Happy July everyone!
The Marketplace Snippet from the Speedinvest x team is back. On the first Monday of each month, you can expect a good dose of content on⭐network effects, platforms, and marketplaces⭐in your inbox.
This newsletter is created by Magda from the Speedinvest x-Team.
You can follow her on Twitter here: @PosMagda
We hope you like it.
If you have any suggestions, feedback or topics we should feature 👉hit reply👈 to let us know.
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Best of...
We have just released talks from our virtual marketplace conference that took place in May.
Our favourite ones include:
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Insights from Marketplace Operators
- 👬 Great retention is the scalable way to grow a product and one of the most important metrics to track. But what is good retention? Lenny Rachitsky shares more insights in his newsletter.
- 🧠 As Jeff Besos says, ”It’s actually pretty easy to be a contrarian. It’s hard to be contrarian and right.” Great resource from NFX with practical points on how to apply contrarian thinking to everyday decision making. Keith Rabois, general partner at Founders Fund shares insights about some of the counterintuitive decisions he made during his career as an executive at PayPal, LinkedIn, Slide and Square.
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🏪 Shopify has always faced strong competition from the largest incumbents with Amazon, Ebay, Magento, Microsoft Commerce. One of the key winning factors for Shopify was introducing the Shopify App Store and open API, which allowed the company to create a tight ecosystem of developers and thereby benefit from tremendous network effects. Albert Wang shares an excellent analysis of Shopify.
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🛒 Livestream shopping is a natural confluence of several current tech trends — streaming, influencers, social, commerce — and offers companies a new path to consumers' hearts and wallets. With a daily viewership larger than Game of Thrones, China’s star saleswoman, Viya, rules a $60 billion world of live online shopping.
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🍔 How a “crazy Dutch guy” won the online food delivery war. The story about Jitse Groen, CEO of Takeaway.com, from the perspective of the former COO of Just Eat Adrian Blair.
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Insights from Marketplace Investors
- 👩💻 “There are hundreds of these already,” Benedict Evans shares his take on what comes after Zoom. “An important part of this is that there seem to be few real network effects in a video call per se. You don’t necessarily need an account to join a call, and you generally don’t need an application either (...) Skype needed both an account and an app, so had a network effect (and lost even so).”
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🤝 How to make B2B marketplaces work? Look out for transactions that are not happening today and enable them to happen, start on the outskirts of the market and work your way in, avoid markets that are consolidated - and much more practical advice on B2B marketplaces by James Currier from NFX. James also discussed the success factors of B2B marketplaces during The Marketplace Conference.
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🏗️ “Figma, Medinas and Schüttflix have created a blueprint for success in the maturity phase of the internet era: Challenge incumbent "single-player" SaaS players with a "multiplayer" network effects-based approach.” Sameer Singh writes about how network-effect driven businesses are taking on SaaS.
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📱Fascinating article about Social Shopping and the story of Pinoduo by By Anu Hariharan and Nic Dardenne from YCombinator. “New commerce platforms that can leverage social relationships will accelerate the offline to online transition and if you are able to tap into groups of social relationships vs. one-to-one relationships the faster your platforms will scale.”
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🛁 Wellness-related spend accounts now for over 5% of global economic activity. With accurate monitoring technologies along with advances in AI that allow delivery of hyper-personalised, 1:1 experiences at scale, we will see further growth of companies in this space. An analysis of the wellness space by Brett Bivens.
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🗼Hierarchy of marketplaces - a must-read from Sarah Tavel from Benchmark.
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New $$$
- 🏃♀️ Playbook, a creator platform focused on the fitness industry raises $3M from several notable angels, including Giphy founder Alex Chung, StyleSeat founder Melody McCloskey, and Eventbrite co-founder Renaud Visage among others.
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💻 ClickUp, productivity platform combining tasks, docs, chats, goals in one raised a $35 million Series A round.
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👨👩👦👦 Discord, a community communication platform raised $100M from Index Ventures to double down on growing the categories outside of gaming.
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🏢 Bellman, property management platform raised a $4.5 million seed extension round led by Lakestar.
- 🚗 Cazoo becomes the fastest-ever British unicorn after raising an extra £25 from venture capital firms Draper Esprit, General Catalyst and DMG Ventures.
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News from our Speedinvest x Portfolio
- 💍 Motley, the affordable jewellery brand, officially joins our family!
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🚚 Schüttflix’s story from the perspective of Sophia Tomalla, angel investor and brand ambassador. For German speakers.
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⛺ Lizee was flagged by Les Echos as the European pioneer in the booming e-commerce rent-as-a-service sector
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🛴 Tier prepares for the launch in the UK and hires Uber’s ex Head of UK to lead the market.
- 🎮 Admix raises $7 million in Series A funding.
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Resources and Treats
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