Jeff Hoffmeister’s Post

Breakfast with founders 🥐 First up this year with Laurence Booth-Clibborn Laurence is a co-founder at The Mothership, who acquire e-commerce businesses and help them go stratospheric. We spoke at length about the journeys of getting into the startup world and eventually starting a business through the power of networking, maintaining good relationships throughout your career and thoroughly understanding the needs of rapidly moving businesses. No one size fits all. Coincidentally, we both had musical pathways and both asked ourselves the same question of 'do we want to commit to the path of music?' - which is by no means an easy one! A core part of scaling e-commerce businesses comes down to operations. They are critical towards finding margin in every touchpoint and resource within the brand. Being tight on them internally makes for the highest chances of returns on your investment. When major powerhouses like Temu and Alibaba Group exist to resell products at ever-reducing costs, it becomes very hard to compete for customers with products that can't be bought at a fraction of the cost. As a DTC brand, you are no longer competing for margin, but rather the customer data - you can only play this with economies of scale. Great way to start the year with the first 2024 breakfast series, more to come this week! ----- If you're an investor or founder keen to meet, I'd love to have breakfast with you in London. Link to waitlist is in my featured section. Naturally, I can't meet with everyone, but I'll always try to make time to speak!

Groupon was founded ten years ago by Andrew Mason. He was in his mid-20s, a graduate student, and he built #websites as a side gig. Mason had brought up the concept for a website he intended to support to tech mogul Eric Lefkofsky, whom he had met through that job. Groupon was worth several billions of dollars and was generating hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue every month within two years of its existence. It grew more quickly than Apple. quicker than Facebook. quicker than Google. And then its fortunes turned around just as quickly and drastically. Mason's tenure at Groupon is best remembered for the candid letter he wrote to staff members announcing his departure: "After four and a half intense and wonderful years as CEO of Groupon, I've decided that I'd like to spend more time with my family." #Mason was fired after Groupon's stock had fallen to a quarter of its IPO price. I'm not serious—I got fired today. If you're asking yourself, "Why haven't I been paying attention? This improbable ascent and precipitous descent, over an astonishingly brief timeframe, resembles the start-up narrative found in comic books. Mason is currently the CEO of a considerably smaller #business with only ten workers. The company is called Descript and it produces software for editing and transcribing spoken word recordings. Around the time my co-founder and I were launching the podcast Gimlet in 2013, I got to know Mason. Mason and I had some experience with audio, so we got to know one another a little. In the end, he #invested angel money in Gimlet. We had not truly discussed his experience at #Groupon until I met with him a few months back in a San Francisco studio, using my podcast as a justification to finally get him to share his story. www.tycoonstory.com #AndrewDMason #Groupon #CoFounder #Entrepreneur #TechInnovator #StartupSuccess #BusinessLeader #ECommerce #Innovation #TechEntrepreneur #BusinessIcon #SuccessStory #Leadership #IndustryPioneer #OnlineDeals #DigitalMarketing #TechIndustry #BusinessInspiration #Founder #StartupJourney Groupon Ashok Kumar Rajath Hiremath shazia khanam Chetanya Gupta Soumi Ghosh

Walker Deibel's claim on the $10T tsunami of small businesses going from boomers to our generation is creating a movement in Saas too! This is the time for SMBs to shine and you don't have to buy a business to get in on the action. Acquisition entrepreneurs are going to try automating everything with software/AI. Selling software to SMBs is equivalent to selling shovels to gold miners. OpenTable made a landmark tech IPO in 2009 when the economy was recovering from the last recession. Who do they sell to? ----- Fine dining restaurants Klaviyo recently had one of the first tech IPO's in over 2 years of drought. Who do they sell to? ----- SMB e-commerce merchants. The time for SMB Saas is now. 👊

Unlock your entrepreneurial journey with e-commerce! 🚀💻 Start your own business online and tap into a world of opportunities. E-commerce makes it easy for anyone to showcase their products, reach a global audience, and turn passion into profit. Don’t miss out on the digital revolution—start your e-commerce business today! 💼🌐 #EcommerceEntrepreneur #digitalbusiness

All those pitching. Please read this carefully: Tobias Lütke recounts pitching Shopify to VCs on Sand Hill Road a few years after founding Shopify. Investors passed because they thought the addressable market was too small. At the time, there were about 40,000-50,000 online stores, and even if Shopify captured 50% of the market, that still wouldn’t be a venture-scale business. When Tobi ran into the VC partner a few years ago, the partner asked Tobi what he missed (Shopify is valued at almost $100 billion today). Tobi explained: “You were actually correct, but what you didn’t realize was that Shopify was the solution to the very problem you identified. The reason there was only 40,000 online stores was because it was hard, expensive, and everyone who tried ran into all these brick walls of complexity, which Shopify, one after another, smoothed over and made simple to do.” Tobi believes this is a common mistake: “What a lot of free-market thinkers don’t understand is that between the demand and eventual supply lies friction. And I actually think that friction is probably the most potent force for shaping the planet that people just generally do not acknowledge… That was my theory when I turned my snowboard store into Shopify: there was a lot more people like me except there was too much friction which we needed to solve. And Shopify has proven out that every time we make the process simpler, there’s more consumption. At this point, we have a million merchants on Shopify, which is a mind-blowing number. So friction is a major component, and it’s something that software is uniquely good at reducing.” #startup ( courtesy https://lnkd.in/gjMCZMHe)

https://lnkd.in/giN3BGQR How to Build a Website Like Groupon in 9 Steps Groupon took the world by storm when it pioneered the group coupon model in 2008. This Chicago-based startup saw exponential growth, reaching profitability and over $760 million in revenue by 2011. How’d they do it? Groupon negotiates huge discounts (typically 50-60% off) with local businesses for deals on restaurants, spas, events, and more. Users get great deals while Groupon and the business split the profits.  Within just 3 years, over 150 million people had signed up to access these incredible deals! With this ingenious business model disrupting the e-commerce space, it’s no wonder entrepreneurs worldwide want to learn how to […]