Back in 2009, Boston-based designer Ben Pieratt and Founder Collective partner Zach Klein founded Svpply, a slick-looking, stylish social shopping site that allowed people to follow the picks of friends and favorite brands. After raising a seed round from Spark Capital and pulling 37,000 downloads, the startup sold to eBay in 2012 for an undisclosed sum. Though the site’s been live since, eBay announced that it would be sunsetting the app for good two days ago.
And now, Pieratt is planning on building a radical, new and improved version of Svpply, called Very Goods, with the help of Kickstarter and a goal of $50,000. In the last two days, the campaign, which is based out of Brooklyn, has already raised nearly $15,000 from 279 backers.
Pieratt explains his reasoning for building an alternative to his first company on the crowdfunding page: “If you supernova Svpply onto thousands of hard drives, you lose what made it wonderful: a strong community with really really great taste. We didn't want that to just disappear without at least offering an alternative.”
Things will be different this time around, however. Pieratt wrote that the company is prioritizing sustainability above scale. In other words, no VC funding and no selling of the startup. “We will not end up right back where we started. We actually almost called the new site ‘Not For Sale,’” reads the Kickstarter.
Pieratt promises that there won’t be any dead product links either. Basically, it will be a whole new site, but Svpply users will be able to transfer over their current, lengthy data profiles in full.
But there’s a catch. Once the Kickstarter is over, the only way people will be able to join Very Goods before its official launch in 2016 is to have donated to the campaign or been invited by someone who has. (Perhaps that, in part, explains why the campaign already has 279 backers.)
And there’s one other big difference, too: Pieratt won’t be CEO.
Is this a stubborn co-founder post-acquisition who is pissed at the parent company for shutting down the service? Or a passionate entrepreneur dedicated to giving the people what they want? At this point in time, I’d say it’s probably the latter. Svpply seems to have a loyal user base, with more than 70,000 stores and brands and 1.1 million products on the site, with 3,000 new products added daily. (BostInno reached out to Pieratt for a statement, but he was unavailable.)
It’s too early to tell, however, what new leadership will mean for Very Goods, and who that leadership will be (though he does mention he will be working with developer shop Fictive Kin.) Under Pieratt’s guidance, Svpply raised modest seed round of $550,000 from Spark Capital, Founder Collective and other notable angels, like Ron Conway, Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley, and former MySpace President Jason Hirschhorn.
Take a look at Pieratt’s Kickstarter video, and let us know what you think in the comments below.
Image via Svpply
