TechCrunch TV interview (Nov 2012) with Polyvore co-founders Jess Lee and Pasha Sadhri about Polyvore, a style and social commerce platform where users create 'sets'—collages of real products. They report growth from ~11M to 19M monthly unique visitors (≈91% growth since January), note they are profitable and cash-flow positive, and describe revenue from affiliate transactions and brand/native advertising. The segment also covers the launch of Polyvore's first iPhone app.
Hi, you're watching TechCrunch TV. My name is Colleen Taylor. Here with me in the studio are the co founders of Polyvore, Jess Lee and Pasha Sadhri. Welcome to TechCrunch.
Thanks for having us.
And so, just to get started, for anyone who doesn't know already, you have an iPhone app to show off. But what is polyvore?
So Polyvore is a style and social commerce platform. We've got all these people all over the world who are really passionate about style, and they like to express their sense of style by putting together these collages that we call sets. So they mix and match real products from real online stores into these collages and then they share them with their friends and share them with the world. And you can go and browse and look through millions of different styles created.
By our community now. And as I mentioned, we have this iPhone app that I want to get into, but I also want to talk numbers a bit because I think the last time that we checked in with polyvore, we had some pretty impressive numbers then. It was something like 11 million monthly uniques. Can you tell me what's the update? How are things now?
So we've grown to 19 million unique visitors a month. That's about 91% up from January of this year. So we've been growing really fast. It's been great. We're also now cash flow positive in addition to being profitable, and that's sort of a change since the last time we talked.
So things are going really well. That is certainly a change because most startups out there right now are not cash flow positive or profitable, and a lot of them don't even make money. So how is Polyborn making all this money?
Well, despite our best efforts. So our revenue streams are affiliate revenue transactions that have always been there and that has been growing very nicely. We actually grew that faster than our traffic growth over the past year. And the other component is brand advertising. We work with brands who do branding campaigns, obviously on Polywar, around the fashions.
I see. So it's companies, they put their own products into Polyvore, sort of more branded in it, and then they pay to do that.
Yes, that's a typical campaign that we do. And the great thing about that is that it's a form of native advertising. Polyvore sets are composed of real world products. So if you actually think about them, they are a form of advertising that is community generated. And we think they're great because individual users are sharing them with their networks. We are extending that to a new device, right?
Because this is a launch. You've never had an iPhone app before. You.
