(12) Carousell sharing

I'm a frequent user of Carousell so it's cool to be in a talk with the founders about the company.

Monetization was one of the key issues I have with this app. They currently do not have any way of getting revenue, and their "asset" is probably the massive user base. But apparently, they have monetization plans! Some of their plans as below + my own views:

(1) Taking a cut from payments on Carousell

Pros: For convenience sake, people WOULD pay, as long as they do not overcharge. For instance, 1% of $20 is only $0.20. And given the amount of transactions, I think it's a pretty solid source of revenue.

Cons: Hmm, to move from free service to freemium is always risky. Furthermore, there's actually a lot of young users (yes, xiao mei mei especially) on Carousell, so these small little charges may turn them off and still opt for cash payments. However, I don't think this is a big issue because given that all the xmm and xdd (xiao mei mei & xiao di di) today owns a smartphone and even personal laptop, $0.20 to them should be negligible.

(2) Charging for listing luxury expensive items like cars and houses.

Pros: Lucas suggested $10 - $20 for such listings. This sum is really small compared to the sale price of the cars/houses, so people will be deterred to pay VS paying an agent to sell for you.

Cons: Ehhh.... Selling huge luxury items like cars and properties on Carousell seems unsafe and weird. And it may run into legal issues because of the transfer in ownership. I feel that keeping it to normal, smaller items is better. I definitely wouldn't like Carousell to be like Taobao, selling all kinds of things including BAD DEBT. omg.

Definition of bad debt: A debt that is not collectible and therefore worthless to the creditor.

It's quite amazing for Carousell to reach such scale and success, given that everything was done over a summer holiday. They did intensive marketing, really really intensive marketing. They strategically used their identities as students to market to students via school camps, and have a lot of support from NUS Enteprise as well. And honestly, I even saw their sticker in the toilet cubicle haha.. Don't think this is the same in Male's toilets? Since 70% of Carousell users are Female. heh. I attribute part of their success to their aggressive marketing - they made it so pervasive such that you can't miss it. Abit spammish and can irritate, but well, it worked :)

Ciao

Mei Lan

(11) 2nd consultation

It's been long since I posted anything. I admit, I have been delaying CS3216 project for a bit due to job applications and interviews, networking, my other school projects and FSP that requires me to also go out and speak to companies and people.

Spoke to Colin and received quite a number of useful feedback, and also he managed to connect my group with some of his connections to seek feedback from. Thanks! :)

Issues with Marketing
(1) Eventspark basically has no specific target audience
This has been extremely tough and it's giving us millions of problems. So it means, if we have a football event, we need football fans. If we have Taylor Swift concert, we need Swifties. Marketing efforts are diverse and massive when you manage the events yourself. Cost wise, it will not be effective. But at this CS3216 scale, it does make some sense. But it's quite a gamble-- we have to choose the events wisely to attract enough interest.

(2) How about Marketing to event companies?
Speaking to companies without legit prototypes...... I don't know how will they think. I am hesitant definitely (well, I don't want to get blacklisted by the events industry haha), but based on my experiences, the number people who are willing to talk and share always far exceeds my expectations :) Colin said something quite interesting- pitch, and not say "what do you think of this idea?". The latter automatically launches people into a critical state to critique your app than to think of the possible use/integration with their company.

(3) Number of Live events
It has to be live to justify the chat there. Hmmm, but how many live events are there exactly? Quarterly results of companies maybe. But probably will get banned. Why not go global? Okay, so I went on Livestream.com to check out what kind of events people do. Usually for popular events, the number of people watching Live would be around 2k-3k. But these events, oh man, Karbala religious event in Iraq. HMMMM. Ok. I'll focus on sports events.

I have to be honest that I doubted the idea a little more than once. How often do we have a live broadcast event, with people wanting to chat online, and people want to monitor the tweets, etc? And our live streaming gets banned by some organisers too.

Sigh, I'm having a very incoherent day. Will come back with better thoughts.

Ciao
Mei Lan

(10) Paypal + Updates on Final Project

Today's sharing was by Paypal's Lawrence and Prof Anderson on data security. Lawrence breezed through his work at Paypal and gave us his take on monetizing our ideas. This was the feedback for our group:

1. Paid widgets
2. Tickets for livestream of paid events (work with event organizers)
3. Product placement adverts

(2) is pretty cool. We have not really thought of making specific events private for certain event organisers and make it like having a ticket. This will really be amazing if there's a market for it. Imagine, livestream ticket sales for Taylor Swift concert. It targets on people who are more budgeted (e.g poor students like me) yet wants to have the closest thing to actual live. And the chat widgets will allow these online viewers to interact amongst themselves. I'm pretty sure this is a market that is untapped. It will be profitable for the companies as well because the margins is quite attractive + can sell merchandise online as well, just have to put in effort for live filming so that nothing goes wrong. There will not be seats issue, and people can join anytime they want to, even buying the online livestream ticket 1 min before the show or even when it's ongoing! This can attract many spontaneous and last minute purchases as it maximises the buying time for people.

Final project updates

Hiccups along the way.

(1) Definition of competitors

This got me thinking. How do we actually define who are our competitors? 

I was frustrated with myself when my group actually got stuck at this fundamental question. We got stuck because we were thinking about who else offered the same services as we did. Then things like "But we are completely a new idea, so technically speaking we don't have competitors!" pops up and I'M LIKE "NO". and YET I didn't know how to put myself across clearly in explaining this question then. I went home to think, and this was my verdict in defining competitors-- competitors are the ones who are serving your customers.

I came up with a simple thought process of knowing who's your competitors.

- Who are your target audience?

- How are you going to get them?

- WHERE are you getting them? 

The 3rd question is the most crucial. WHERE. Not geographical wise, but which other services are they using now and you can provide them with more, so they will switch over to us. Then think of your core product/service. For us, our idea's core is events video streaming, and therefore competitors would be Twitch and Youtube and not our widgets like Twitter and chat rooms. 

(2) UX

Lol. We spent like 1.5 hours debating whether to provide layout templates. There's very different perspective of what's easy or difficult for the user. Shall see what's the feedback on Wed consultation.

aww double chin never looked so cute hahahaha