Toronto entrepreneur Katherine Hague has been involved with startups since she was a teenager. Last year, she designed a theme for the celebrated Ottawa online retail startup
Shopify, and then wanted to sell some T-shirts of her own in a Shopify store.
"I realized it would look pretty silly in a storefront, with just one product," she says. The cost, hassle and time involved in setting up an online shop for a single product—in order to achieve the level of professionalism she wanted to project—convinced her she needed an alternative. Looking around at the options for ultra-small-scale vendors, mostly eBay and Craigslist, convinced her she'd need to create that alternative.
Shoplocket was born.
"We wanted to make it as easy for people who had something they wanted to sell as it is to post a video or a photo," she says. "The challenge for us was knowing what to leave out, so it would be optimized for the majority of users who need the service." Those users include people who don't want to learn any code or to design and maintain a storefront. They just need a way to sell things that looks professional and is easy and quick.
Working out of the
Extreme Startups accelerator at Yonge and King, Hague and her partner Andrew Louis officially
launched Shoplocket in open beta late last month. Hague says they have attracted 4,000 users in those few weeks, and have hired a Canadian manager and brought on two co-op students. Hague expects Shoplocket will close a funding round sometime this summer.
Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Katherine Hague, CEO, Shoplocket