I want to share with you the story of TiZKKA, a great app by a team I have been mentoring for some months now. TiZKKA is being launched in Mexico and other Spanish-speaking countries in Latin America this week. Before continue reading you should download it to your iPhone here so you can see what I’m talking about (a version for android will be ready soon).

TiZKKA wants to be your personal stylist. The app lets you connect with stylist and fashion experts that could provide real time feedback on your fashion choices. This is being done with a social network feeling, so you can share looks with your followers and review, like and comment on the looks of the people you follow.

TiZKKA was created and founded by Gabriel Roizner and Nathan Schorr, both young Uruguayan entrepreneurs and both serial entrepreneurs.

They saw that despite the huge interest in fashion, there was no practical ways of creating a back and forth communication between users and stylists and fashion experts. Also, people were using some general social networks like instagram to share their fashion looks and request feedback from others. Instagram clearly wasn’t designed and optimized for that usage providing then a regular user experience.

Gabriel and Nathan decided that Brazil should be their starting market and called the app Roupologia (science of clothing in Portuguese). Roupologia was launched in beta in March 2014 only in Portuguese and slowly stylists and users came onboard in Brazil. The first months were used to improve the user experience and iron out bugs. The company was run in a bootstrapping mode and most of the user acquisition was organic (which means that almost no money was spent on marketing).

The first breakthroughs came in August this year, when Roupologia had its official launch. Then different fashion and style websites and fashion bloggers wrote notes saying that Roupologia was “a must have app for fashion lovers”. New users registrations grew by 20x in a few days and then stabilized on a 4x rate compared to before the launch. Roupologia made it to the number one spot on the lifestyle ranking of the App Store in Brazil for several days, above apps like Tinder or MercadoLibre.

Encouraged by this, the entrepreneurs and their advisors, including me, saw a global opportunity. Quickly the app was modified to localize to any country and English and Spanish versions were introduced (other languages could follow in the near term). The team decided to look for a more universal name, easier to pronounce and write, and TiZKKA was selected.

As of today, TiZKKA has more than 330 stylists – fashion bloggers, personal stylists, image consultants, makeup artists, hairstylists, and fashion designers – onboard and has created a loyal base of more than 25k users of which 50% use it recurrently every month. Weekly user growth is at 7%. Since the launch in August, users have had more than 200k sessions viewing more than 6 million looks!

And if you wonder about monetization, brands are actively calling the team interested in partnering and promoting their products on TiZKKA. The team believes that with the new fully global version released this week that growth could explode. They know fashion lovers are everywhere, and today they do not have a comparable app.

I think this a great story so far and a great example of the global view that Latam and emerging markets digital entrepreneurs should have. In this case, very driven and smart entrepreneurs with a great idea decided from the begging to tackle a 200 million people market – Brazil – rather than start in their less than 4 million people market – Uruguay. When in less than six months they got market validation in Brazil that users loved their app, they decided to think globally and started preparing the product accordingly. They are focusing on a Spanish-speaking Latam launch this week but other regions will follow.

I hope you enjoy TiZKKA and become a recurrent user. It is an amazing product! Download TiZKKA here.

Do not hesitate to contact the TiZKKA team (or me) if you are a stylist, fashion blogger or brand that want to be on the app. Interested investors with fashion experience are also welcome.