Try It Out Tuesday: Hukkster’s Meteoric Rise
Life with a corporate discount is fun. It’s cushy. At least that’s how it was for Katie Finnegan and Erica Bell, who worked in pricing and promotions at J. Crew. But in late 2011, they had a problem: having moved onto other jobs, they had to confront the holiday shopping season without it. That meant shopping like “normal” consumers, relying on the onslaught of promotional emails sent to their inboxes every day. Or at least, trying to rely on them.
“We’d get to our inboxes at the end of the day, and they were overloaded to the point that we were just forced to delete everything,” Bell recently said, “knowing very well that there was a lot of relevant content that we weren’t accessing.”
In those moments of shopping frustration, Bell and Finnegan wished for a simple solution. All they wanted was a tool that could tell them when the item they wanted — and only the item they wanted — went on sale. And with that nugget of an idea, Hukkster was born.
Hukkster — the name is adapted from the term huckster, or peddler — is a website that does the heavy lifting of price tracking for consumers. A shopper tells Hukkster that she wants a pink sweater from Ann Taylor, and it emails her when that sweater is on sale. Not when sweaters from Bennetton are on sale, or when Ann Taylor scarves are on sale, but the specific pink sweater that was originally selected.
“This is your modern-day peddler, huckster looking out for you, capturing relevant deals,” said Bell. “We don’t just ping you every time the price of the item moves. If you hukked an item and you want it for 25 percent off, and Bloomingdales is running the whole store at 25 percent off, we’ll let you know. Any way to get you [to the desired discount], we’ll keep track of.”
By May of 2012 — just five months after Finnegan and Bell first thought of the idea — Hukkster was available in beta to a select audience, and by October 2012 it had publicly launched to an audience of 6,000. Now, just six months later, that audience has multiplied tenfold, to over 60,000 users.
“I’d be lying if I said this was a planned, methodical, strategic decision,” Finnegan said of Hukkster’s timeline. She and Bell had originally considered staying in their day jobs part-time while the site got off the ground. Instead, due to enthusiasm from Hukkster’s earliest users, they quit just weeks before the private beta began. “[Starting a business] will never be how you planned it,” she said. “Had we actually stuck to our guns, there’s no way we’d be where we are today.”
Where they are today includes an office at Winklevoss Capital, after earning a $750,000 investment from Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss in November of last year. The Winklevosses (or “Winklevii,” as they were jokingly coined in the 2010 film “The Social Network”) famously sued Mark Zuckerberg for the rights to Facebook. Now, with winnings from their settlement, they are investing in promising Internet start-ups – including Hukkster.
Beginners luck? Hardly. Finnegan and Bell owe much of their success to having taken a calculated look at a landscape they knew extraordinarily well — shopping — and aiming to solve a specific problem. This is a strategy they’d recommend to all budding start-up companies.
“The one thing I think is really important for new entrepreneurs is to really understand the problem you’re solving. Transform a space that you yourself are familiar with or are an expert in,” Bell said. “Our skill set is merchandising, [and] honestly we are the target demo; we are avid online shoppers. That makes it so much easier to make sure you’re building a website… that will resonate.”
