmed. So I wanted to set out to solve this issue for other people as well as myself.
What did Real Ventures like about your startup?
It’s a practical way to solve a common problem. It’s easily monetizable too, because it’s in the ecommerce space.
How did you start out?
By launching a previous version that was barking up the wrong tree – we launched a version where we were trying to mine data from people’s taste profiles. But we realized what a big undertaking that was and how long it would take to actually solve the issue by using data – because data is so messy online. So then we thought, ‘Why aren’t we using the power of people’s brains instead of trying to figure out this data thing.’
