Confession of a Serial Entrepreneur – What Now?

1. Partnering with a company like Yellow Pages to increase their ability to sell advertising/coupons. After taking a deep dive into this company, we thought they were a perfect fit. They need something to turn their ship around after successive years of declining revenue, their app hasn’t been updated in 3 years, and they already have an advertising sales force in place. But like most large organizations it is difficult to steer the ship away from the iceberg (and after a few months they decided they weren’t interested in partnering with us).
2. Selling our scraping technology to other businesses that need the technology. This is a growing field as data is needed to train AI models. One of the leaders in this space is Oxylabs (oxylabs.io). We feel our ecommerce scraping tool is better than theirs. With the advancement of AI there is a growing demand for large datasets to train models. This still is a possibility.
3. Providing retailers with competitive information – for instance one of the Home Hardware stores we visited had built their own technology to compare their prices with Home Depot and notify them when the difference in price was greater than 5%. We have built a good part of the technology (scraping and matching) to do this.
4. Create another Kayak (kayak.com) for a particular industry vertical (other than travel). Kayak business model was to aggregate all travel information in one place, so they had information from Expedia, Priceline, Hotels, etc. While Expedia, Priceline etc. got paid for the travel booking (about 20% of the price) with the actual tour operator, Kayak was simply an affiliate and advertising partner of those same sites. We could do the same thing in an industry like the automobile sales industry – just be the thin layer where people start their search and then pass them to Auto Trader, CarGurus, the local dealer, etc.
5. Create another Kayak for the retail industry whereby we just become an affiliate partner. Many large companies such as Amazon and Walmart have affiliate programs, and they pay 2% of the final sale to the affiliate partner.
6. Partner with an ecommerce company (like Lightspeed https://www.lightspeedhq.com/) to create an ecommerce marketplace for those retailers that just have point of sales systems without ecommerce. Using our scraping technology, we can scrape all the products being sold in a market. We would have the image, description, title, etc. for a product, allowing quick transition from a point of sale to ecommerce. We basically eliminate the need for an individualized ecommerce system for these retailers not wanting to manage their own ecommerce platform.
7. Use our scraping technology to compare, purchase and deliver the lowest cost bundle of groceries to consumers

We settled on number 7 for a number of reasons but ultimately because:

• Gina and I started One Red Maple to help local retailers compete and therefore strengthen smaller communities. If we wanted to make money for the sake of money we would have done something else…anything else. Our shareholders gave us money as
  they also believed in the cause, so what we were pivoting into needed to have an altruistic cause. Saving people money on groceries worked.
• Nobody else was in the space, there were indirect competitors, but no one was using AI to compare all the products in your neighbourhood and give you an optimized shopping list based on how many stores you wanted to go to. Most shoppers go to at least two stores per week.
• We wanted something that would increase the usage of the app. Unlike retail shopping, grocery shopping is a regular recurrence, at least once per week.
• If our grocery app was successful, we could go back and apply the technology again to all of retail and fulfill our earlier goal of helping local retailers.
• The more we looked at groceries the more opportunities we saw.

Usually a pivot is not “create a new company from scratch”, it is a pivot into a new market (think of YouTube shifting from dating site to video upload site – the tech they built made it easy to upload videos) or new technology (think Netflix moving from DVD rentals by mail to online streaming). Yes, we developed scraping technology for One Red Maple, but we decided early on that we needed new real time scraping technology as prices in a grocery store change often and accuracy was key to our success – so all the tech we had was not going to work. So new market and new tech. At this point I am not sure I am up to the task. My Cardiologist told me I cannot lift more than 10 pounds for one year so what else can I do but work – so we soldier on. It is incredible how many things in my life weigh more than 10 pounds. In the past if I find myself in a rut, I have found that if you get the body into shape the mind follows, however this is now difficult as I cannot lift anything. Work did help me focus on other issues besides the pain.

To figure out if this new grocery idea makes sense we solicited 4 weeks of grocery receipts from friends and family and then took those receipts and shopped them again at all the stores in North Bay to see if we could save anyone money. For a 30-item receipt it would take us about 3 to 4 hours to shop at all the stores in North Bay by visiting each store’s website. We then wrote some algorithms to see if we could optimize their spending. We found that we could save money for all the shoppers except for one. That individual shopped only for specials and visited up to six stores each week only purchasing what was on sale. We could however have reduced the number of stores she went to from 6 to 3 to get the same results.

The word gofer came from the work reference for a new employee that is sometimes referred to as a gofer as they need to go for this and that at the beck and call of their boss. Gofor was already taken as a domain name, so we found the variation of gofor that worked for us, which was gofer.run. Funny enough I thought gofer was a made-up word until I was playing Wordle and the word of the day was gofer. Unlike One Red Maple I think we have a better product market fit. Product market fit is critical to an app’s acceptance by the market. Basically, is the app providing enough value to the consumer so that they will download it, use it and pay for it? There is an obvious demand to save on groceries given the success of apps like Flipp in the marketplace, so we felt we are on the right track, but the big question that still remains is will consumers pay a monthly fee for it?