A million shoes to fill: a profile of ChickAdvisor

By Trevor Stafford on September 25, 2006 - Comments (View)
From doctors to espadrilles (sandals, guys) ChickAdvisor helps women share reviews and tips on local services and trends. Red Canary sat down with co-founders Ali and Alex de Bold to talk about their recent launch.

Read co-founder Ali de Bold’s “blog“on Red Canary

How long have you been working on ChickAdvisor?
ALI: I guess we started about a year and a half ago. Alex and I just got married last year. We started building it slowly over the fall and this spring we really ramped it up.

Where did the kernel of ChickAdvisor originate?
ALI: I moved from Winnipeg to Toronto and thought it was very difficult to find a good hair salon or good dentist or a number of things. I spent time searching (online) and found that there wasn’t really anything out there [locally] for Toronto.

I spent all summer researching to see if there were websites that served up local product and service reviews and found that there was nothing for women that did everything that we have rolled into chickadvisor. We realized that there was a gap.

"I think Alex discovered how expensive it is to be a woman…haircuts, clothes, dry cleaning – everything for women is more expensive.” – Ali de Bold

ALEX:...it costs $50 or $60 dollars for shampoo…including all of the bottles that we have crammed underneath our sink in the bathroom.

What are your backgrounds?
ALEX: I started in web 1.0, I launched a company called ProfessorJones that sold textbooks over the Internet. I spent four years doing that, and eventually morphed the company into an integrated media platform. We had launched a magazine across the country, created a student portal, a magazine on 20 campuses and distributed 250,000 CD-ROMs.

Unbeknownst to me, Ali was working for ProfessorJones while at the University of Manitoba. (Ed. They later met serendipitously when Alex moved a friend into an apartment that Ali shared. The fact that Ali was indirectly employed by Alex wasn’t discovered until later.)

I spent four years at Labatt, then started working with startups again.
(Ed. Alex has contributed to Albert Lai’s photo-sharing startup Bubbleshare.)

ALI: I was professional insurance adjuster for four years.

That sounds…awful
ALI: I hated it passionately and I’m a firm believer in doing what you love, so when Alex and I started dating I quit and went back to school.

Tell me about the organization, what are your roles at ChickAdvisor?
ALEX: I build a framework, she fills it in.
ALI: I wrote the ChickAdvisor manual and I write the (on-site) articles and copy

"Last week MSNBC came out and said iVillage is going to be their growth engine and they’re going to use social networking and grow it to $1 billion in revenue. That’s a massive validation for the ChickAdvisor model.” – Alex de Bold

When did you launch?
ALEX: September 2. We feel like we’re in the right place at the right time. We’ve been using websites like iVillage as our proxy.

So you just jumped into this?
ALEX We started with a focus group before we did anything. We asked what girls wanted, then we did another focus group [before launch] and that’s how we came up with the flying search keywords.
ALI: Everything from ‘what kind of categories do you want to see?’ To, ‘what kind of things do you want advice on?’. Our direction has changed based on what our focus groups have said.

Will ChickAdvisor be national? How does your model work?
ALEX: We allow women to submit reviews for products and services across North Amercia. For now we have ChickAdvisor Everywhere and Toronto and we’ve already recruited city editors for four other cities.
ALI: we’re going to do one city at a time

Like a Craigslist approach? You’ll roll out Specific URLs?
ALI: Yes.

Tell me more about your model
ALEX: Our model is based on building something useful for women. If you look at any magazine you’ll see it’s a one-way conversation talking women. Traditional Media doesn’t engage women in a meaningful conversation. Products are a shared experience.

"At a local level when a woman says “your skin looks fantastic”, or “your hair looks great” or “where’d you get those shoes”, that’s the conversation that we’re trying to capture.” – Alex de Bold

If our site can be pivot point for that conversation & discovery of products and services that work for women then maybe they might just buy it through our site.

I’m sure that changes according to locality
ALEX: That’s been the bane of our existence in terms of database design…the east coast is more conservative than the west coast. How do you show the equivalent of a big ranking between different cities versus a local ranking?

How are you getting the word out?
ALEX: Organically. Through word of mouth, contests and partnerships
ALI: We’re going to be holding promotions to get people to give reviews. We’ve been getting good reviews through Mashable and had a good review from a TechCrunch analyst recently.
ALEX: If women like it, they’ll spread the word.

What’s coming up for ChickAdvisor?
ALEX: Our primary objective is get the word out and then listen to what women have to say about the site before we touch any more code. We just launched discussion groups, and people can now bookmark individual items as their reviews and integrate it into their blogs. We have a lot of things up our sleeve but we want to make sure we have a solid foundation.