Happy Sunday and a very warm welcome to all the new subscribers! I’m thrilled and honored to have you as readers and truly appreciate your thoughts and feedback 🙏. Each edition of 3 Things will contain a dive into 3 rabbit holes I’ve found myself going down recently. Subscribe to get each week’s edition straight to your inbox and if you enjoy it, please share (I suck at self-promotions so can use your help)! This past week I’ve been thinking a lot about:
Crunchyroll for Korean Drama
Restaurant-in-a-Box
Reverse Hiring
1. Crunchyroll for Korean Drama
If you are a fan of anime, you’re probably very familiar with Crunchyroll. The company started in 2006 by UC Berkeley grads as a video upload and streaming service for East Asian content. They quickly evolved and began signing distribution deals with Asian video production companies, and in particular manga titles which were rapidly growing in popularity with American viewers. By 2015, the company had over 700,000 paying subscribers and started engaging in joint ventures with the likes of Sumitomo and Kadokawa to produce, invest in, and exclusively license anime productions. The company continued to grow reaching over 1 million subscribers in 2017 and has an estimated revenue of $122M per year. In 2020, Crunchyroll was acquired by Sony’s Funimation for $1.175B in an effort to consolidate anime distribution rights outside of East Asia.
Just as anime and manga became extremely popular with Western audiences, we are now seeing a similar phenomenon happen with Korean drama. Last year the movie Parasite won 4 Academy Awards (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best International Feature Film) and grossed over $258M at the box office. The past week or two, Squid Game has quickly become the #1 title on Netflix without doing any outward marketing. Korean drama is not for the faint of heart (or the squeamish) but also follows the trend of Americans love for true crime and messed uo violence. I think there is an opportunity to take the Crunchyroll playbook and act as the distributor for Korean drama (both TV and movie). A company can do licensing agreements with various production studios and can sell the rights to the myriad streaming services as well as create their own subscription destination for diehard fans. There are also lots of ancillary opportunities including merch, podcasts, and more.
2. Restaurant-in-a-Box
There are over 1 million physical restaurants in the US employing over 15 million people. Unfortunately, 60% of restaurants don’t make it past the first year and 80% won’t last past five. Each year tens of thousands of new restaurants open their doors to attempt success in one of the most brutal industries out there. While there is very little barrier to entry (aside from upfront capital) owning and operating a business has only gotten more complex over the last few years with restaurants needing to navigate online ordering, delivery, online marketing, new point-of-sale (POS) systems, and much more.
Given the size of the market (everyone needs to eat!) we’ve seen many tech startups do incredibly well providing various point solutions for restaurants. Toast, a modern POS system, went public last month valuing the company at $20B, Doordash, Grubhub, UberEATS are all $B+ businesses, Choco, Pepper, and others have raised $10s of millions to streamline restaurant ordering from suppliers, startups like ChowNow, Owner, and Bentobox help restaurants take online orders, and OpenTable, Resy, and Tock help restaurants take reservations. There are also employee management solutions, procurement, loyalty and rewards, accounting, and more. Figuring out what software you need when you start a restaurant, what works well together, how much it should cost, and how to optimize sales is a maze to navigate and not the core competency of most restaurateurs. A company could become a marketplace for restaurant tech and bundle various platforms for different types of restaurants (fast casual, upscale sit-down, ghost kitchen, etc). You’d take a commission from each of the vendors every time a restaurant purchased their solution directly through the marketplace or through part of a bundle. By bundling you could also provide discounts when you purchase many pieces of software at once and negotiate those rates with the vendors which would help draw demand to the platform.
3. Reverse Hiring
One of the most challenging parts about hiring is that, for the most part, you don’t know which candidates are in market and actively seeking (or open to) new roles. This is one of the reasons that recruiting firms exist and can charge 20-30% of first year salary since they spend a good chunk of their time simply maintaining relationships with individuals to create a rolodex of who is looking or willing to make a move and what companies/roles might be a good fit. Hiring managers know exactly what they’re looking for in terms of their ideal candidate’s background and skill set but spending hours searching LinkedIn and then sending cold InMails or filtering through the flood often unqualified inbound resumes is frustrating and inefficient at best.
Traditionally it is the company that posts their open roles on various hiring sites for candidates to find, but what if the script was flipped and it was the candidates who posted their resume and ideal next role? Given we are in an age when the candidates have all of the power and more and more are leaving their current jobs, a platform can become the go-to place for free agents to post their qualifications and what they’re looking for next. Those looking to hire could filter and search across the job seekers to quickly identify possible fits and also know with certainty who is currently in-market. Let’s say you’re a Series A startup; you’d immediately be able to see not only candidates with the right experience but also whether they’d even be open to an early stage startup in the first place. Imagine never having to waste time on people who are looking to go to a Facebook or Google again! Companies would pay a recurring SaaS fee to get access to the constantly updated candidate job postings and would likely not churn since companies are always hiring. People often talk about “unbundling LinkedIn, and if successful, this would replace LinkedIn Recruiter which is their cash cow responsible for over 65% of their revenue and about $1B annually.
That’s all for today! If you have thoughts, comments, or want to get in touch, find me on Twitter at @ezelby and if you enjoyed this, please share with a friend or two!
~ Elaine
3 Things: Crunchyroll for Korean Drama, Restaurant-in-a-Box, Reverse Hiring
what would be the difference between the reversed hiring platform and linden recruiter. Why would companies choose reverse hiring over linkden recruiter?