How to structure and market B2C marketplace apps
Hi everyone,
I'm excited to announce the final episode of Season 1 of Spark! with Shereen. I can't believe we've officially completed 30 full episodes and I thank you all for supporting us through this entire journey! We'll be taking a little break after this amazing accomplishment.
Now, let's conclude Season 1 with our latest episode.
In our latest episode, we sit down with Kerem Kuyucu who's the co-founder of JustMop, a platform that connects home dwellers with at-home service providers. Kerem has extensive experience building and scaling startups as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Rocket Internet and Country Manager at Foodonclick.
Your business value is depicted in its name
Choose a catchy name for your business that is easy, memorable, and related to the product or service you're offering. For example, JustMop came up with its brand name by entering the market as a pioneering cleaning platform. However, as the businesses started to offer additional at-home services as it scaled, they're considering rebranding to reflect its current business offering.
Customers find comfort in buying from brands that are specialists in what they do. For example, Instashop is a stop to buy groceries, Washman is best for bringing laundry and Uber/Careem is for hiring a driver. If companies that are known to sell one specific type of product or service start to excel in providing other products at a high quality then customers will trust them to provide something out of their expected specialization.
However, now super apps are in development. For example, Careem has now launched delivery services, such as, Careem NOW which delivers food at home. Similarly, Noon has started offering its own grocery delivery service called NowNow. This way, big successful apps are trying to become the hub for everything you need to buy regularly.
Marketing is important, but product-market fit is more important
Marketing should be done on both online and offline channels. With a younger audience, online channels like Tiktok and Instagram are the best places to advertise as they're the most frequently used by such an audience. To see which platform and what kind of content markets the best, businesses create a lot of content, test them all out and check results to see what performed the best.
All it takes for a consumer to shift between platforms is the customer experience
But, it isn't all about the marketing techniques used since they're all replicable by competitors. It fundamentally comes down to your product. If the technology or quality of a product isn't good, it won't sell well in a competitive market. All it takes for a consumer to shift between platforms is the customer experience. As businesses scale, failing is more likely as the volume of customer activity increases.
In the United Arab Emirates, even though Talabat has been in the market for years for delivering, Deliveroo is more popular. This is because they provide full oversight and status updates on orders from when they're ordered to when they arrive at the customer.
Quality control and customer experience are essential especially when partnering up with other businesses
Find your differentiation from other businesses in your market. With the example of JustMop, they stand out by providing full oversight of cleaning service delivery. They do this through special features like booking professionals to clean through browsing, reading reviews, and communicating through their app. These features aren't offered by their competitors.
Being aware of how your product or service is made allows you to have high-quality control. By controlling or being informed about the value chain, you can control the value yourself. For example, apps like Hello Chef provide you fresh ingredients and recipes that you can use to cook your own food the way you want it. This way you can have complete control over the quality of your product.
Quality control can be difficult when partnering up with other companies and having to adjust to their way of business. Each partnership is unique with different levels of integration. For example, some business partners take full accountability and responsibility for their customers. Regardless of the depth of integration of a partnership, the amount of diligence and level of operational excellence isn't as high as directly working with a business rather than through a partner.
Specific product features are unique to every business and its own platform. Partnering up with other companies doesn't give complete access to all features but instead allows companies to combine them. Nevertheless, every business aims to provide all platform customers with the same level of experience, if not better.
Until next time,
Shereen