Building a Fashion Accessories Marketplace from London: Kiyan Foroughi, CEO of Boticca (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to 2010 when you were launching Boticca. Tell me more about how you got this off the ground. What did you launch with? What was the financing around it?

Kiyan Foroughi: I actually launched an alpha version of the website on my own. I’m not a technical guy so I had to work with an agency to develop a very basic alpha version of the website. We got it out there. There was about 30 designers on the platform at launch. Now we have close to 350 brands and designers. That was all out of my own funding. Once I got it out there and saw that it was starting to demonstrate some traction, albeit at a small scale, I recruited a co-founder. We both put money into the business to fund some early hires. The first outside investment that we did was a convertible note round. It was a fairly small round. It was around £250,000.

Sramana Mitra: The £250,000 was aside from you and your co-founder?

Kiyan Foroughi: Yes. My co-founder and I put £50,000 into the business to get it off the ground.

Sramana Mitra: Let me ask you a couple of questions there before we move on to the next batch of stuff. First and foremost, how did you meet your co-founder? How did you decide on the fact that this was going to be a co-founder?

Kiyan Foroughi: We knew each other from a few years back being in the same industry. She was at Excel Partners as an Associate in Europe. I was with TA Associates in private equity. We were in similar industries and we met through colleagues. From there, we struck a good friendship and started sharing ideas with each other. When I decided to launch Boticca, I actually reached out to her and told her about the idea. At first, she had already committed to go and do another startup in the Bay Area. Once I launched the site on my own, I just reached out to her again to see how she was doing. It turns out that what she wanted to do in the Bay Area fell apart. She was looking to get her teeth into something. I told her about Boticca. She loved the concept.

The reason why the partnership worked was because we had very different skill sets. Even though we were in the same industry at that time, we came from different backgrounds. I came from a pure business background. I had that personal heritage when it came to jewelry. She came from a technology background. She was at eBay in the early 2000s as a product manager. Ultimately, that’s how we split up the roles.

Sramana Mitra: She moved back to London then?

Kiyan Foroughi: Yes, she’s in London. She’s no longer with the business. She left last April. She decided that she wanted to move on to new opportunities after four years of Boticca. At that time, she came and moved back.

Sramana Mitra: Before you raised the convertible note financing, you had some traction. Can you elaborate on that? What kind of traction were you getting? How were you getting that? What was your customer acquisition strategy?

Kiyan Foroughi: We had no money at that time. The customer acquisition strategy was very organic. It was working with bloggers, social media, and a few press articles that got us off the ground.

Sramana Mitra: When you don’t have money , that is the time to really get traction. We’re constantly dealing with entrepreneurs at the very early stages. Typically, social media and guerilla PR are ways that people navigate that part of the journey. That syncs up with what we see here. There aren’t that many options at that point when you don’t have money.

Kiyan Foroughi: Yes, absolutely.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Building a Fashion Accessories Marketplace from London: Kiyan Foroughi, CEO of Boticca
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