#52 - Making Physical Retail as Easy as Opening an Online Store - Ali Kriegsman and Alana Branston of Bulletin

**Craig Cannon** (0:00)
Hey, how's it going, this is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinator's podcast. Today's episode is with Ali Kriegsman and Alana Branston. They're the founders of Bulletin, which is a platform that allows brands to share the cost of a physical store. They currently have two locations, one in Soho and the other in Williamsburg, and there are more coming.
So Ali and Alana went through the YC Fellowship program, and then they later went through the Winter 2017 batch of YC. We ended up meeting up in New York to talk about what they're working on. All right, here we go.
There were a bunch of questions about you guys kind of like pre-YC, and I think maybe the easiest way to do this is like flow through from there. So like before you guys were in YC, and then Fellowship, and then Core, and then now. So going all the way back, Phil Thomas asked, what did you learn from the Fellowship and that you applied during the main YC Core program?

**Alana Branston** (0:53)
Yeah, I think so we did the Fellowship in winter of 2016 when Kevin Hale was running it.
And so I think for us, YC Fellowship was all about like figuring out product market fit, and like figuring out what we were, because we didn't know.
When we got in, we were basically, the concept was this like cooler curated Etsy. So everything was online.
We would find these cool emerging brands, sell their product online, and like have like a content element to it. And so it wasn't really working. We had like some brands selling with us, but there was like clear problems. And so I feel like Fellowship for us was about like acknowledging that like this wasn't working. Yeah. And like really Kevin, actually Kevin, like really Kevin's good for that. Yeah, he really is. Yeah. So acknowledging that wasn't working. And then it's almost kind of gave us permission to just totally tear that down and try a million other things. I think before we kind of got into YC, just got into that whole mentality, we were like, this is our company, and this is what we're doing, and we're gonna just keep doing this until it works. And I feel like Kevin and the program in general basically allowed us to be like, okay, this isn't working, let's try literally 15 other concepts and get something with some momentum and go with that. And so I feel like we basically used, I think it was two months, that program, and we just ran experiments every week. So we're like, okay, what if we, and most of them were ridiculous.

**Craig Cannon** (2:20)
What was the worst one?

**Ali Kriegsman** (2:21)
Okay. There are so many bad ones. The worst one was Kevin.
So we were selling all of this beautiful dishware. It was all handmade, like emerging brands on our site. And Kevin was like, why don't you go to restaurants and see if they need help designing their stores and if they need a programmatic interior design solution or a way to replenish forks and knives and stuff. So we spent the entire day, the two of us, bopping around to different Brooklyn restaurants and being like, how do you find your mugs?

**Alana Branston** (3:03)
And this is a business where they have razor thin margins. We're like, what do you think about if everything was handmade and way more expensive and probably breaks more often? And they were like, no, we would never use this.

**Ali Kriegsman** (3:14)
Yeah, and we also knew nothing about the restaurant industry. And there are programs that some guy pulled out his phone and was like, here's an app where I can order 800 limes on demand if I need it. This has been figured out already. And we're like, okay, thanks, bye.
So that was definitely the worst one and the funniest one.

**Craig Cannon** (3:39)
Funny. And then so by the time you started working on your product as it is now, that was before YC Core, right? That's what you applied with.

**Ali Kriegsman** (3:47)
Well, there was a whole chunk of time after YC Fellowship where we had realized that this editorial magazine model wasn't working.
We, in the spirit of YC, asked our users, so we asked all of the brands that sold on our platform what they wanted. And it turned out that they actually needed more help selling offline than they did selling online. So they weren't really looking for another multi-vendor online marketplace or another Etsy or anything of that nature. A lot of them made boatloads of money doing craft fairs and selling in retail environments or doing pop-ups or markets. And so what we did was we listened to that and we said, okay, what if we basically just started doing this as many times as we can? As frequently as we can, as inexpensively as we can, just to see if there's a there there.