Independent stores are like Etsy, but not limited to handmade – Tumblr users can sell what they craft, draw, photograph, and compose directly to their followers. Tumblr facilitates the transaction via credit card or Paypal, taking a modest 5% transaction fee. Not only does this generate meaningful revenue, it creates a really amazing virtuous cycle for user growth: sellers promote their tumblogs offline to drive business, which drives more users registrations, which create more sellers, who then promote their shops, etc. At least, that's what we saw at Etsy. At last estimate, Etsy did ~$3M/month in revenue, an easily attainable goal for Tumblr. The integration is non-instrusive: Tumblr users can choose to add a "Purchase" button to the bottom of their post that is tied to an item they've added to their tumblr shop (also viewable at user.tumblr.com/store). Followers who click the button input their billing & shipping info via an overlay to purchase, then are returned right to where they were in the dashboard. Like at Etsy & Ebay, Tumblr processes the payments but otherwise leaves transaction coordination to the buyer & seller. Down the road, Tumblr could aggregate all of these items together into a Tumblr Marketplace, for people who want to exclusively browse the items for sale by all Tumblr users.

Retail partnerships would work like this: Tumblr does custom integrations with the major retailers (Barneys, Nordstrom, Gilt) so that every time a post containing a link to a partner's product page is detected, a "Purchase" button is embedded at the bottom of the post. Clicking the button leads the user through a purchase pipeline. Tumblr gets a 5-15% affiliate fee. I believe Tumblr can negotiate very aggressive revshare deals because of the volume, the incremental revenue, and the demographic. The reason why nobody can do this except Tumblr is because Tumblr's users are curators, and curators are the missing component. Amazon is great at selling books but is awful at softlines (retail speak for fashion items) because there are so many items and they go out of style every 3 months. (Read my post for more detail.) Tumblr's community of curators is the secret ingredient that I believe can bring e-commerce's current single digit share of the $225 Billion US fashion market into the double digits.

Here's the math: Tumblr claims 60M posts per day or 22B per year. If we assume 0.1% of posts fall into the e-commerce category, each post gets viewed by 200 followers, 1% of those followers buy something, and Tumblr makes a $2.40 transaction fee per sale (8% on $30 item), that's $105 Million per year.

Given a small team with the right skills, Tumblr could get this going in 3-6 months. The $100M question is, why aren't they already doing this?

Screenshots of the app coming next.

1. 22M reviews of 19M businesses, averaging 100 words per review.
2. 529k businesses have "claimed" their page.
3. 19k local businesses pay for advertising, spending an average of $234/mo.
4. Yelp made $40M in local advertising revenue so far this year, and $58M overall.
5. That said, Yelp lost $7.6M in revenue so far this year, mostly due to spending $38.5M on sales & marketing.
6. Yelp admits that a substantial amount of their traffic comes from search engines, with Google representing 50% of that traffic, and if they were to lose their rank in unpaid search results, they are screwed. I mean, it would have a "substantial negative effect."
7. The top categories for reviews are "Shopping" and "Restaurants", each representing 23% of all reviews. I'm surprised, as I've never looked at a "Shopping" review. I would have guessed "Restaurants" would be 50%.

The biggest takeaway here is that Yelp is actually have a HUGE problem getting businesses to engage with them. Only 2.78% of businesses have claimed their Yelp page, and only 0.1% of businesses are advertisers. That's despite what you'd imagine to be a strong brand that a lot of people know. I wonder how Foursquare feels…

Anthony (soupsoup) has clearly understood that potential from the beginning, both in how he uses his Tumblr dashboard to curate news and how he manages Neighborhoodr.

Anyway, yesterday I finally got to meet Christina Cacioppo, Union Square Venture's newest associate, and she told me that she's been seeing a lot of pitches lately trying to tackle the relevancy problem through personalization (something I know a lot about having been the product manager for that team at Amazon.com). This is both relevancy as it relates to news, e-commerce, or otherwise (art, music, relationships). Our conversation reminded me of what David Karp said and what Anthony does… and given Tumblr's latest round of funding I've been thinking a lot about what I think Tumblr could do to create $500M in value (which is what I think their exit would need to be given their latest round and valuation).

So where is the real value? I don't have it all figured out yet. My intuition is applying the tumblr human filter network to long tail categories – fashion, news, humor, art, music – as a way to extract the diamonds from the rough. Is that monetizable? Maybe it is, in the context of e-commerce, where people pay to purchase those fashionable objects, artistic pieces, digital albums, or concert tickets.

Tumblr currently has 47.8M uniques a month, according to Quantcast. For the purposes of easy math, let's say they get to 100M uniques in 12-18 months, and 3% of all users buy something via Tumblr post. Furthermore, let's say the average item price is $15 (way less for music, way more for clothing / tickets / art) and Tumblr takes a 5% transaction fee. 100M * 3% * $15 * 5% = $2.25M / mo or $27M / year. Add on a couple other revenue streams (premium themes, sponsored posts in your dash, sponsored Radar items, sponsored Tumblrs you might want to follow) and I could see them getting to the $40-50M / year range. Not sure that gets you acquired for $500M, but it's in the ballpark.

What do you think?

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*Basically, give every Etsy user a tumblog, and populate it with all of the items they "favorited". Then, you could follow the tumblogs of people who's tastes you loved. The motivation was to solve the "I can't find anything on Etsy" problem, plus increase user engagement. We both left Etsy before we could make it happen. Hopefully SVPPLY can fill the gap we saw.

Micro VCs are notorious for building large and friendly syndicates.  One or two players decide (sometimes rather quickly) to make a seed-stage investment in a new startup, and as a round comes together they invite in a number of their Micro VC and angel cohorts.  What’s the reasoning for all of this chummy behavior?  While traditional VCs sometimes have a love/hate relationship with their syndicate partners (often depending on how well their mutual portfolio companies are performing), it seems as though in the Micro VC arena all of the players speak and act like best friends.  Can this friendship last forever?

Just like traditional VCs, Micro VCs syndicate to pool their risk and their (tangible and intangible) resources in maximizing the upside of the investment while hedging the downside.   Therefore, the most obvious reason for Micro VCs to syndicate more prevalently is due to capital constraints.  When a Micro VC is working from a relatively smaller pool of capital (usually less than $25M per partner), it would prefer to spread risk out further.  Plus, unlike traditional VCs which have capacity to invest over the life-cycle of the startup, Micro VCs can usually only afford to play for a round or two.  Or not even a full round in many cases.  By definition MicroVCs need each other.

However, the friendly nature of syndicates is not just dictated by capital constraint, but deal sourcing and velocity as well.  Perhaps implicit in Micro VC model is the aim to potentially maximize the number of good deals to deploy capital, as opposed to maximizing the amount of capital deployed into a number of potentially good deals.  Given the number of deals that they do each year, Micro VCs more actively turn to their peers for deal sourcing.  This situation is further exaggerated by the smaller funds they manage which result in less management fees.  Without additional cash flow coming into the firm, Micro VCs lack the ability to hire associates or other support to provide leverage on deal sourcing, so they instinctively turn to their fellow firms.

This reliance on outsider syndicates for deal flow does present risks for Micro VCs.  Outsourced deal sourcing shouldn’t be confused as outsourced deal diligence – a potential fatal flaw which does certainly happen.  Playing nicely in syndicates is not reliable due diligence, period.  This group-think effect also fosters a negative situation for entrepreneurs as well.  With Micro VCs building syndicates in familiar packs, a cursory investment decision by one group-member can spread quickly.  Somebody passes in a clique, and soon an entrepreneur is receiving an automatic “no” from the rest of the network of informal ties.

The third reason Micro VCs travel in overly-friendly packs is that the Micro VC space is relatively immature, so the supply of good investment opportunities is still outweighed by the demand.  Almost all of the firms or quasi-firms are just a couple years old.  As the Micro VC space matures and there are additional entrants in the market, potential competition for getting into deals and more capital in each will increase.  This evolution will drive up the “price” of getting into good deals and the chumminess will be dampened.  

Moreover, as some Micro VCs experience success and decide to change strategies by “growing up” into traditional VCs, their capital constraint goes away.  So players who were friendly originally may be less so down the road.  Yet just as traditional VCs are face their peer firms as coopetition, this situation will endure in the Micro VC segment as well.  As the space matures some of the over-enthusiastic pupply-love will be lost.  And if Mirco VCs lose their defining characteristics and become the pigs at the end of Animal Farm, they’ll lose the overtly syndicate friendliness.

But as long as these Micro VC players remain capital constrained and seek a higher deal velocity, they’ll remain good friends forever.  A critical mass of high quality friendly syndicates creates an activation energy for an ecosystem.  Having more smart people giving their time and their resources into a startup market creates a ripple effect of new companies, better performing companies, and ambitious entrepreneurs.  Afterall, it’s good to have friends.

This is a dynamic I'm in the midst of and watching very closely. I wrote about this in detail in my latest letter.ly mailing (sign up here!), but I predict "spray and pray" angels who put in $10-50k will get investing fatigue, Micro-VCs will beat out VCs for the new Series A ($750k-2M on $3-5M pre), and the first VC only rounds will look a bit like Series B rounds ($3-6M on $8-12M pre).

Lots of people continue to make over-strict comparisons between Japan's debt-engorged situation and that of the U.S. There is a new Credit Suisse report out arguing that such comparisons are way overdone. Here are the main bullets:

• The US has had far more proactive fiscal/monetary policy (Japanese monetary conditions were tight until 1995 unlike the US today, Japan fiscal easing was small);
• Japan had falling wages since 1997 and negative inflation expectations since 1993 (US wage growth and inflation expectations are >2%). Falling wages create sustained deflation;
• Asset deflation was more acute in Japan, with house prices declining by almost 80% in the big cities;
• The US moved to recapitalise banks quickly and have already written down 85% of their estimated losses (Japan needed 13 years to do that);
• Japan was very slow to de-regulate (and hence the price of labour fell as oppose to the quantity) with companies having little incentive to maximise RoE, the return on capital is a third of the US;
• Deflation became economically and politically acceptable because Japanese households have net financial assets of 41% of GDP so they benefit from deflation.

I don't disagree, but keep in mind that it's early. Japan has had more time to sink deeply into its mess than the U.S. has.

I'd like to think that the various US government bailouts have helped us avoid a decade of deflation, but I strongly believe there has been a structural shift in employment that will leave a lot of blue collar / lower middle class people out of work for a long time.

A huge challenge for user-generated websites is overcoming the chicken-and-egg problem: attracting users and contributors when you are starting with zero content. One way to approach this challenge is to use what Geoffrey Moore calls the bowling pin strategy: find a niche where the chicken-and-egg problem is more easily overcome and then find ways to hop from that niche to other niches and eventually to the broader market.

Facebook executed the bowling pin strategy brilliantly by starting at Harvard and then spreading out to other colleges and eventually the general public.  If Facebook started out with, say, 1000 users spread randomly across the world, it wouldn’t have been very useful to anyone.  But having the first 1000 users at Harvard made it extremely useful to Harvard students.  Those students in turn had friends at other colleges, allowing Facebook to hop from one school to another.

Yelp also used a bowling pin strategy by focusing first on getting critical mass in one location – San Francisco – and then expanding out from there.  They also focused on activities that (at the time) social networking users favored: dining out, clubbing and shopping. Contrast this to their direct competitors that were started around the same time, were equally well funded, yet have been far less successful.

How do you identify a good initial niche?  First, it has to be a true community – people who have shared interests and frequently interact with one another.  They should also have a particularly strong need for your product to be willing to put up with an initial lack of content. Stack Overflow chose programmers as their first niche, presumably because that’s a community where the Stack Overflow founders were influential and where the competing websites weren’t satisfying demand. Quora chose technology investors and entrepreneurs, presumably also because that’s where the founders were influential and well connected. Both of these niches tend to be very active online and are likely to have have many other interests, hence the spillover potential into other niches is high. (Stack Overflow’s cooking site is growing nicely – many of the initial users are programmers who crossed over).

Location based services like Foursquare started out focused primarily on dense cities like New York City where users are more likely to serendipitously bump into friends or use tips to discover new things. Facebook has such massive scale that it is able to roll out its LBS product (Places) to 500M users at once and not bother with a niche strategy.  Presumably certain groups are more likely to use Facebook check-ins than others, but with Facebook’s scale they can let the users figure this out instead of having to plan it deliberately. That said, history suggests that big companies who rely on this “carpet bombing strategy” are often upended by focused startups who take over one niche at a time.

Focus is a really important for early stage startups, as it forces you to stay close to your customers while achieving product / market fit. It also allows you to concentrate any word-of-mouth effects you may have, helping you build your brand + critical mass. Great post by Chris (as usual).

Today I want to talk about something that hit me pretty hard this past week on the last day of the TechCrunch Disrupt conference: for all the talk about Lean Startup vs. Fat Startups, no one was talking about the Starving startup.

Really quick background on what Lean and Fat startups are. "Lean startup" is this idea that startups who don't have product / market fit should stay quick and agile as they iterate and pivot. For example, don't hire an expensive VP of Sales and a 10 person sales team until you know you've got a product you can sell scalably. "Fat startup" is this idea that in some cases you need to spend heavily to win, because the gap between being #1 in a market and everyone else is large.

What I realized is that all this talk about "lean" was being misinterpreted by many (myself included) as "cheap". Stay small, don't hire unless absolutely necessary, figure out the perfect business model… and then raise a bunch of growth capital and ramp up. I think we've taken it too far and created the "Starving" startup. 

A starving startup typically has 1 product & business focused founder and one technical founder. Following the lean startup concepts, they build, test, and iterate on their product. Since it's just the two of them, it can take 1-2 years to find product / market fit – there is only so much 2 people can do, and typically the bottleneck is in engineering early on as the product gets built. After months or years of effort, they finally achieve product / market fit, as greater than 40% their survey respondents say they would be very disappointed if the product suddenly was no longer available. Congratulations!

Here's the problem: 1-2 years is an eternity for consumer web software, because "fast followers" can generally leapfrog the time you spent making mistakes, copy your successes, and be out in the market quickly. Heck, they might even get to product / market fit faster than you, by copying the general direction you're taking but making key innovations. Suddenly, you're fighting for your life in a crowded market… a market you created!

This is a long-winded (sorry!) way of saying I think startups need to raise more seed money than they have been. $200k (or $350k, the amount we raised) is too little. Sure, it keeps you hungry (literally!), but you're just not moving fast enough. If managed properly, an 8-12 person team with $1.5 million in seed money can make dramatic progress. Basically, an experienced and agile entrepreneur + access to capital is a powerful combination, so take the money! 

From an investors point of view, I can understand the hesitation – you want an entrepreneur to turn assumptions into facts and "de-risk" (hate that word, sorry) before investing significant capital. But if you come across an amazing team and a strong market, I think investors need to convince founders to take on more capital and increase burn to $50-$100k / month, while still practicing all of the agile "lean startup" techniques that Eric Ries, Steve Blank, and Sean Ellis have been preaching. Remember, just because you are thinking lean doesn't mean you need to starve.