Startup Day (June 2017)

Continuing the “Startup of the Day” series of digests, today I present the most interesting projects for June. If you want to get acquainted with the others, then please in my blog. Entries are available on Facebook , ICQ and Telegram .

Yext

Yext helps business to be better represented on the cards. Ideally, as soon as the bank opens a new branch, it should immediately appear in dozens of places: from obvious Google maps and Yandex (Google and Bing in the American realities) to the local counterpart banki.ru and, for example, the Western Union website. In reality, of course, no one deals with dozens of places: everywhere, except for the largest and most promoted sources, incorrect or incomplete information remains for a long time; customers go wrong, money is lost.

And here comes Yext. For amounts starting at $ 4 per week, it gives businesses a single point of control for their locations on all relevant sites: one click - and the data is updated everywhere. Alone, such a service does not work: a greedy buyer could include it only for the sake of some changes, but for most clients this event is quite rare, you can save a lot, so the startup "at the same time" offers regular services. For popular networks, this is monitoring reviews on all those sites, the data on which Yext puts in order, and for small ones who are irrelevant, there is a function of geo pages. Beautiful, properly designed and SEO-optimized pages about each location are once embedded in the main site and then managed from a common dashboard along with external resources.

Now a startup has more than 40 thousand clients, revenue for a hundred million dollars a year, an IPO passed a couple of months ago, the company's capitalization is more than a billion. Probably never come to Russia, it’s quite possible to make one’s own.

August Home

American August Home makes electronic door locks for ordinary houses and apartments, controlled via an application on a smartphone, and this idea is much deeper than it might seem: everything related to delivery is now in trend, and the project is largely about it. The main promotion bonus is the absence of the need to meet couriers and other people who actually need a place, not a person. The door can be opened from anywhere, where there is Internet, no need to wait for anyone. A courier can come when he is comfortable, and you can be where you are comfortable. The eight-hour delivery interval becomes quite comfortable, logistics services are getting cheaper, GDP is growing, splendor ... A resident of Russia may have a question about theft, but in the States the answer is so obvious that even in promotional materials it is not mentioned: on the one hand, there’s nothing to steal in modern apartments and on the other hand, the courier is photographed at the entrance, where he came from - more or less known. A possible crime is just perfect for the disclosure, people are not so idiots.

The remaining possible scenarios seem much more contrived. Well, yes, you can take away the key from the ex-boyfriend with one touch of a button and be sure that he did not duplicate. But to take care of such a situation in advance and put a special lock for this? .. Is it possible that in apartments for daily rent this is relevant. Or, for example, the opportunity for cleaners to enter the house only on Wednesdays from 10 to 12 - and why? Because we can? And logging of inputs and push notifications about them seem to be generally harmful to normal family life.

As for the risk of a discharged phone, it is solved as simply as possible: you can open the lock not only from the application, but also by entering the code. A lost phone seems less dangerous than a lost iron key: reprogramming codes is much simpler and cheaper than changing the lock. But hackers in the future in any case will be expanse, yes.

If we talk about the current scale, then hundreds of thousands of devices have been sold, about fifty million dollars of investments have been raised, and in four years of life a hardware startup has been quite a lot.

Grammarly

As far as I can tell, I am writing in Russian quite competently; regular readers of the blog, of course, know better, but I have such a self-assessment. And the same self-esteem was about the English language: I understood that my texts were very simplified, without complex constructions and vivid idioms, but I thought that there were few obvious mistakes in them, especially since the browser with Word emphasized something rarely. Ha! It was necessary to install a plug-in from Grammarly, and the illusions vanished like smoke.

This is just a text literacy check, but the check is good. Grammarly does not check words with a dictionary, but really knows English (only English) spelling with punctuation, sees missing commas, inconsistency of times, incorrect articles, understands that the player must always have, but not have, and notices a huge pile of different problems. I rule in almost every paragraph, despite the fact that, again, the standard tools do not emphasize almost anything. It is important that errors are not just noted, but also fully explained. In general, a really useful application of AI technology.

Technically, Grammarly has three options for implementation: a plugin for Chrome / Safari / Firefox / IE, a plugin for MS Office and a standalone text editor. Only an option in the browser seems to be workable - to change the familiar editor, even for the sake of checking English, this is too much, but in Word it somehow breaks the Undo feature via Ctrl-Z (how ?? who programs so ??), which, of course, completely kills the possibility of use.

The monetization model, naturally, is based on a subscription: you can see only obvious mistakes for free, and premium users for about $ 20 a month also receive stylistic recommendations in the spirit of “a lot of does not fit here, use better much”. A very small percentage of the audience is likely to pay for this, but with the current 7 million DAU it should be several hundred thousand people (that is, tens of millions of annual revenue).

The company says that it is profitable, and there was no investment before this year, there was nothing to cover the losses, where would they go without profitability. But now they decided to grow faster, they took as much as 110 million dollars in a recent round. Success to them and thanks for the great product.

Lovecrafts

The easiest way to make a successful online store is to sell such a category of goods for which there is a great demand and a large amount of sales offline, but it is also poorly represented in existing online stores. It requires the most trivia: you only need to find such a category.

English startup LoveCrafts sells knitting and sewing goods via the Internet using the most ordinary business model, with its warehouses, the most common logistics and other features of a typical online store. The focus on the only narrow category allowed them to achieve a completely infinite choice, to program convenient filters, and, of course, to conduct more targeted marketing. It is significant that even for knitting and sewing they made two separate sites, although connected by many cross-references, but still different. Target audiences like all this, of course, they buy a lot on LoveCraft.

However, even the position of a specialized store is not guaranteed to be stable: an arrogant competitor can make a clone, and Amazon will soon reach this niche, and then only price competition remains - and who needs it. Therefore, in order to consolidate its current advantage, LoveCraft wants to be not only a store, but also a community, and a marketplace. Since he sells goods to creative people, then let them share their creativity through his platform - should it be convenient?

For the sake of money, authors can upload diagrams and designs invented by them to the site and sell them to less creative users. If you want fame and respect, and not income, then this is the section "community": there you can display your work and like others.

Additional functionality does not bring LoveCraft money directly, they do not even take a commission for the sale of schemes, but it increases user loyalty, and journalists like it. However, if the community is in fact actively engaged (not yet), there can be a lot of different monetization.

The start-up English market took up virtually no investment, raised about $ 30 million for the sake of the US, and now about half of its business in the US is about. In April, there was another round of 33 million - they want to organize new categories and enter new countries.

Oberlo

The idea behind this startup is direct resale automation from AliExpress. An Internet businessman with his account on Shopify connects to Oberlo, selects in the web interface those products from AliExpress that need to be shown on a new site, and voila, the store is ready. It remains only to correct the descriptions in the required language and set the rule for new prices, +20 or +50 percent to the original ones, for example. Anyway, it will remain cheap.

When the end customer orders something on this storefront, Oberlo will automatically create and pay for the order on AliExpress immediately with the final address. If something changes on the product page on Ali, the price increases or the product disappears altogether, then Oberlo will adjust the display case as well. The store owner only needs to attract customers and deal with complaints: disputes, alas, until they are automatically proxied.

In addition to pure arbitrageurs with the approach “wrote beautiful descriptions, put a 100% mark-up, bought advertising in Target, profit” such a model can be used quite logically on thematic sites: why not sell your relevant selection of products to your audience. Probably, with a reasonable price difference, people will not even be too indignant if they find out the whole story. In the end, they made a choice for them, it is also worth something.

In addition to the obvious SaaS subscription and the potential use of AliExpress’s marketing budget, Oberlo also charges a fee for some of the products. The idea is that in addition to regular stores with Ali, they are in the same mode offering to resell products of certain “proven” suppliers working directly with Oberlo. When setting up exports, this part of the assortment always slips higher, and, of course, regularly hits the final shop-windows. I don’t know how true the direct contracts are: it would be very nice and quite in keeping with the spirit of the project if simple products with Ali with changed descriptions and increased price were called “verified”.

They invented this wonderful model not far from Russia, in Lithuania. A startup recently bought by Shopify for $ 15 million.