Munjal Shah is the founder of Like. He is also the CEO & Co-Founder at Riya, Inc. and was the President and CEO at Andale Inc., now owned by Ebay. Visit his blog here and his linkedin profile here.

With the current state of the Web 2.0 market, what recommendations would you give to future entrepreneurs to build a successful startup?

Follow your passion. Make sure you work on something people will find mentally useful but more importantly have a great technology and business model. Most importantly, having a great technology will give you the competitive advantage and differentiating factor.

Like.com’s technology advantage is the ability to search by picture (visual search) rather than text. Where does like.com help you the most is by describing items that are aesthetically hard to describe by text.

What were some challenges you faced while starting and developing Like?

The two major obstacles we faced with the development, was the complexity of the project and usability. Because our visual search engine requires an extensive use of Artificial Intelligence (AI), just getting it to work posed a major challenge. On the note of usability, it was developing a user-friendly search-engine based on visuals rather than text.

At the moment, Like seems to be focusing on women, do you have plans to extend your offering to other audiences like men?

Possibly. We focus on women because they are the most likely group to benefit from a service "like" Like.com. Nonetheless, Like.com does also offer shoes and watches for men.

Taking into account the age-old problem of people not wanting to shop online because they are unable to “try it on,” or similar problems relating to item return, etc. is Like doing anything to mitigate this issue?

Established retailers such as Macy’s have what is known as soft-goods (eg. Clothing, accessories) free return policies. On this note, statistically and financially speaking, $3 billion worth of shoes, $9 billion of clothing, and $4 billion of jewelry are sold annually online and so we at Like.com do not see a problem with online shopping.