Category Archives: entrepreneurship

Should you work for a startup or big tech? Calculating the payoff

Courtesy of the clickUP blog

Make millions, lifelong friends, and a professional wolfpack for the years to come. Also possible: leave with no money, work for a minimum wage hourly rate or less when overtime is accounted for, and burn out. In the world of extremes, this is a good description of the startup experience.

So how should you be thinking about joining a startup? Is it worth leaving the cushy, well-paying job?

There’s no crystal ball and every choice is unique. In the end, it’s your life, your choice, and if your gut tells you to go for it, then don’t bother reading further. You have your answer. 

If however, you’re on the more popular side of the camp, where options are swirling in your head inconclusively, then this is for you. 

Know what you want. 

Ask yourself, “what is it that you want”. Is it money? Acknowledgment or perhaps challenging yourself?

The older I get, the more I take seriously the question of “where do you see yourself in 10 years”. Have an answer to that and you can reverse engineer your way to the end result without feeling like you are groping in the dark. 

The experience element

Are you next to the action? 

Startups are great for learning; unless you’re the last cog of the machine in which case you simply “do stuff”. You won’t even experience the actual journey. Business insights will be tainted by what the narrative told across the business. This is not pessimism. The unfortunate truth is that founders have to sugarcoat things a lot – if not outright lie -to their employees, since everything is shaky at the early days (pre-series B) of a startup. 

On the other hand, if you are the Founder’s right-hand and get exposure to investors, customers and get to witness the decision-making journey of a strong founding team, this is a golden ticket irrespective of the result. 

Are you a key employee? 

Key employees don’t have to be the first 10 people. Key employees can be employees in the formative years of the company, the first 500 employees of a 5,000 person company, or any employee whose remit allows them to execute and learn on someone else’s account. 

Imagine you’re a director of marketing and you’re given a few million pounds to execute on a marketing strategy. The experience of having experimented and seen the direct outcome of your actions at scale from the front seat, are an automatic step change in your work capabilities and skillset. You’ve levelled up. 

Seeking an adrenaline rush or balance?

The ubiquitous, understated, unquantifiable issue of startups: can you deal with dedicating your life to your work? You will have to. 

On the other hand, your cushy job means socializing, going to the gym, and having personal time for family and friends. This is a trade-off that seems easy conceptually but just like bodybuilding, it’s hard every-single-day. 

The value of experience is delayed

Startups that grow like rocketships offer a scarce experience: the experience of seeing a constantly transforming, growing organization. This is critically important since there is no company that would not want to follow that trajectory nor is there another successful company that does not want to poach the “experienced hires” who were there for the ride.

Being part of this journey means that IF YOU LAST and if you become a key employee, then you can cash out that experience for the foreseeable future, and all sorts of doors open easily. Also, it’s cool.

Hopefully, this helps. Now, to brass tacks. The payoff. When does it make financial sense to join a startup? 

How to calculate the payoff

Before I get into specifics, there are a few principles: 

  1. Think about wealth, not money. 
  2. Aim at equity, not salary.
  3. Know your number, don’t settle for someone else’s. 

In the end, every startup succeeds when it participates in wealth creation. If you don’t think a startup can create wealth, don’t join, move on. 

If the startup you’re considering is not offering a generous pool of equity, move on. Because, what is a startup? Fundamentally, it’s a speculation on a potential future. And when it comes to private markets, there’s only one way to participate in the speculation: equity.

Finally, know your number; don’t compromise for someone else’s. Forget the spiel about “the pool is maxed” or “no one has more stock than this” or the even more offensive – and my personal favourite –  “people with twice your years of experience make this”.

You’re not an amateur experience seeker. You’re a professional playing the game and you ought to have a threshold number and stick with it. What is the ticket you’re looking for when the startup exits?  It does not matter if you like the business, the founders, or the setup. It’s likely that your number is not possible to be met. Can this business get you where you want to be? If not, don’t compromise, move on. 

How much can you really make?

Total Equity owned x Exit Value – tax. 

The total amount you will receive from your time at a company is basically the vested options you end up with by the time there’s an exit minus the tax you pay. Simple right? 

Well, no. 

Let’s start with an example. 

Assume you’re offered a job at a hyper-growth startup. By that I mean a company that is growing in terms of people and VC inflow way faster than the mean of the industry. Imagine a company that grew from 0 to 100 employees within a year and raised £10m in 12 months in Seed and Series A. Since the startup is raising way more money than average, the dilution is also quite high and the startup is valued £30m. 

You’re offered to join by the time they’re 50 people. Your offer includes options worth 0.2% of total equity (£60k) and a salary of £100k which I will leave out since salary would be matched in lots of places – and is not a wealth-creating mechanism -. 

So, how much do you stand to gain? 

Let’s move on with our scenario. The business raised meteoric rounds of £50m at £150m and £300m at £900m and gets sold. You’re left with about 0.08% of a unicorn (in dollars) or £720,000. 

Now let’s divide by the number of years it took to get here. We are on a rocketship, so let’s say it’s 3 years and the return per year is £240k. But what about tax? Let’s say it’s EMI qualified (the UK tax incentive for early employees of businesses) and only taxed at 10% and the market value was negligible to acquire shares so won’t even calculate it. This leaves us with £216k per year. 

But judging an option based on the outcome is not really precocious approach. What you need to think is the expected payoff is and since a lot of things can go wrong and at early stages, even if you’re in a rocketship, can you really be that sure? I will be generous and assume 50% certainty (at Series A!) to exit the business. 

As a result, before you take the job, you are looking at shares worth £108k per year which is very different from your original 0.2% of £900m. 

And I am not finished. As competition rises and alongside it pressure does too, the startup succumbs to dealing with terms that are not beneficial for you. There might be liquidation preferences, a bridge/down round (the valuation drops) and suddenly you end up with a much smaller amount. 

The allure of big tech

Now let’s say that you get a job at a FAANG business. At a mid-senior level, a Product manager/engineer in one of these businesses can make £130k and another £200k in stock and bonus which may I add is often exercisable from the first month i.e. you can treat it as cash. You also have a sign-on bonus and performance bonus – you can double your stock-.

Let’s also assume that an 8% year-on-year increase on the total compensation is an average scenario. 

In this case you’re expected annual payoff is ((£200,000 + £216,000 + £233,280)/3) or  £216,000 pre-tax or £108k after tax assuming your 50% tax rate on RSUs. 

In other words, the best case startup scenario is the average at Big tech. 

Some other things to consider: 

  • Getting fired from a startup is not uncommon. 
  • Big Tech keeps offering stock, startups don’t usually until much later. 
  • There are very few UK businesses that have exited with more than £1bn in value.

So if money is the reason you’re joining, the option is simple. 

Follow your gut, or follow your plan 

Progress is not linear. Whether that is experience, money, or career, we make plans only to see them fall through.  

One good startup will leave you with experiences, opportunities, and money for the next decade at best or with some learnings that stick with you for the rest of your life. 

But as a person that has done both and has passed on opportunities for the right and the wrong reasons, I want to leave you with this: if you can follow your gut instead of a plan, do that. But if go with a plan, stick with it. In both cases, consistency trumps intensity and if you make a mistake, know it’s yours, not someone else’s. Good luck! 

Search-as-a-service: A trillion dollar opportunity & why Google might miss out

Google search is one of the top engineering marvels of the 20th century.

Its business one of the top industry defining businesses of the century. Google is the true dominant name really in the category it helped invent. The rest of the players are inevitably and undoubtedly playing catch-up. 

And here comes the unfathomable: A new better search is needed and Google might not be the one to make it. 

Yes, you read correctly and no, Google won’t lose in its own game. The question is whether it will be able to capitalize on the new wave. That which is driven by the needs of knowledge workers and the creative economy. One driven by digital skills as a means to productivity and the corporation’s appetite for paid productivity tools.

The trends are all there: an ever connected globe of 5 billion connected devices. 45% of jobs already being digitally enabled driving more competition amongst firms than ever. An increasing flow of capital in productivity -33% of unicorns in 2020- is reported and across all areas of work (email, design, notes, sheets).

There is soon going to be a new paradigm for search. It will be for businesses only at first, costly, exclusive, and a trillion dollar business.

The next frontier in search

There’s a few reasons why search innovation on the consumer side has not happened. 

First, no one can or wants to compete against Google.  

Secondly, the barrier to entry in search is very high. 

Third, search is currently “free” and works really well. 

The thing is, it works really well for consumer use cases. And though all three were true till recently, we are now at a tipping point. But first, it’s important to examine what is the current and future opportunity in search.  

The business of search & AdWords

Let’s start with the business of search. What does Google sell? It sells attention and corresponding leads in the form of keywords. In a way, Google AdWords is a marketplace.
And how are there keywords priced? Keywords are priced on a Cost per click (CPC) basis with the exact price calculated as a derivative of the sale. Google’s thinking is that since a customer made a purchase as a result of discovering the product or service from Google, then they deserve to be paid a fraction of that transaction. As a result,  factors that pertain to the CPC cost are things like demand of the keyword, the probability of a user buying a service as a result of clicking on the keyword and finally the cost of the service. A rough formula then appears for valuing a keyword. 

Keyword Cost = Demand competition x P(purchase) x Cost of service/good.

To exemplify what I mean consider this. For google “find a plumber” is more valuable than “How to find out if you have a leak” since the first is indicating intent and thus more likely to result in a job whereas the latter merely an interest in a house issue. Following that logic, Google prices the former search phrase higher. 

From that lens Google’s strategy becomes easier to understand: provide free knowledge and responses to all the non-commercial questions so that users love it and come back frequently so that when they do have a commercial query in mind, Google can monetize that.

Whilst the amount of new questions people ask on Google tends to infinity, it turns out that they can conceptually be categorized in three broad types based on their commercial value. 

Here’s a nice illustration from Moz showcasing that.
 

There’s three categories of search: Navigational, Informational and Transactional. 

Navigational queries are the original use case of search and of low value to the business. Informational are what makes people love Google and the basis of SEO nowadays and transactional where Google makes the majority of its revenue.

Whilst there are no public data around the distribution of revenue per category, it’d be logical to assume that transactional queries might contribute above 80% of the total ad revenue.

And this leaves us with an interesting observation: Google’s incredible business model is leaving the majority of searches without monetization. In Google’s case it is partly intentional. Free traffic (SEO) is the reason why companies comply with Google’s standards. This in return provides Google with better data, less problems to solve and better monetization in transactional queries. 

It’s also safe to assume that the more complicated the informational query, e.g. “what is the total valuation of online marketplaces” the less ads are likely to be targeting the phrase. Additionally, this is not an insignificant amount of traffic. Complicated queries inherently require more more words in each search and according to Moz, this amounts to approximately 20% – in line with the percentage of people clicking on multiple results per query. 

In other words, the answers to the complex informational queries that are powering the workers of the future are free yet unattainable unless one performs multiple searches, opens multiple tabs and manually extracts the data points from each page. 

GPT-3, Transformers & search v2 

And then GPT-3 arrives. GPT-3 is a new search paradigm by OpenAI and possibly the biggest threat to the status quo of search. Both Google and GPT-3 accept a string (a sequence of characters) as input but while Google needs to return a relevant link which hopefully will result in a paid click, GPT-3 is an API which merely returns a text-mashup of the most relevant information it has collated from the web and charges on a per call basis. GPT-3 is also able to generate answers for any symbolic query, not just words. In the example below, GPT-3 returns code that is rendered on the browser.

GTP-3 outputs JavaScript code

In doing so, GPT-3 does not need to worry about neither transactions happening off the back of a search nor owning the client. In fact, that’s not the purpose. GPT-3 is focusing on complicated informational queries. In doing so, it is breaking down the so tightly held barriers to entry in the search space.

Additionally, GPT-3 provides a superior user experience to this growing segment of digital workers which rely on information gathering and analysis to conduct their jobs.

To understand why that is, consider the previous example of “What is the total valuation of all online marketplaces”. 

Google is not able (in its current form) to respond optimally to this query because it is designed to find the most relevant web resource, written by a human and surface it. However this desirable answer to such a query requires gathering information from multiple sources and aggregating it all in one place. Today, this means opening up multiple tabs (some relevant, some not), reading through each post and manually stitching together the relevant information.

This inherent limitation in the way the engine is built is the reason why Google’s 21% of search queries result in multiple open tabs. This is an effect we have never questioned because we didn’t have to. However just as people don’t want a mortgage, they want a house, similarly people are searching for multiple data points, not multiple open tabs.

On the other hand, GPT-3 will aim to understand the intent behind the query, find all the marketplaces  online, collate information about their valuation and then return a complete response.  

The Google approach might take hours whereas the GPT-3 search will take seconds and return a complete response. Apart from the argument of convenience, consider the difference this makes for an employer. This is not a step change. This is a game-changer. This is search v2.

GPT-3 used for medical advice – not suggesting this will be the primary use case 😉

The difference in terms of working hours is massive. And of course this does not stop here. This revolution of search can be applied in any field which requires the user to research and collate information and each field will present different requirements. Search v2 will be vertical-first.

Here are some other interesting use cases: 

Sales: Return a list of all the names of Texas based CEOs in companies with more than 200 people. 

Education: Create a set of exercises to test a user’s knowledge on “Advanced computer architecture”. 

Investment Analysts: Return a list of all London based businesses with less than 10 people focusing on <you_name_it>. 

The list of use cases is endless for someone with a little imagination and one thing is for sure; our kind is full of that. 

However the three use cases above all seem relevant under a corporate setting. There’s good reason to believe businesses will be the first customer for search v2. Under the current global context discussed above, they’re the most likely to perceive paying for a new kind of search as an “edge” rather than as an unnecessary expense. Additionally and in accordance to the history of disruptive innovations, these revolutions start from “toy architectures”, niche use cases and with limited capabilities. Businesses present the perfect starting point. 

And so, following recent updates to email, sheets and the rest of productivity tools there are a few things we can expect: 

  • A freemium version of such a search engine 
  • A product-led growth approach defined by low initial operational expenditure and healthy cash flows from day one.
  • Inherent product virality stemming from collaboration use cases
  • User adoption that will move from (small) business to enterprise and finally to the general public similar to the desktop computer and unlike Facebook or Google. 

And a true competitor to the latter. 

And here is another interesting thing to consider. If a company with a slick UX and good interactive design managed to persuade people to pay $30 per month for email (yes, Superhuman), what would a consulting firm be willing to pay for the new generation of its knowledge workers? The answer is simple: way more. 

The business case for search-as-a-service: a trillion dollar opportunity

Google search yields about $36 per user globally. In fact, to better visualize how possible it would be to create a new trillion dollar search business, consider that business search, search v2 is priced at $99 per month, or $1,188 per year, yielding 33x Google’s ARPU. 

For context, Microsoft Office business Premium is about £180 per annum per person, or $240 at the current conversion, so 5x less but at full market penetration.  

I guess the point I am circling around to is this: to reach Google’s 2019 $133bn in revenue, search v2 would not need 3.6Bn users. It would only need 110m, or 1/8 people of the combined US/EU population or ⅓ people on Linkedin. 

And when this means your work halving and productivity doubling, this suddenly the combination of price and market penetration does not seem so crazy. 

So, the next billion dollar question is: who is going to reap the benefits of this? 

The players in the search industry

Microsoft

Did you forget about Bing? In this new game they’re not an outsider; rather they’re the dominant platform. There is a few reasons for that. Firstly, Microsoft is a SaaS-first business and workplace is its bread and butter. Office, Teams and Outlook and search v2 make for a good combination.

Secondly, they invested $1bn in OpeanAI, the business behind GPT-3. Additionally, they have the customer base and thus very effective distribution. 

Finally, Microsoft owns LinkedIn and GitHub. The former is conveniently the most powerful distribution mechanism to businesses while the latter provides an edge to Microsoft within the developer community should they decide to pursue a platform approach.

Google

This is definitely Google’s opportunity to miss. Google Cloud and its enterprise division are very well positioned in the space of productivity and Google can already power search V2. Additionally, many organizations rely on the search giant for Storage, Sheers, Docs & email which is also one of its fastest growing segments. 

This could very well be another product offered as a premium tier of the gSuite or at least use the customer base of the division.

The main issue here is that Google has to face the innovator’s dilemma: how to launch a product which is competitive to the cash cow?

Startups

With GPT-3 being offered as an API this means that any startup can basically compete in the quest for dominating this new trillion dollar industry. VCs have also shown a clear appetite for funding productivity and working on the future of search would be as sexy as it gets 

This also makes sense since newcomers can have insights in specific use cases for business and enhance search with the necessary tools to make this a complete product for the industry. 

I feel inclined to highlight DuckDuckGo as a fit candidate since this approach would be completely in line with their privacy-first and, using GPT-3 as a basis for new search products, with their indie approach. 

Conclusion? Brace yourself. Search v2 is coming. it will be the biggest business since Google and it’s up for grabs. Possibilities are endless.


Games, corporatism and misaligned incentives: the internal downfall of the newsroom

You are reading Part 1 of a 3-part series on the publishing industry.

Part 1 is about the past. Specifically, the internal mechanics of publishing and the forces that defined the industry’s response to Google and Facebook. 

Part 2 is about today. How has publishing adapted to the change, what is working and what is not? 

Part 3 is about tomorrow and what sustainable news & content publishing can look like. 

——–

If you thought Google and Facebook killed the news industry you’d be right; but only partially right. 

It is true that the internet nullified the raison d’être of buying the paper. It’s also true that these two internet behemoths robbed the publishing industry of its audience and the attention that came with it. 

Disruption is the inevitable outcome in the life of any company. It is not possible to predict the future; it is within the realm of possibility to respond to the present. And that is where news has failed; in providing no response of their own for the past 27 years.

This is a story of games, corporatism, and misaligned incentives. Let’s start at the beginning. 

The business model of news

The first colonial American newspaper was printed in 1690. The New York Times is 169 years old. The industry itself is 330 years old. 

As it often happens, the news revolution was kindled by matching idealistic founders with a technological revolution; in this case, the printing press.

In the process of distributing the news, the founders of the first newspapers were the first to capture public attention en masse.

And in doing so, in these past three centuries, newspapers have enjoyed their fair share of influence, and profits. So much so, that there is a special term for their importance in our society. “The fourth estate” was coined to denote their crucial role in regulating our society. There was no other industry that enjoyed this level of attention. 

If anyone understood the importance of how stories underpin economic value, it was news publishers.

The news was immediately entrenched in society and publishers exerted a strong influence in the public sphere. With an addictive product, the revenue model was simple. Want the paper? Pay per unit. Want to read more newspapers? Buy more units. Circulation became the core metric. And circulation skyrocketed.

At the beginning of the 20th century, advertising found its natural place within the newspaper and the combined business model exploded. Advertising had zero marginal costs from a print and editorial perspective but all the upside. The news started selling the attention it captured.

And the cherry on the top? Starting a newspaper was hard. Matched with a high barrier to entry due to fixed costs (printing press, distribution) news publishing offered a recipe for a long-term oligopoly. 

The news business model had been on an unstoppable growth trajectory that would last almost  100 years. 

New Statesman, 2012

Internally, the job of a journalist was perceived as an elite craft and the editor’s job was revered. Editors commandeered the nation’s attention and journalists instigated commercial, political and social action one word at a time. The editorial team were the superstars of their industry basking in the widespread belief that revenue and influence stemmed from their actions. This level of attention is addictive and when the individual finds themselves in the middle of change, change is not welcome.

News itself was a cornerstone of society, a part of the system. The most brilliant of the institutions. The blueprint of a corporation. 

Fast forward to the end of the 20th century.

The market had reached peak maturity.  Revenue concentration, combined with barriers to entry has led to consolidation leaving a few despots and trusts running the show. They had become part of the establishment. 

And then the internet arrived.

Going free online  (1994 – 2006) 

Today it’s clear that the orchestrators of the internet, Google and Facebook, won our attention and the advertising dollars that come with it. In hindsight this is obvious. However, it could have been different. It started with one crucial decision: posting online for free. 

The Telegraph started posting online in 1994. The Guardian in 1997. Both for free. Reading the news online for free is a given today but at that point paying for news was standard behavior. In fact, the only behavior. So why go free? 

It is true that payment technology was embryonic (PayPal didn’t exist) and people’s appetite for transacting online was nonexistent. But even then, there could have been simple ways to work around this. News publishers had tight relationships with distributors and could reach corner stores, kiosks, and off-license shops. Selling a digital subscription through print would require a passcode within the newspaper to access a site. Or one providing yearly access. Cash could be exchanged physically at the point of purchase. Technicalities were not the sticking point.  

The first reason that emboldened publishers in going online early and free was conflating the notion of readership with that of a loyal audience. This is justified as in the past circulation was the only measure of both revenue and attention. Paying for information was a good enough signal the customer cared. And so, the presumption that readers would be loyal online too was not scrutinized. Circulation online was named traffic – the new core metric that mattered.

Since traffic was important, missing out on the new way to capture the audience bred fear. Fear of missing out. Every major publisher was petrified by the “what if” scenario where the internet explodes (hint: it did) and they missed out on following their audience (online). 

The reasoning went as such:
“If we go online, we can capture a new audience. And if we go free and the competition goes paid, we could capture their audience. In the likely scenario our competition goes free as well, we find ourselves in a good position for the future. This is more important than payments for now.”

So before understanding the threat of Google and Facebook, the news publishers viewed the internet as a Zero-sum game between themselves; one in which they were compelled to participate. 

To exemplify, assume a total market of 100 readers. Then a simplistic version of the publisher’s perceived payoff of going online in 1997 would look like this: 

Going online: Publisher’s perceived payoffs

From a short-term perspective, publishers were incentivized in going free. Going paid was also tricky as no one could predict the trajectory of news monetization online. What would be the right business model and how many people would be interested in reading online was unknown. In fact, buying a paper every morning was more convenient than downloading the news via a clunky modem on a slow churning PC. 

But in fear of their competitors thriving in the new medium, going free was a “what if” inspired action, a defensive play. Assuming a static order of things, there is certain merit to this logic. 

This period lasted approximately 15 years. It was not until 2010 when it became clear that the drop in print revenues was not a blip but rather a combination of broadband penetration, Google’s search dominance, and Facebook’s 600 million friends. 

Monetization online was still a question mark albeit one thing was clear; the open web was not good for business. Print circulation and ad revenues had been in decline for the past 5 years, quickly depreciating the once most valuable assets of the corporation, the printing press.

The time to be nonchalant and experimental had run out. Still, no business innovation. The News industry decided to chase pageviews instead of long term viability. This time it was not games of fear but rather corporatism and misaligned incentives that got in the way. 

Why the publishers didn’t react: an ode to corporatism (2006 – today) 

This might not be obvious yet it’s not an overstatement; the executives were, in fact, incentivized to avoid innovation. Here’s why.

The executive team (CEO, CFO) would set a strategy. Since they are appointed by the BoD, this is who they answer to. Their career success hinges first on staying in good terms with their managers, secondarily with the City of London (or Wall Street if you’re in the US), and then and only then with their customers.

Of course, where you pay attention defines what you see. 

Inevitably a CEO who wants to maintain their position has to keep the BoD and thus the stock at a stable level. How is this going to happen? Generally, there are two options: go after the market or go after internal mechanics. The former involves increasing market share, product innovation, and revenue with customers. It assumes entrepreneurship, innovation, and taking uncomfortable bets. The latter implies cost-cutting. And it bodes well with the corporate management approach. 

See, under the corporatist view, the interrelation with large institutions is the primary driver of value rather than market competition and innovation. Customers are simply in between and disposable. And institutions want to see higher earnings per share. And so innovation was too risky. It could rock the boat.

And there was the spin. Traffic was growing rapidly and despite digital advertising margins squeezed by Google and Facebook, the digital ads revenue was growing too. So, it was easy to present a story hinged on digital ad growth as a deus ex machina somewhere in the future.  

In parallel, circulation was plummeting for every publisher and the return of the fixed assets -printing, factories & distribution- is diminishing. This means one thing: an opportunity for consolidation. Consolidate printing and distribution, reduce the number of employees, increase prices per unit, and increase operating profit in the short-term leaving the long-term business model question to the successor. Such is the corporation. 

In the UK, there’s a perfect example: Reach PLC (FKA Trinity Mirror). In 2015, Reach PLC acquires Local world, a large regional publisher. In 2017, the Guardian scraps their £80m printing facility in Manchester and outsources printing to Reach PLC. In 2018, Reach PLC acquires the Express and other core publishing assets from Northern & Shell, combining circulation and revenue. Their operating profit margin increases almost every year whilst revenue like-for-like (revenue without the contribution of the acquisitions) drops sharply.

 Reach PLC, annual statement, 2019, page 2

Meanwhile, quantity over quality becomes an unspoken rule. Journalists are judged by the number of pageviews they rack up. Each journalist is required to publish multiple times per day at an average reach of 10,000 views per article, so that a stifling number of ads can be inserted and the short-term digital growth bubble won’t burst. The editorial department sees its craft slowly commoditized and finds itself ensnared in an existential crisis. A once symbiotic relationship between them and their corporate patrons becomes a balancing act ahead of a rift.

The effect on the product is also clear. Bounce rates are higher than ever, brand loyalty eroded and publishers are commoditized further, one post at a time. Editorial is not allowed to invest in what they do best; corporate is focused on margins and technology is a catch-up play. No hint or attempt for product innovation. 

The new strategy and story to stakeholders is simple: maintain a strong cash-flow position derived from the declining print revenues until digital revenue takes off. The elephant in the room is this won’t happen and it’s obvious both for strategic reasons but also by looking at the numbers. Given the digital advertising value chain, ads revenue for newspapers will never take off to cover for the loss of print revenue. 

Yet, this is a long-term problem. In the short-term these moves have a positive effect. Operating profit is increased and that is the goal. So much so, that the new CEO’s bonus is 70% influenced by operating profits and only 15% by “strategic goals” i.e. product innovation. The other 15% is revenue. However this is the same remuneration structure the previous CEO was offered. Perhaps an optimistic bet – if not naive – to replace the individual instead of the goal structure, especially since the CEO’s goals cascade over layers of the business stifling innovation. Then there’s the cynical view: pointing the finger at an individual is more convenient.

The narrative was found at last. But it was not one to inspire editorial, employees or customers. It is one of a beleaguered, ailing industry that is willing to do anything to survive. Erode its core value, destroy product integrity, and trust. A narrative suitable for Boards of Directors and investors. Publishers can keep on painting a positive picture of recovery whilst fundamentally passing the pressing question “what are we doing in the future” down to their successors. 

Financial analysts herald consolidation and cost cuts as moves to efficiency. The exec team will be deemed successful by executing on the strategy they set out and approved from the beginning. 

But in truth, at this rate, most news publishers will not make it. 

At last, startups are making shy steps towards a sustainable business model. Fake news, clickbait, and rigidity in news reporting have intensified the necessity for quality news and thus, business innovation. New organizations are embracing the world of social media and leverage niche audiences. It is still to be seen whether news publishers can ever reach their old glory and society can maintain the integrity of the fourth estate.

In the next part I examine news (and general content publishing) revenue models of today. What works, what doesn’t, and why.

Notes

Disclaimer: From 11/2016 till 6/2018 I acted as an Entrepreneur in Residence at Reach PLC working under the CTO to diversify the revenues of the business. The above post only reflects my personal beliefs.

Delivering food, capturing attention: what restaurants can learn from the publishing industry

Before the internet, publishers were in a very privileged position. Controlling the printing press was a true competitive advantage. Similar to other mass-produced goods, the machinery necessary to replicate the news of the day at national scale came at a high cost and the right to participate in the news creation did so too. As a result, the publishers controlled their geographies, their audience, and the advertisers who wanted to reach their audience.

Then along came the internet. Fixed costs for content production dropped down to (almost) zero. What used to be restricted information became abundant and personalization rules in abundance. Google and Facebook are the clear winners of the information economy and advertising online was the prize. 

Mistaking a platform for a channel

Both won by imposing their own rules in the discovery and distribution of content, and eventually owning the audience. Initially, both were heralded as great marketing innovations.

Publishers were mesmerized at the potential of a new global, growing reach. Before programmatic advertising and the maturity of hyper-targeting this was great news. Google and Facebook were seen as channels serving them, not as platforms serving themselves.

The shift from paper to digital delivery of news left publishers with a fraction of the advertising revenue they used to gain and a steep decline of the print circulation revenue. A double whammy.

This has been a bleak and deteriorating reality ever since. The scariest part of which is that it’s been 26 years since major publications launched online and it’s only now that the first signs of economic sustainability appear.

Perhaps not obvious at first, but the restaurant industry is following the same footsteps, commoditizing itself one delivery at a time.

Food delivery as a utility. 

In the UK, Deliveroo, like many a great company, started with providing value to a niche. Casual dining was the target. Connecting those establishments which didn’t offer delivery to the upper-end consumer who valued quality and convenience above cost, the goal.

“We are a restaurant, not a takeaway place” was a common thought for a lot of restaurants initially.

Deliveroo’s offer (and their sales) was hard to ignore. Off the back of the normal operation, why not make extra money? Deliveroo would make money from the extra fees clients paid. The restaurant didn’t pay but a small fee (if anything). 

In the beginning, Deliveroo was the perfect utility. Since the cost was zero or very low, restaurants were incentivized to inform their local base that now they could reach them even more conveniently; they could deliver the same quality of food at home. 

This was fantastic and it didn’t affect the restaurant’s economics. Deliveroo was a (near) free marketing channel.

Abundance, commodity and owning discovery

While hindsight is 20/20, in the moment it is not easy to spot the inflection point where a short-term opportunity turns to a perilous force. And this is because there was no qualitative change in the nature of the service to inform of the upcoming disruption. It was the users’ attention that shifted as a result of repetitively using the service.

Initially, customers would use Deliveroo or the other delivery companies (mainly Uber Eats) to get their favorite meals delivered, from their favorite places delivered. As the value of the service was higher than the delivery fees associated, usage increased and eventually the nature of the question changed from “how can we get X delivered” to “What are we eating tonight?”.

What started as an “add-to-basket-and-go” experience, was now turning into a discovery session.

As customers got habituated to using one place to get food delivered and, more importantly, to get inspiration, the power dynamics gradually shifted. Customers had less of a reason to stay loyal to the local pizza shop nearby. Why would they? Another authentic Italian Pizza place with great reviews was now able to reach them, sometimes enticing them at an even lower price, courtesy of the delivery companies.

To the discerning eye, the power to sway customer preferences is a pivotal moment. The channel was on its way to become the platform.

At the same time, this was but an imperceptible change for restaurants themselves; each place kept seeing their delivery revenue steadily increase and so did the confidence they placed on this quickly growing stream of revenue, devoid of quantitative concerns stemming from a drop in customer lifetime revenue. After all, such are the concerns befitting a tech company, not a restaurant. To their detriment, this is a view a lot of restaurant owners share as they prefer focus on the creative part of the experience.

The delicate balance of indulging their customers in trying the various options available whilst continuously growing revenues for restaurants was sponsored by the humongous growth of the delivery economy with the Venture Capital industry picking up the bill. In other words, the volume of orders for each restaurant was a derivative of market growth, not the performance of an individual operation. 

The result might seem obvious now but not so much then, especially not from the perspective of the restaurateur who experienced a booming business. For every new order they accepted however, the relationship with existing clients was diminishing and new clients were not represented by a name; a fleeting order ID sufficed.

More choice for clients equaled a lower volume of repeat orders to individual restaurants. In return, as restaurants had a wider addressable reach of clients, an equilibrium was found.

Finally, customers were now loyal to food delivery companies which dictated the discovery, delivery, and payment for food. 

And for this endless growth to be sustained the rake doubled to about 30%, charges were placed on the restaurants rather than the end consumer (or both) and delivery fees became “variable” (increased). Delivery companies now control the value chain and it’s time to squeeze as much value of the proceeds as possible, leading restaurants to re-think their razor-thin margins and business relationship with delivery companies.

Sound familiar? 

COVID and the acceleration of disruption in the restaurant industry. 

This was a slow process but then COVID-19 happened. And any lingering doubts were removed. Restaurants had two options: sign up to the delivery platforms or shut down. Or both. But one thing was clear: this was not the promised land they signed up for.

At the current pace and given the dynamics of the industry here’s what to expect. 

Kitchen and restaurant unbundling. Low cost space “dark kitchens” become mainstream. Restaurants are struggling to compete in an industry where their sole contribution to the value chain is a commoditized product. All other value-adding services have been stripped away from them. Marketing, payments, delivery operations, and real estate (dark kitchens) belong to delivery platforms. 

And just like that, restaurants are in the shoes of the publishers. Losing their customers attention means gradually giving up on their sovereignty.

Dominant marketplaces inevitably give birth to individual creators

But we have seen this cycle before. When a network reaches maturity and moves to a value capture phase there’s inevitably an economic incentive for creators, solopreneurs and SMEs to compete against the network and capture value from customers on the fringes of the network, kicking in another cycle of creative change.

As Amazon grows to unprecedented level, Shopify is growing even faster.

Substack grows in tandem with Medium and traditional media as the appetite for content is at an all time high.

This should inform us as to what might happen in the restaurant industry too. Restaurants have traditionally been low-tech, focused on fly-by traffic and didn’t have incentive enough to act any different.

However, there have been significant changes in the past 5 years. It is now possible to outsource delivery, have a direct relationship with customers and finally, capture the whole transactional value. And of course, now it is a matter of survival. How can they compete? Customer loyalty.

Lessons from the publishing industry moving forward

I’d be surprised if the dominance of the platforms was to be challenged anytime soon. In a way, it’s too soon. It’s the boiling frog effect once again and things won’t change before they get any worse. Delivery platforms play a significant part in keeping the lights on and, as such, it’s difficult to envision radical change.

But were things to take on a drastic change of course there’s a few lessons from the publishing industry and there is a few reasons for drawing that parallel.

In the attempt to own their audiences, publications have turned to multiple media and in doing so generate revenue from multiple sources. Subscriptions are starting to work, podcasts attract a different set of advertisers, events capture the value of an audience and social media drives premium newsletter sign ups that allows publishers to connect with their audience. Additionally, these exact same tools are available to micro, small or large enterprises.

A similar path seems possible for the restaurant industry.

From loyal customer to member: a viable path ahead

Despite the recent slump in retention, restaurants are indeed a high loyalty sector which becomes obvious with a quick glance at Deloitte’s report on restaurant spend. 49% of visitors spend at least 25% of their total restaurant budget in one place. 

Deloitte, Second Helpings:Building consumer loyalty
in the fast service and casual
dining restaurant sector

A loyal customer would be someone eating there once per month which looking at the graph above should be represented by the segment of people who spend 25% of more of their total restaurant budget, assuming eating out once per week that would be once per month. If that was the case there’s 49% of people that each given restaurant could target to convert.

Of the roughly 100 customers an average restaurant (25 seater) serves per day, or 3,000 per month we can assume that at least 10% will become repeat customers. This means that a restaurant hosts roughly 300 loyal customers monthly.

The second important metric that Deloitte points out was that (in casual dining) 9% claimed they’d be amenable to a subscription offered by the restaurants they visit and they’re likely to dine again. 

Deloitte, Second Helpings

It’s reasonable for a restaurant to convert 10% of its 300 loyal customers each month and expect these customers to do so with an increased spend. This would equal 1% of the total footfall.

In other words, this restaurant, assuming no churn for simplicity, should aim at 360 members in a year. 
Taking an Italian restaurant as an example and £15 as the cost of a pizza, it’s safe to assume the average member spend could be £25, the price of two pizzas discounted by ~16%, as an example of a simple membership perk.

That would amount to gross sales of £108,000 in annual recurring revenue or roughly 60% of the total revenue the restaurant would need to be viable. 

The restaurant owns its audience. 

Starting as low tech as a QR code on the food box offering a perk and later through a combination of email,  SMS or even a Facebook Group the new wave of restaurant operators would have the ability and the mindset to harness a community.

In an era where people are spending more time than ever in their local area and their social fabric has been eroded, the community feel (even virtual to begin with) is more important than ever. 

Community, multiple touchpoints and revenue diversification. 

On the basis of creating a community, a restaurant would seek to use an array of channels to deliver and capture a higher part of the value of their members. Educate on all culinary topics, offer exclusive perks (e.g. private dining after hours is a great one), exclusive meals (specials of the day) and/or cooking classes “how to cook X on your own” are some very basic examples. Especially since once owning a community, monetization opportunities present themselves.

Restaurateurs as creators 

Operating a community, subscription management, and payments is a solved problem and very much in the scope of being a creator. Finally, delivery can be outsourced to a 3rd party, dedicated delivery service companies like Stuart.

And this is already a big part of the value chain. 

Expect steps in this space and along these lines to be few and far in between as well as clunky for a while until dedicated SaaS platforms (an opportunity there) to arise to streamline these operations for a fraction of the cost.  

I’d be keen to hear from operators. If you’re in the space thinking along these lines, feel free to reach out, I’d like to hear from you. 

Notes

Restaurants* there is an implicit assumption that for sheer takeaway places things might stay the same since their margins were already low; in this article I mainly refer to restaurants offering seating which also didn’t offer delivery traditionally aka the casual dining part of the market.

Founder market (un)fit: why choosing the right market for you matters

Seems that these days everyone is talking about Product Market Fit. That magical moment when “you know you have it” or “your customers would be very disappointed if you didn’t exist”.

But PMF is hard and no matter what process you use it’s an elusive concept. It will take time and you will get stuck. So before you start thinking about that, there’s the prerequisite you, the founder, are the right person to take on this challenge. Founder market fit. Perhaps the most important, yet under-appreciated, part for the success of the business. It’s not a frequent topic of conversation. Early stage investors though do understand this and as such they want to know at least two things: 

  1. Is this founder technically equipped, or even better “the only one”, to execute on this problem?
    A perfect example would be Patrick Brown, from Impossible Foods. A professor in biochemistry decides to start a plant based burger which tastes and feels like real meet and to do this he will produce a lot of heme from plants.
    The whole business is based on a scientific insight only someone with this background could have had, recruit a team for and execute on. 
  2. What is driving this person? How do we know they will keep on going when things get hard?
    Once more, Patrick Brown. To come up with Impossible Burger, Patrick took an 18-month sabbatical to think where to focus his energy on and decided starting this company is the best way to go about protecting the future of the environment. 

Not every case is so clear cut. Very often a founder will stumble in an industry as a customer or have an itch they’re trying to scratch themselves. And then there’s a need to assess how well that person (you) can operate in this industry. Is it a good fit for you, the human?

More often than not, we get excited about the idea, the product, the customer and don’t examine the long term match of the person in a particular market.

However, if you are starting a business and you’re going to dedicate years of your life in, you better make sure the every day life in your chosen field adds rather than drains your energy.

A fundamentally wrong argument that can mislead is to think you will love the process no matter what. Yet the process is not an esoteric task; rather it’s a by-product of the market you’re in.

It’s not obvious and easy to confuse. For example, you might think that a mechanical engineer would be a great fit for the automotive industry: (s)he has the credentials, the quantitative background and might see solving hard problems as their mission and hobby but: how would every day look like? Would they thrive socially within a manufacturing culture ridden by safety and regulation? Is is possible to work remotely? What about dressing in a particular way? How does that affect the rest of the day? This might seem trivial from the outside but it’s every day. And “every day” follows the magical trajectory of compounding.

With that in mind, here’s some thoughts on areas to research to conclude whether you’re a fit for a given market.

  1. Market dynamics: What’s the market currently like? Is there fierce competition already? Is it a rapidly growing and nascent or boring old market?
    Depending on the state of the market you may have the ability to stay in stealth or need to go loud and quick. This implies a whole different setup, day to day life and organizational structure. 
  2. Business model: Your business model is not your revenue. It encompasses all the exchanges between people and systems to create (product), deliver (marketing) and capture (sales) value. As such, the founder’s obsession needs to serve the business model. When Jonah Peretti decided you start BuzzFeed he was deeply interested in the mechanics of why people share content. Or take Ray Kroc of McDonald’s. Relentless in the pursuit of opportunity and deal making. A salesman by nature, he grasped the potential of expanding McDonald’s from a nifty restaurant to a global phenomenon by selling to franchisees that involved constant, rutlhless deal making. Now imagine if they ran each other’s business. Not so obvious, right? Is the problem the business requires the one you’re inclined to solve?
  3. Key activities:
    Then depending on your business model, you will have certain key activities that are not to be underestimated. These are the things that will actually occupy your day to day. For instance, running a sales driven business is fundamentally different than an engineering one. HR. Culture. Metrics. Discussions. Amount of deep work. Everything is different. In a Sales driven organization you get shorter reward loops and morale is crucial. Communication is necessary, managing expectations too. And to run a top tier sales organization you will need a formula for your people, very aptly described by Marc Roberge in this book. On the other hand, if your business is engineering led things might be different. You will need to expect long reward loops, perhaps with no rewards for a long term, intellectually challenging conversations constantly and an analytically driven mindset to prevail constantly so that product quality is maintained.
  4. People and culture of the industry:
    And finally, the people and culture. Say you like finance. Do you like financiers too? Getting to like the people you will be selling or working with might be the most important thing. If you don’t enjoy your interactions, even if they’re minimal it is bound to cost the business. At the end of the day, businesses are a bunch of humans together and each business shares its own culture, rituals etc. Here’s a real life example when things went awry. A friend was part of a prestigious incubator. Built a SaaS business in the fashion industry. The business case was there. The salesmanship too. But the business didn’t take off. At the time, him and his co-founder were not even clear why. After the dust had settled and time had passed they told me: “It was impossible to get our point across. They didn’t get us. It was really frustrating”. Currently, the two of them have taken on a new business with great commercial success in another industry – oil and gas. It turns out that selling to geotechnical engineers and governments (!) was easier to them compared to selling to the fashion industry. 

So, ask yourself: will you be happy in your market of choice, given the necessary responsibilities and the people that come with it? 

If not, then you have a problem. In fact, I would argue it’s such a problem you should choose to focus on another business, one that feels like a great fit.

How to solve Founder market (un)fit

Still want to go in? In that case, here’s some suggestions:

  1. Find a co-founder that is deeply entrenched in the industry. If the market you’re in is not one that is a great fit for you, you can substitute some of the problems by getting a co-founder or senior executive to work alongside you. To open doors, develop relationships and generally do all the things you dislike. Usually, it will someone more senior with experience and an interest to join a smaller company and of course you will need to be very persuasive because these people are hard to come by.
  2. Get Social proof.
    Start with investors. Now you don’t just need money, you need smart money. In this case your investors are signalling to your market that you are important and worth listening to. Are you in Oil and gas? Get BP to invest in you.
  3. Get influencers and create thought leadership.
    Then you invest in thought leadership. If you can’t be the voice, use your resources to befriend those that are and get endorsements.

Conclusion? It is going to cost, will feel uncomfortable and will place higher demands on you. The need to fundraise differently, hire differently, grow a larger team and a brand early on etc. 

There you have it. Founder market fit. It can make or break your business so ask the hard questions and ask them early. In the end, you need to feel good to perform well.

The effect of high market growth rate on company strategy

Analyzing markets is not an easy task. It’s going down the rabbit hole. Dynamics, competition, fragmentation or consolidation, PEST, TAM, SAM, SOM are just the tip of the iceberg.

That said in competitive environments, there is one ratio that stands alone. Market growth.

Jeff Bezos apparently decided to start Amazon upon realizing that the internet was growing at 2300% YoY.

From a product strategy perspective it might feel easy to discard market growth as another statistic. In fact, you might go as far as to say that a differentiated product offering would fare better against a steadily growing (stagnating & mature) market which is already shaped and rigid where differentiation has the ability to disrupt, erode, and re-distribute (to your benefit). And that is true. It can happen. But it’s against the odds success where a startup disrupts an industry, not the norm.

In practice, high-growth markets have a few fundamental advantages.

  1. High growth rates coincide with medium to small markets driven by early adopters.
    Easier to identify, target, and create early communities.
  2. Growing demand means that supply can have healthy margins.
    Since the market is growing and demand often outstrips supply, there is no incentive for suppliers to engage in price wars.
  3. Paid acquisition is very low and it’s possible to acquire customers at large.
  4. It’s possible to grow without a highly coordinated & sophisticated marketing plan.

COVID, Cycling and bike shops

Bike shops are a good example. It’s September 2020. The restrictions of the pandemic are very much in place. One of the (few) good outcomes of the pandemic is the rapid rise in cyclists where at least in the UK, their number of increased by 100% within 8 weeks.

Have you passed outside a bike shop? If you haven’t and you want to see the effect of rapid market growth in practice, find the most obscure bike shop, one without a website, and pass by on a random weekday. It’s very likely they’d be packed.

In fact today, I had to wait 1.5 hours to get a simple fix on my bike at a mom’n’pop shop that does not have a website or any market presence whatsoever. Why? Simple. Before COVID 42% of people > 5 y.o. had access to a bike and 8% cycled weekly. Within a space of 8 weeks the total miles increased by 120% and since all other means of public transport fell by a whopping 95% the urgency to fix our primary vehicles elevated from a “to-do” to a must-do. Result? Bike shops are getting customers left right and center with no effort. The market is pushing them up.

Market growth first, company second

The bike shop example showcases a fundamental truth: Jump on a wave and the wave will help carry you. In the case of the bike shop, it’s literally “Offer to fix it and they’ll come”.

In the case of a new business? Its so much better to follow market growth than not. It’s not just another metric. Then again, you can always go for a bike shop.

Why genius does not exist

Our society likes to glamourize genius, overnight successes and anything that can be attributed to inherent advantages. If you’re remotely close to VC-Twitter you’ll hear talk about brilliant founders; if you’re into sports, journalists talking about talent and in dinner parties where “charismatic” is the common description for successful people. It turns out things are a bit different and if anything, for better or worse, intelligence does not matter a lot.

There’s a few sound arguments against genius myth:

1. The intelligence delta between a “genius” in the top 0.1% and an upper bound average average individual according to their IQ is roughly 30% (average between 110 and genius = 140).

This means that at any given point, someone can be 30% faster compared to another average person at the same topic. Assuming all other personality traits and background to be the same, then it would take the average individual ~ 1 hour more to work through the 3 hour problem the of the high IQ.

Considering that most people spend 1+ hours per day in social media, this does not seem a lot.

2. There’s a few researchers and authors who make a great case that “compounding” returns is what make a difference in achievement; not inherent ability. Malcolm Gladwell talks about this extensively in his book outliers, introducing concepts like the 10,000 hour rule and “concerted education” and Angela Duckworth in Grit where she explains her model that achievement = passion x effort =>Skill x effort = achievement.

In other words, anything worth mentioning takes time and even if someone is 30% smarter, they need to put in years of work to create something remarkable. Then intelligence does matter. But if someone is smart and quits in a matter of months and someone is less intellectually apt yet passionate enough about the task at hand to dedicate years, the winner is clear and it’s not the most intelligent one.

Considering how many people truly excel and the time dedicated, It’s more remarkable and rare to score high on grit and perseverance than intelligence.

3. Take a really fast computer to solve complex problem with a large dataset and run a dumb, inefficient algorithm and you will be disappointed. Take a mediocre computer with an optimized algorithm and rest delighted in the speed differential.

This is so true in humans. Where software, replace with mental models and thought patterns. Our lives and the decisions we make are vastly more complicated than what we can process alone. We rely on collective knowledge and intelligence to survive. Good decision making is much more important than raw processing power and yet it’s not the smartest that makes the most efficient use of mental models or perspective. It takes training, not ability.

4. Capital is the largest intelligence differentiator.

Capital allows indiscriminate additions of intelligence to one’s roster.

Almost certainly it’s better to work with a designer, a programmer and a writer than you doing all these jobs. In fact, mental models imply this would be wrong (context switching costs).

This is also useful in answering the question:”Should you hone your skills or strengthen your weaknesses?”

Slightly tangential, yet I think it’s fair to answer: None of the above. If you want maximum impact, partner with others and let them hone their respective strengths to complement your weaknesses.

Of course this answer only fares well from an organizational perspective but is there a worthy pursuit which only an individual is interested in?

Coincidentally the reasons geniuses don’t exist is also the recipe to productivity, purpose and achievement. Go make your genius.

When Managed Marketplaces Don’t Work And Why SaaS Enabled Ones Do

Sometimes a marketplace is flawed and headed for a tough time before it even begins. But it’s not unlikely that this does not become evident until £20m has been invested. So, it begs the question: how can you know if that is the case and what can you do about it?

Network effects, liquidity, TAM, are some of the many things that a marketplace needs to get right. All very aptly described by Bill Gurley here. The list in the post is informative, concise and certainly correct. But if we were to put these in a timeline, gap related to the execution in the middle emerges. For instance, you can know if you have a big market from the get-go and by the time you experience network effects it all gets easier however, everything in the middle is murky, complicated and multivariate.

In a 2018 post, Eli Chait published a very insightful piece where he correlates the fragmentation of buyers to marketplace success.

Effectively, his research reduces the complexity of the first list to one metric that’s a bit meta; he’s positing that for a marketplace to be successful there is an inherent characteristic the market needs to possess and that is a very large amount of buyers (1 million buyers for one business) and for those buyers to also be fragmented.

This is a useful point because it identifies the principal component of success amongst many other variables and thus simplifies the problem. Can you get a million buyers? If not, then the cards are stacked against you.

Once more, if you have 400,000 buyers already this is a meaningful insight. You can approximate the value per added buyer in the network and roughly calculate if you can escape velocity through network effects.

But what if you’re just starting? What if you have 100, 1000 or even 10,000 buyers? Are the above enough to ensure that a marketplace is the right model for a given industry? How can you tell if your unit economics can mature to reflect a £1bn marketplace?

Perhaps there is a way to know what will NOT work. And there if there’s one thing to steer clear from is services with inherent repeatability of transactions between the same supplier and buyer. If that is the case, then scaling a marketplace to the 1 million buyers, 1 billion GMV will be tough.

And there is both an intuitive and analytical approach to explain why. But first, why is the lack of repeatability a benefit? Uber is a good example.

From the perspective of the supplier (driver), Ubers works like this. A driver can reach clients previously unreachable and get access to a set of value-adding services to make the job easier. In exchange Uber takes a fee per ride. Every time a new rider connects with a driver, Uber has taken care of: finding the client, navigation, safety measures and, seamless payment in the end. But since the whole CLV is (most likely) equal to the value of the ride, the next time the driver picks up a new rider, (s)he will reap the same exact benefits from Uber and Uber will receive the same fee.

In other words, supply and demand see each other as a commodity. Therefore a platform facilitates the transaction. Uber is there to ensure that a code of conduct is enforced (safety, trust, politeness etc) and enables transactions that would not be possible before (eBay, AirBnB are also good examples). This is an example of Bill Gurley’s point on “technology expanding the addressable market”.

From the supplier’s perspective, Uber’s value per ride is the same.

However, there are industries where the above hold true and still have fundamental issues in their economics, because of the loyalty repeat transactions create. Take therapy for example. The more therapists, the better the matching. A marketplace can expand the market via remote therapy, matching and also by creating the necessary privacy and trust for clients to make the first step. It’d be closer to how eBay grows the market (remove friction) than how AirBnB, Fiver or Uber do it (without them it’d be impossible).

But still, in the UK alone there are at least 2,500,000 people that will receive privately funded therapy per year. Trust is necessary initially. Structural and attitudinal barriers can both be addressed by marketplaces and therapists have a constant need for new clients as some come and some go. Yet, a therapy marketplace won’t work. Why? Because of the repeatability of transactions. A therapist is not able to see more than 25 clients (max) per week (50-75 uniques per year) and a client will only see one therapist.

That would not be a problem if the marketplace could capture a chunk of the value across the lifetime of therapy. However, the value-add of a marketplace declines after the first session because the client forges a trust relationship with their therapist. By definition, therapy is about the trusted relationship.

From the perspective of a therapist, a therapy marketplace exists for referrals.

In fact, from the perspective of the therapist, the marketplace doesn’t only stop adding value but can detract value. After the first session, a therapist will start adding notes for a client, have constant communication with them via their preferred medium (e.g. WhatsApp), receive the payment in a centralized way (e.g. PayPal) and agree on a fixed schedule which on a per-client basis at least, is simple.

Consequently, after the referral is done, the marketplace introduces a cognitive cost to use its add-on services (e.g. automated payment collection). If the therapist wants to use the marketplace they have to do extra admin on another space to keep their operations centralized.

Therefore, taking the client away from the platform is natural. Disintermediation is inevitable and thus, CLV real < CLV expected, which leads to unsustainable economics and does not allow the marketplace to scale.

Enter SaaS enabled marketplaces, or SEM

So, repeat transactions present a structural barrier for the marketplace to achieve strong unit economics and scale. Still, suppliers do need services to grow and manage a practice.

This is where a SaaS-enabled marketplace can provide a solution for a few reasons.

  • The positioning of the product is not necessarily around lead generation
  • Consequently, pricing is not pegged on “getting more clients”
  • Finally, the supplier might bring the clients onto the platform voluntarily which alleviates the platform from the burden of CAC but also positions it to capture value across the lifetime of the client.

From a cash flow perspective, this allows for a direct reinvestment of revenue per supplier to acquire new suppliers. Eventually, when there is a critical mass, then the platform can aggregate them and introduce a new service on lead generation but without the pressure of that being a promise. Shopify’s Shop app is a good example of that.

So, are repeat transactions intrinsic between supply and demand in a market? If so, it will erode the marketplace unit economics and pose challenges in scaling to network effects. Looking at the “come for the tool, stay for the network” approach is the more appropriate strategy for these kinds of markets and can still take to the same end point but in a more sustainable way.

The tangible contribution of a strong brand to top line growth

Allocating budget and effort to brand awareness has always been a struggle for me. During my time at Timewith, I have witnessed firsthand the importance of a solid brand. It’s therapy, one of the human services where trust is the industry currency. But despite being so obvious, I was never able to articulate the exact function of brand to the marketing mix.

It does not take an MBA to understand that a strong brand is important. It’s not an exaggeration to say that sometimes a strong brand is everything. For FMCG this is true. Just a look at cleaning products should satisfy even the most deep-rooted doubts. Tesco’s antiseptic surface cleaner: £1/500ml. Dettol antibacterial cleaner: £1.75/500ml. We are talking about 75% difference for a product category that is arguably commoditized. That is crazy and what’s more, more people buy Dettol. The same trend exists across categories. Detergents, dishwasher tablets, food, candy. A strong brand brings about this elusive halo effect that can elevate a product or service to what was previously unimaginable.

But it’s not measurable

But here is an issue. How do you build and then how do you measure the importance of a brand? How does that correlate with your budget allocation?

See, for someone coming from an engineering and business background where “data is king” seeing ads on the tube, buses made me squirm for a while. “What a waste of money” I’d think.

At Timewith we recently expanded our product line with Assistant, a better way to manage one’s practice. While, I dislike the phrase and the positioning, Assistant could be classified as a practice management tool. Practice management is very different from therapy services because without search ads, it’s difficult to target clients at the right context i.e. identify purchase intent. And because practice management is a loyalty product, implying a high CLV and thus CPC and Google Ads are prohibitive.

So, we invested a lot on content marketing, community building and social media. I started seeing my LinkedIn following grow but I was still not clear on how this will convert, nor how to attribute value.

Understanding the value of a brand

But last week, I received a LinkedIn message that genuinely changed my world view. A therapist reached out to me directly to ask me some advice about her practice. We set up a call without really knowing how I could be of help and right off the bat she said:” I don’t know if you guys offer this, but I am interested in getting a better way to book my clients. I didn’t know who does that and immediately thought Timewith might have a solution for my practice! Do you guys offer anything like that?”

“Yes, we do”.

I felt the dots connecting for the first time. It was illuminating.

Brand awareness sole purpose is psychological priming. Priming occurs when a first thought or stimulus is tightly linked to a second thought. When we think “blue” , we might think “sea”. when we think “soft drink” we think Coca Cola. When we think “Michael Jordan”, we think Nike.

Two things are important here.

  • For my client “practice management” and Timewith were linked because of us posting on Social media insights, statistics and strategies for private practices.
  • Equally importantly, when it was time to look for a solution, instead of “thinking” from scratch or searching on Google she relied on her existing knowledge, and tried to think who’s “top of mind” and thought of Timewith. Why? It’s easier, and faster.

So if we combine and generalize the above two, we can come up with some conclusions.

  • What is the purpose of Brand awareness? To attach a strong link between a customer and an entity, function, product category.
  • What is the tangible result? Direct conversions. The customer will come and attempt to shop from the recognized brand before searching elsewhere.
  • What is the unique function of a brand in the marketing funnel? That it’s top of mind and trusted. Hence the user “does not need to think” and incur a cognitive load. In other words, the brand will not be compared.

Using Google Search to uncover brand priming

Yep, Nike is the only brand that comes as a recommended result when I type “basketball shoes”. Is it such a surprise? Isn’t Nike obviously a shoe company?

But it’s so much more than that. It’s about performance, sportsmanship, nice jerseys.

Tuns out there is a way to look at what are the most common associations of a brand. Simply type the name of the brand on the Google search bar and look at the recommended results. These are the things that people have linked strongly with the brand.

Again, no surprises here. Nike is undeniably linked with: Trainers, Basketball, Jordan and the Swoosh Logo.

Let’s go a level deeper. Let’s examine second level associations where the strategy takes off. What do I get if I type “Swoosh Logo”, the Nike Logo?

Suddenly the connections expand. It’s not about trainers anymore, which was the only product that Nike sells that came up in the first search. Suddenly the Nike brand is linked to trousers, hoodies, joggers, pants too.

In other words, priming can be passed on downstream. This explains why Nike wants to support top athletes. Because by supporting Michael Jordan it becomes the de facto brand in basketball, by supporting Tiger Woods, it is the brand for Golf and so on.

So a general framework emerges.

A brand makes sure to create a priming effect with concepts that are important to it e.g. celebrities and then let’s the value be created downstream from the associations that emerge.

And just like that, brand awareness becomes a tangible, budget worthy pursuit even for startups.

The (near) future of therapy is not online

As creative disruption teaches us, innovations start small. The original concept satisfies a small use case, seemingly innocent to cast doubt over the established modus operandi, but offers distinct advantages to a few niche users.

Online commerce was like that in 2000. 

Online therapy was like that in 2010. 

And then online commerce started growing steadily. Initially it was an add on, a nice to have but eventually it has brought the high street to its knees. 

Remember, there were really good arguments for retail to begin with: “no one buys something they can’t try. No one trusts paying online. Do you know the product is genuine? Can I risk giving a stranger my credit card? On the shop, I can try the item, look at it and feel it, get advice, purchase safely and use it on the go.”

It’s not that long ago that using a credit card online was considered risqué.

And here lies the question: Is the same thing going to happen to therapy? Is online therapy, accelerated by the advent of Covid-19 going to replace the way practitioners help people? 

It is not a dissimilar conundrum. 

Traditional therapy has similar characteristics: it relies on real estate (therapy room) to be delivered, claims that for the relationship to flourish physical presence and a holistic sensory input are required and is bound by a strict and centralised code of ethics which dictates even the logistics of it (e.g. payment). 

Online therapy, indeed, still feels like the lesser good for a lot of people and therapists alike. But it is more cost efficient (or can be). It is more immediate. It’s more convenient. For few, it has been a life saver. 

So, It seems fair to draw a parallel and ask: 

Is therapy going to experience its own existential crisis?

But here’s an inherent difference: Therapy is about feelings & thoughts. Those are very often around about relationships with others. I bet > 90% of people in therapy talk about their relationship with others often.

And during Covid, which media seems to be touting as a general disruptor and propeller of online therapy, there are two categories of people locked in: Singles and non-singles.


And whilst, to my regret, I don’t have data to prove this nuanced detail here’s my assumption: For those that are forced to stay indoors with their loved ones, online therapy is not feasible.

Why? Because for all intents and purposes, the people they want to talk about are the ones they’re locked in with and they don’t feel they can maintain the necessary privacy. As a result, a new appreciation for a physical, safe space emerges. And that safe space might require a set of walls and a far-from-home location. 

And that is a fundamentally an opposing wave to “online is accessible”. 

More likely scenario is that therapy will adjust with the fitness industry. Working from home kits, courses that can be booked online have been available but the need for a dedicated space, sharing a workout with others is very much in trend. Really, it’s a different experience. 

So, prediction? If and when we go back to “normal”, online therapy’s popularity will certainly not be anywhere near traditional, in person therapy. It will keep on growing inevitably but the true revolution is yet to come. 

The true revolution will require a few things that are currently not available. 

  1. A full investment from both parties (no notifications and distractions) 
  2. A sense safety and privacy 
  3. And a sense of physically be present in a shared space.

VR covers a lot of the above but leaves one exposed to their surroundings so it requires a safe communication method which for now hints at Neuralink’s way. I hope this post ages well but… gut feel? None of that is coming soon.