aherlambang

Always wanted to get a held of that book! Will definitely read it

Thanks man!

From the buyer perspective we have made a special one-on-on online coaching session, where they can ask us anything for feedbacks on how to improve their shops. We gave a lot of suggestions to them but most just didn't take any action afterwards.

We do have a reputation service. We verified each and every store by taking in their personal government ID. We show case their customer testimonials in their own shop page.

Two crucial thing that we can't play with, price and quality of product :) Which is two of the most important thing needed for someone to make a purchase.

I would have to disagree with the goal of any business is to be a monopoly.

There are lots of examples of successful business out there who did not monopoly the market.

I'd also have to disagree that startups sell mostly crap they don't need or want. Uber & AirBnB definitely provides something valuable that most humans would appreciate of.

If you're talking about products such as Snapchat or Instagram, that's a different genre of product. It's a vitamin type of product not a pain killer.

Interesting analysis, how about news aggregation :)

I wrote about some challenges in doing growth hacking in my other medium post :)

Yes, so what you're saying is college student who sells aren't qualify as a part of my market since they can't fix this supply chain issue.

Which I also mentioned the way to solve it is to cut down the market size, so that only first hand suppliers are the ones majority selling

The one I wrote was an over simplification. There are of course more than that.

The value proposition to the seller were clear, we wanted to give them more exposure outside of Instagram, make their store be discovered by style/trends.

The value proposition to the buyer is what I think is lacking. We tried to generate sort of a board as a form of style inspirations, but it seemed the market doesn't really care about the mix and match of outfits. I guess what i realized too late is developing country markets are prioritizing price over style way more than developed countries

So any successful aggregators out there? I think the closest one seemed to be pinterest

We did raise funding it was around $100k-$500k (not going to disclose the real amount). We realized that we needed some boost to test the market overall, but after 1.5 year of using that money and got to 30-40k UV per day, the path of profitability from that point seems far away, numbers just don't add up.

It gets worse as I stated in the article that new startups in the same area are raising behemoth amount of funding. The funds were used to attract and subsidized sellers and buyers.

I hope I am not... we still see new marketplaces coming up every day

Apart from the rough time it needs a very long time to get the ball rollin.. it's even tougher to do in a market where the people are not ready yet

The point of having an aggregator is not to have a headache with stock keepings and shippings, on the other hand doing an aggregator leads you to have less control over the products and customer service. Each has its own drawbacks

thanks, it's fixed.. my english is rusty