For last few months my co-founders and I have been working on Dabble - a chrome extension + app that lets you clip products from any furniture store and design your home with them. This is actually a pivot. Before Dabble we were building a 3D scanning SDK for mobile, but decided to step back from the SDK for a bit and build Dabble. (I can get into why we pivoted if anyone’s interested).
About Dabble -
Furniture visualization isn’t a new thing. Most vendors have AR apps these days. But no one really uses them because they’re always limited to their own products and using AR on your phone is just painful for longer than a few minutes. We wanted to build something that was simple, web-based, and worked across all vendors, even smaller local stores. We were inspired by 2D design tools like Canva because there's nothing more cross-platform than a JPEG.
That’s how we came to build Dabble. Basically, Dabble is like Canva for Interior Design. It lets you clip products from anywhere online and saves them to your wishlist (like Pinterest), but it automatically crops and removes the background on furniture and offers a simple 2D canvas with some room design features like wall colors, flooring so you can mockup your room design.
Beyond this, we’re building some A.I. assisted tools to help people design a good looking room regardless of skill level. For example,
1. A.I. background removal
2. Auto sizing of items in the canvas
3. Auto layering so you don’t have to click “send to back, send to front etc.”
We’re also going to start letting people design on top of their room photos by auto detecting the floor and wall in any photo and turning it into a sort of “enhanced canvas”. What’s unique about this is that there’s a bunch of 3D room design apps but they’re really clunky and not user friendly, mostly due to the 3D interface. We want to eventually get to the 3D design part, but as a starting point we decided to decouple the layout from the aesthetics and just build a great visual design tool. Then we’ll gradually start adding 3D elements to it.
As of now we’re trying to figure out our strategy. Should we focus on consumers and build a design + shopping app (larger scale but infrequent usage), or should we focus on professional designers? (maybe smaller market but more regular usage). The upside to building a consumer app is really high, but furniture as a category isn’t the best suited to building a repeat usage cycle into a consumer app (unless there’s something I’m missing here).
Would love to hear thoughts/ feedback on this. Thank you.
About Dabble - Furniture visualization isn’t a new thing. Most vendors have AR apps these days. But no one really uses them because they’re always limited to their own products and using AR on your phone is just painful for longer than a few minutes. We wanted to build something that was simple, web-based, and worked across all vendors, even smaller local stores. We were inspired by 2D design tools like Canva because there's nothing more cross-platform than a JPEG.
That’s how we came to build Dabble. Basically, Dabble is like Canva for Interior Design. It lets you clip products from anywhere online and saves them to your wishlist (like Pinterest), but it automatically crops and removes the background on furniture and offers a simple 2D canvas with some room design features like wall colors, flooring so you can mockup your room design.
Beyond this, we’re building some A.I. assisted tools to help people design a good looking room regardless of skill level. For example, 1. A.I. background removal 2. Auto sizing of items in the canvas 3. Auto layering so you don’t have to click “send to back, send to front etc.”
We’re also going to start letting people design on top of their room photos by auto detecting the floor and wall in any photo and turning it into a sort of “enhanced canvas”. What’s unique about this is that there’s a bunch of 3D room design apps but they’re really clunky and not user friendly, mostly due to the 3D interface. We want to eventually get to the 3D design part, but as a starting point we decided to decouple the layout from the aesthetics and just build a great visual design tool. Then we’ll gradually start adding 3D elements to it.
As of now we’re trying to figure out our strategy. Should we focus on consumers and build a design + shopping app (larger scale but infrequent usage), or should we focus on professional designers? (maybe smaller market but more regular usage). The upside to building a consumer app is really high, but furniture as a category isn’t the best suited to building a repeat usage cycle into a consumer app (unless there’s something I’m missing here).
Would love to hear thoughts/ feedback on this. Thank you.