LOCALPAD

Problem
With the rise of Ad blockers and mobile browsing, Ad revenues are declining. One million Blogs each with millions of readers face extinction unless they find new revenue model.

Solution
We offer a 'private eBay' like marketplace to enterprise Blogs, where readers can buy and sell blog-themed items with each other on the Blog itself. Blogs like it as it generates 10x more revenue vs Ads. Readers like to buy from fellow readers right on the trusted Blog that they are already visiting for product information. Survey shows that 64% readers will use the marketplace; most of them do not even use eBay. Trust is the key issue in 'online used goods' and we have a huge opportunity to grab a share of this $20B market using the massive outreach and trust of Blogs.

A Blog can deploy it on its site in minutes. It is ready to go as existing listings are shared across all Blogs in a vertical. We charge 8% to sellers on a sale and split it with the Blog.

Traction
In Oct'15, launched a broad FinTech/Social Networking SaaS that had 5 paying clients with 30,000 active users by Dec. In Mar, pivoted to focus on just the marketplace, as it had the strongest demand. We work only with large Blogs (1M+ readers); each generates $50K-$400K /yr for us.

In Apr-May, worked with 2 betas. In Jun, an enterprise client with 2M readers joined- generating $360K /yr for us. Pipeline has more large Blogs and newspapers e.g. Metro.us, NYC daily with 1.5M readers.

Competition
Marketplaces by Shopify, Magento and many others allow only the Blog or a few vendors to sell. Many of these fail because of limited inventory. We have greater, cheaper and more relevant inventory, as items are posted by Blog's readers themselves. We serve large Blogs, whereas others serve smaller Blogs. We share inventory across all Blogs in a vertical, other marketplaces are insular. Ours is the only inventory less/marketing less model.

High barrier to entry
As a FinTech product the core of our business is to facilitate user-to-user payments to millions of anonymous sellers and protecting users in disputes & fraud- it takes time to earn that trust. Vendors like 'Near Me' charge $1M+ /yr to lease such platform without any user protection. It is sticky as we can capture users' shopping and blogging data. Finally, it is built on top of integrated Networking, Reviews and Deals which are currently hidden for simplicity but will be turned on in future for comprehensiveness and virality.