00:06:33 · S3, S5, S10
Ad[00:06:33] S3: you time and over $700. Wanna get in on the membership duo of the century? Visit sam'sclub.com. Come join us. Sam's Club. Ad[00:06:41] S5: Annual plan only auto renews TNC apply estimate based on average combined Walmart Plus and Sam's Club Plus savings among members of both for one plus year versus nonmember or club member pricing slash fees. Excludes membership fees. See Walmart Plus terms and Sam's Club terms for more info. Ad[00:06:50] S10: This is Blue from the UPS Store with a very special holiday announcement for small business owners. We're open. Let's be real. Your deadlines don't take holidays. So while the other guys are checking out, the UPS Store is here to pack, ship, print, shred, notarize, and check more things off your list all year long. With over 5,500 locations, there's a blue near you at the UPS store. Shredding services are provided by Iron Mountain as is. Visit the upsstore.com/shredding for full details. Locations are independently owned. Product, services, prices, hours of operation may vary. See store for details.
00:06:50 · S10, S7, Levi Fawcett
Ad[00:06:50] S10: This is Blue from the UPS Store with a very special holiday announcement for small business owners. We're open. Let's be real. Your deadlines don't take holidays. So while the other guys are checking out, the UPS Store is here to pack, ship, print, shred, notarize, and check more things off your list all year long. With over 5,500 locations, there's a blue near you at the UPS store. Shredding services are provided by Iron Mountain as is. Visit the upsstore.com/shredding for full details. Locations are independently owned. Product, services, prices, hours of operation may vary. See store for details. Ad[00:07:20] S7: It's officially the holiday season, and Abercrombie's new collection has outfits for everything on your calendar. It's the busiest time of year, and between shopping and party invites, I don't have time to plan every look. But Abercrombie's always got me covered. Their sweaters are the perfect easy layer for low key plans. And on a nice night out, I'm reaching for their classic trousers. Fill your closet with the pieces you'll need all season long. Have a very Abercrombie holiday. Shop in the app, online, and in stores. [00:07:50] S9: Called marketplace. Competing with marketplaces is fundamentally a terrible idea. Marketplaces have these deep network effects, and so it just doesn't make sense to compete.
00:07:50 · Levi Fawcett, S8
[00:07:50] S9: Called marketplace. Competing with marketplaces is fundamentally a terrible idea. Marketplaces have these deep network effects, and so it just doesn't make sense to compete. [00:07:58] S8: It was a long journey. We built this company from nothing. Just a few guys coding away or riding away inside this dark caravan. It was a great sort of deep dive into how do you get your first customers? How do you do any marketing? It was just a wild experience for a young group of 20 year olds to have this taste of, wow, we could actually do something impactful in the world. [00:08:25] S9: On top of that, there were all of these kind of weird dynamics. About 20 of our customers sold parts online so they were always telling us 'hey can you make it easier?' Every other category most orders were coming from within New Zealand parts 85% were coming from outside of New Zealand and so the more we looked into this and the more we tied this back to my previous experience building things it became a lot more clear real global problem wasn't helping small and medium businesses. We thought about it for a long time. We didn't change the business for about two months because Allgoods wasn't failing. It was just not wildly successful, And we felt like every week we were doing something that was going to bring us to the next level or cross the line. It took us two weeks before we finally said, look, we're going to shut down Allgoods. From day one, we exist in New Zealand, but we're not a New Zealand focused company.
00:08:25 · Levi Fawcett, S8
[00:08:25] S9: On top of that, there were all of these kind of weird dynamics. About 20 of our customers sold parts online so they were always telling us 'hey can you make it easier?' Every other category most orders were coming from within New Zealand parts 85% were coming from outside of New Zealand and so the more we looked into this and the more we tied this back to my previous experience building things it became a lot more clear real global problem wasn't helping small and medium businesses. We thought about it for a long time. We didn't change the business for about two months because Allgoods wasn't failing. It was just not wildly successful, And we felt like every week we were doing something that was going to bring us to the next level or cross the line. It took us two weeks before we finally said, look, we're going to shut down Allgoods. From day one, we exist in New Zealand, but we're not a New Zealand focused company. [00:09:12] S8: A lot of people, when they think of automotive or when they think of parts, they think, oh, wow. That's a niche problem. But I think having a second thought about that, they realize this is an industry where everyone in their lifetime is buying parts multiple times. The latest numbers that we have on this is there's around about $1,900,000,000,000 spent on parts.
00:09:33 · Levi Fawcett
[00:09:33] S9: When I go and look for parts, I go door handle for my 2015 Toyota Corolla. There's actually 300 different variants of Toyota Corolla. Each one of those cars has a different door handle. The core thesis there was because there are so many parts and they fit so many different vehicles, because the data is so complicated, as a buyer, I want to put in my exact vehicle, and then I want to see all of the exact parts that fit. That's an incredibly difficult problem. It's painful for me as a buyer, but the question was, can it actually be solved technically at scale? The way we went about proving that was talking to customers. We talked and have continued to talk to hundreds of customers all the time. It's not statistical, it's a bit more anecdotal, but really understanding the business helps a lot. The second thing we did was go talk to buyers where they were, how they thought, the types of problems they faced, and so I think that's what we did. We tried to really understand based on these conversations and based on information we could find on forums and other. One of the most challenging things I think we've faced for us, we came extremely close to running out of money. This was during COVID actually. Those times were particularly hard because the enormity of the problem just felt overwhelming. I think at the time we thought maybe there's like a ten percent chance of solving it. That period was one of the hardest. The problem just looked so large and overwhelming that it didn't seem possible for a few people to solve it. There just seemed like there was no path forward.
00:10:57 · S8, Levi Fawcett, S0, S1, S2
[00:10:57] S8: What was really difficult was not so much the lack of money or worried about running out of money, it was more the pressure to turn what we'd been spending the past three years on, to turn what we'd been building, the relationships with customers that we'd formed over all of that time, trying to turn that into something bigger. For me, I'd been living without a salary for three years at that point. I think we're all very ambitious. I think we wanted to do something very impactful with our lives. It was a moment of taking a step back and really having to think, okay, what are we gonna have to do here? You know, what are we gonna have to do to to really achieve our ambitions, to really make the impact on the world that we want to want to make? [00:11:36] S9: We worked ridiculously hard, seven days a week, sixteen hours a day, and we just solved each problem as it came. There was no alternative. Right? The alternative was to stop, and then we probably never would solve the problem. We would have found those Ad[00:11:50] S0: This episode is brought to Ad[00:11:52] S1: you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. Ad[00:12:02] S2: It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Ad[00:12:05] S1: Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.