Why I invested in Rebagg

This week I completed an investment in Rebagg – a company based out of New York that buys and resells luxury handbags.

 

I see increasingly more investment opportunities and consistently I find the way that sits with me the best in terms of evaluating them is along three very simple heuristics.  I truly believe that in consumer internet today (other tech sectors like Enterprise or Bio, Cleantech etc are a different  game altogether)  you can only compete in one of three ways fundamentally. That’s it – by the process of elimination almost.

You can compete on

  1. Inventory
  2. Fulfilment, or
  3. Customer Acquisition

Most startup founders knee-jerk reaction is to say ‘we are good at all 3’ but the reality – and the evidence out there – is that you can onloy really win in one, at least at the start,

Put simpler, you either

 

  1. have a way to produce or  curate products that others don’t have access to or at least as readily as you do (Airbnb, Warby Parker, Uber and eBay at its start fell in this category)…. OR
  2. you get them delivered faster or cheaper than others (Amazon being the master at this of course) or with better customer experience service  (e.g. Zappos, which is now Amazon too not surprisingly)…OR
  3. you have homogenous inventory (just the same SKUs as the others in other words like Amazon), you are NO better than the rest on fulfilment (you may be using Amazon’s fulfilment in fact or another third party) BUT  you somehow are (for a window of time at least) better at customer acquisition. I would put gaming in this category as they live and die over their ability to generate powerful viral loops that become their acquisition channels, although as we’ve seen, rarely sustainable or predictable for that matter.

 

Of these the third is my least favourable or investable. People who believe they have a sustainable advantage in acquiring traffic over others are like fund managers who delusion themselves that they can bid the index in the long term. They can’t. Trading – be it in stocks or keywords – is an arbitrage play, and like any  arbitrage  play, the margin trends to zero in the long term.

 

Of course if you’re Oprah or Kim Kardashian maybe you have a scalable unique customer acquisition channel. But otherwise you’re just kidding yourself that you can buy keywords or Instagram/ Facebook likes better – consistently – than anyone else. You can’t.  One could argue that SEO is more defensible if you just happened to be one of those brands that got in early and got indexed well by Google with a stronghold that’s harder to break, but even then you run the risk of  your business being shattered one day because of a change in Googles algorithm as we’ve seen happen many a time.

 

To the second heuristic, i believe that fulfilment i.e. speedy, reliable delivery of whatever it is your buying (be it a tangible product or a service), with great customer support at your fingertips, is important. However, with e-commerce at least, its now near impossible to compete with Amazon on that front. If you’re selling a non-differentiated homogenous SKU and think you can deliver better fulfilment than Amazon you’re deluding yourself. Amazon has been investing billions in building the most sophisticated logistics distribution infrastructure in the world for over two decades. The best you can do is be on it.

Of course not all consumer internet businesses are e-commerce businesses; arguably Uber transitioned from being a prime ‘Inventory fit’   in the above to now being both an Inventory AND Fulfilment play … but only after amassing unique inventory that no one else did (at least as efficiently as them) and put it a click away from the consumer. Now, of course, it also boasts a huge distribution network that its smartly using to go into other inventory categories like food  with UberEats (although there the inventory is homogeneous.. the food you get on Uber Eats is not differentiated, it’s the same stuff you can get yourself in the high street or by calling the restaurant themselves so clearly it’s a fulfilment play)

 

continue reading »

A supply-side analysis of marketplaces

Marketplaces are notoriously hard to get going because of the chicken-and-egg problem at the start. You need supply in order to get demand and you need demand in order to get supply. In most the money comes in through the demand side of the equation and thus are considered to be demand-led. However, I would argue that in embarking on setting up a marketplace business one can be more rigorous in their analysis on the supply side.

These are the factors I would consider if I were to set up another marketplace business (or invest in one):

 

1. Arcane Supply

My first company was a business called Arcarnus which promised to broker the world’s ‘arcane’ places and services – secret gems as it were- to a discerning people.

That business didn’t do very well when it came to scaling but the notion of the ‘arcane’ was certainly carried forward to my next (and current) business PeoplePerHour.com and is without a doubt a big reason for its success.

Amassing inventory – of whatever kind – that has an element of exclusivity or scarcity is key to getting initial traction. It’s not always a must, but if your inventory is too easily discoverable elsewhere it will be harder, and although not impossible (as Amazon has proven) you need to innovate in different ways like price, the speed of delivery or simply having a huge breadth to become a ‘one stop shop’ destination. Whilst doable that’s without a shadow of a doubt a much more expensive endeavour.

 

2. Homeless supply

Arcane or not, my next question would be “is that inventory looking for a new home?”. Some things – like second-hand collectables, much to eBay’s delight, were craving to migrate from the street fair to the world wide web. Others like grandma’s hand-knit woollen cardigan also did, finding a home on Etsy.com.

Here too, timing is everything. A category seeks a new home when a) there’s enough inventory within it and b) when their current home gets crowded. If you’re selling hand-crafted inflated Baboons who pop a caramel-infused marshmallow out of their backside every time you squeeze them (now why didn’t I think of that idea before!) and you can only make a handful a day, you may find that walking up the street is all you need to sell them all. Why pay a marketplace a % of that? But if you find that your whole neighbourhood or town rip off your baboon-trade, then you may well need a bigger home for your boons.

 

3. Ripe for storytelling

Given an infinite amount of dollars, any business can turn into a success (even my fabulous baboon idea above). But given finite dollars, having scarce supply, that’s ripe for a new home, and, a story that others are willing to share, will almost certainly act as viral agents and catalyst for distribution and growth.

In the end, people don’t relate to facts and figures, or shapes or forms, or tastes for that matter, as much as they relate to ‘storytelling’. Even the sensation of taste is instantly followed by a story, and it goes like this “Yumm…” You instantly can’t wait to share the delight with others!

Everything that precedes it, therefore, is a means to an end. What propagates are not the facts, the smell, the taste, the form or the function. It’s the story they inspire.

Every great company has at some point planted storytelling in their customers’ mouths one way or another. For Uber it was something like ‘look at me and my own personal chauffeur aren’t I cool’ … for Airbnb, it’s the personal experience of staying in someone’s own home, and the things that hooked you. In my last stay, it was the host’s sound system and how he came over to personally show me how to hook my iPhone to it.

With PeoplePerHour, the story we hear again and again is how someone built their entire business through PeoplePerHour.com. Often while residing on some beautiful resort on the beach!

 

4. A friendly Macro

Sadly, success and effort are not symmetrical. If Newton’s 3rd Law of motion was translated into the world of business dynamics it would be this: “for every micro, there is an equal and opposite macro”

In other words, for every one thing, you get right internally there is some external force that opposes that success and acts as ‘friction’ point (no wonder we borrow terms from physics in marketplace lingo).

Macro is your tailwind. You need it acting in your favour otherwise, it will be much harder – if at all possible – to get there, at least without running out of fuel!

Is onboarding of the supply you are amassing helped by some macro forces?

Again, in our case, that was clearly the case. Be it out of ‘need’ (e.g., rising unemployment during the recession forcing people to seek alternative sources of income) or by choice underpinned by socio-economic drivers, such as work-life balance, freedom and the aspiration to be your own boss, it remained unquestionable throughout our journey that people’s yearning for independence was no short-term fad.

Similarly for other categories: travel’s tailwind is the long-term declining cost of travelling; the health food’s sector is people’s ever-increasing health consciousness (or paranoia of premature death), renewable energy is buoyed by people’s delusion that we are running out of energy sources (when in fact, it’s outstripping consumption) and hypocritical rhetoric on saving the planet when they destroy it in equally or more ways than the rest of us; and so on.
Delusional or not, having a friendly macro helps!

 

4. The 10x factor

Peter Thiel argued in his book ‘Zero to One’ that for a start-up to be a big success it needs to be 10x better than that of the incumbents. In marketplaces, businesses that criterion is almost always a supply-side criterion.

The Uber experience is certainly 10x better than waiting in the rain to hail a cab which will – in most cities – also be more expensive, a lesser quality car and a driver who may have just got off the wrong side of the bed that morning, or had an argument with his wife and doesn’t give a sh*t, is rude and scares the crap out of you because he’s behind the steering wheel and you’re inside locked doors with what looks and moves like a loony on steroids.

On Airbnb, you will find amazing homes to stay in which are (for a certain category of people at least) 10x better than hotels in terms of cost (per square foot at least) and the homeliness factor.

PeoplePerHour grew very quickly when we started because getting a logo or any piece of work done on the site was – and still is – 10x cheaper than the old-fashioned way (say going to an agency or hiring someone in-house).

 

5. Platform stickiness

Platform stickiness comes from both sides, albeit in different ways. However, more often than not, a marketplace is not just an exchange mechanism but also a suite of tools for the supply side to build up a regular source of income. It’s more than a one-off ‘hit’ or strike of good luck for the Sellers.

Tools, such as the ability to get paid fast, securely and seamlessly, exchange files, communicate in real time, integrate with your calendar, trusted reputation systems, and a raft of other admin tools like collating all your invoices in one place, perhaps even integrating with your accounting software – not to mention getting customers in the first place – are invaluable tools for Sellers that would otherwise be a nightmare to put together individually themselves. And very expensive!

A newer breed of marketplaces, which I am a big believer in, takes that one step further and builds deep workflows tailored exactly to the vertical they are serving. They essentially become mini ‘ERP’ systems for micro-businesses who don’t have the scale to do that themselves and overlay the transaction on top. Newer business models are arising to support these, often licensing the software hosted in the cloud (SAAS) and in other cases, a dual model where they charge in part for the transaction or in part for the software. Wahanda (now Treatwell) is one such example in the UK, as is Zocdoc.

These are powerful marketplaces as they can migrate upscale to serve larger enterprises once they prove the model for SMEs by tailoring their software and workflow to serve larger organisations. This is a big part of our strategy in the next 1-2 years at PeoplePerHour.com as well.

 

6. Network effect

Once you crack the chicken-and-egg problem and get going, marketplaces turn the corner and become both highly scalable and defensible businesses. That’s because ‘network effects’ kick in.

Simplistically, network effects means that the value in a marketplace is a function of how many participants are in the marketplace. So every new user you get makes the entire marketplace more valuable, for other buyers and sellers alike.

Sounds obvious. But what’s not obvious is how to get that flywheel going. In practice, it comes down to understanding why Sellers on your platform could benefit not just from getting Buyers (and hence sales) but from other sellers. Often it’s to do with complementarity. They can find other products or services that strengthen their selling power. This then gives them an incentive to promote your site and bring others in their network to the site so as to collaborate. Hence, network effect.

In certain marketplaces, this happens de facto in an unstructured way. On Etsy.com example, many Sellers turn to Buyers and then resellers of the things they bought. On PeoplePerHour.com we see the same dynamic: a graphic designer may need to work with a Videographer for a project they are doing for a client. Or a voice-over artist or copywriter.

Other marketplaces do this in a more structured way or design in their DNA from the start which has considerable advantages. For example, if you are building a marketplace for lawyers, and say you know they work with paralegals, you design the flows such that when a lawyer creates her profile she can then invite her paralegals – or other lawyers they collaborate with for that matter – and integrate all of that into their profile. To encourage that behaviour one could allow discovery of lawyers based on the size of their team, or feed that into their reputation system. These type of marketplaces can get exponential growth as each participant will be inclined to bring numerous more with them (their network), which in turn will make it more attractive for Buyers and build critical mass faster.

 

Epilogue

Very few successful marketplaces are built by design. Most just happen. Most even happen despite bad design, not because of it. There are so many variables needed for success that probability overtakes calculus. Which is why VCs take 10 bets for 1 to succeed. Given how many businesses they see (and a biased sample set at that skewed towards the best of the crop), if there was a predictive formula for success surely they would apply it and have 100% hit rate?

That said, one can conduct a rigorous analysis, especially – as I argue above – on the supply side, to consider whether the marketplace they are about to create has the necessary qualifying criteria for success. ‘Qualifying’ is the operative word here. Meaning: if you do tick the above boxes, you’re off to a good start. But it’s certainly not the end and definitely not a foregone conclusion.

The Future of Work: the evolution of labor marketplaces

Operating in the labor / outsourcing space for almost 10 years now (first with an offline business and then online) this is something I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about and in many ways have been part of its evolution. What does the Future of Work look like? In this post my aim is to highlight the trends that I think will shape it versus the applications and solutions it will manifest itself in.

  1. The West-East playing field will level out

The outsourcing industry has its origin in the labor rate arbitrage between developed and developing economies. The first labor marketplaces like Elance & Odesk were in essence online versions of the Wipros & Infosys’ of this world, connecting businesses in the more developed Western economies with cheaper labor where it was abundant in the East, mainly in IT services. They emerged to piggy back on the newly minted IT industries in India in the 90s.

That rate arbitrage is narrowing today as the economies of India & China and other emerging markets are growing faster than the West inflating prices (including that of labor) and hence closing the gap.

Secondly, as these economies mature they start developing a middle class and an SMB (Small & Medium Sized Businesses) sector – the backbone in any economy that’s the essential channel for distribution of wealth downward from the gorillas at the top of the food chain – the big corporations and national institutions.

Much like those gorillas, these SMBs turn to the west to adopt some of the best practices that have matured over decades. The ‘freelance consultant’ is to those SMBs what the McKinseys of this world and the Harvard MBA franchise has been to the gorrilas at the top. They hire them to help with the things they are weakest in, from basics  like writing sales and marketing collateral, design & UI, to business management advice social media marketing and so on.

PeoplePerHour.com was founded largely on this premise. From the start we focused on nurturing a freelance workforce in the West which is still over 70% of our total. Most of hiring happens ‘semi-locally’ (i.e. not onsite , the work sill gets done remotely, but in same geographic region) or from companies in the emerging economies  hiring talent in Europe or the US.

As I argued in a previous post I also believe that this may well be the rebirth or the once might export economy of Western nations.  With manufacturing on the decline and unable to compete with lower cost economies in the East, the next wave of exports may well be skills and services that are more in abundance in the West and scarcer in emerging markets, the gap being bridged by the emergence and growth of online labor marketplaces.

  1. Marketplaces 3.0: the rise of End-to-End (e2e) solutions

We are entering what I believe is the third generation of marketplaces. The ‘1.0’ era was all about liquidity (Craiglist). ‘2.0’ was about building trust via reputation systems, social validation (eBay, Airbnb, Etsy) to help in the discovery process as inventory exploded making discovery more challenging. Now, ‘3.0’ is making discovery redundant or unnecessary altogether (you don’t interview your taxi driver on Uber or Lyft and equally you don’t select your tasker on SuperTasker). These are what have been termed e2e solutions, going deeper at both ends – supply & demand – to remove friction in the experience.

continue reading »