Wanelo

» see wanelo.co as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

women in the us used wanelo. that was not my crowd. i was in ankara doing engineering work in the same window and social shopping was not a category i looked at on my phone. still, the pitch was clean enough that even the techmeme skim caught it. wanelo was the want-need-love acronym stitched together, and the app itself was mostly a feed of products people had saved from stores across the web. for whatever reason it was one of the cleaner ideas of the pre-instagram-shop era.

deena varshavskaya, the founder, was russian-born, came up through the columbia journalism school route, quit a product manager job to build the first version. first round put in seed money in 2012, sequoia led a series a in 2013 at around a hundred million dollar valuation. by august '14 there were roughly eleven million users, mostly young women in the us. no ads on the site, monetization was pure affiliate.

the app kept looking like the future of e-commerce until it did not. instagram added a shop tab. pinterest, which was already the closest neighbor, kept eating the same use case. by the time the wanelo team was doing later funding conversations, the answer from every reviewer was some version of "why do i need a separate app for this". look, the honest answer was: you did not.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

in 2013 wanelo did the growth that made blog headlines. more than a million products saved a day, teenage girls treating the app like a mall directory, product pages that outranked the actual store urls on google image results (for some reason the seo just happened to work). the affiliate revenue was real. at that scale even sub-percent conversion pays hosting and payroll.

the office was in soma, one of the harder-to-notice bits of the 2013 social-app bubble. the pitch inside was that wanelo would be the shopping graph the way facebook was the social graph. by then, that framing sat well with sequoia and it sat well with the press. really though, the shopping graph turned out to belong to whichever feed you were already scrolling.

~ the unraveling ~

by 2016 the growth curve had flattened. pinterest had a bigger catalog and a search bar people already used to plan weddings. instagram was quietly shipping shoppable posts inside the same tab where people watched cooking videos. varshavskaya stepped back from ceo duties around 2018. the company raised no meaningful new money after 2015.

the app kept running for another two years on cash flow and reduced headcount. no press release announced anything. really though, sometime around october 2020 the domain stopped resolving and the app store listings went dark. it was more of a shutter than a shutdown, no farewell page, no timestamp, just a quiet exit from the app stores.

~ what it left ~

the model wanelo pitched, save products from any store into one social feed, is now the default behavior of every large consumer app. tiktok has a shop tab. instagram has shopping. pinterest is arguably wanelo grown up with more search. for whatever reason, none of them credit the earlier startups. either way, the affiliate-only monetization idea aged better than the standalone-app idea did.

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