3 Things: Digitizing Pre-Internet Pastimes, Checkr for Vendors, Glossier for Fitness
Happy Sunday! It has officially been 1 full year since I’ve worn a pair of real pants, and honestly I’m loving my athleisure :) 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! This past week, I’ve been thinking a lot about:
Digitizing Pre-Internet Pastimes
Checkr for Vendors
Glossier for Fitness
1. Digitizing Pre-Internet Pastimes
There is a saying that everything is cyclical and “what’s old is new”. Right now we are seeing a wave of reincarnated pre-internet pastimes in new, somewhat modernized digital formats. A few examples include:
Clubhouse = radio shows
Before the days of the internet, podcasting, and music streaming, people used to tune in at the same time from all over to listen to their favorite radio programs. Families crowded around the radio and friends would talk to each other afterwards about the shows they both tuned in to. People would even tape record their favorite programs so that they had a replayable version. The hosts became celebrities and each show had its own theme, style, and content. Reminds you of Clubhouse, right? The new social app that has exploded in popularity features drop-in audio rooms hosted by moderators or personalities that often bring on guests, based around specific topics or themes, and are often now recorded and posted to podcast or YouTube feeds.
Dispo = film cameras
Before our smartphones became more utilized for the camera functionality than the phone dialing feature, to take photos you had to have either a cheap disposable camera, or a more expensive film camera. Regardless, outside of Polaroid which was novel for its instant development, you needed to either develop your own photos or take your film to a place, leave it for a few days, and come back to pick up your pictures. The app Dispo, launched by YouTuber and early Vine star David Dobrik, makes this concept digital and app-based where you take photos on your phone but have to wait until 9am the next morning for them to “develop”. They also don’t allow editing afterwards, truly mimicking the experience of having your film developed and getting what you get.
NFTs = trading/Pokemon cards
NFTs (non-fungible tokens) have been around since 2017 but just caught on in popularity over the last few months, thanks in large part to NBA Top Shot created by Dapper Labs, the same people behind the first NFT wave that was Cryptokitties. The basic concept is that using the Ethereum blockchain and a specific ERC-721 protocol, you can mint tokens that each are directly associated with a specific digital item such as a piece of art, a video of a LeBron dunk, or a digital cat. Each item is unique and the token enables you to track the entire provenance on the blockchain and also encode specific behaviour in the smart contract such as getting a royalty every time the item is resold. Right now this is mostly being used for collectibles (cough, speculation, cough) which is the digital version of things like sports trading cards (a shockingly huge $5+B industry), Pokemon cards, Beanie Babies, or the art collector market.
Playing off this theme, there are tons of additional opportunities to follow suit and capitalize on this current desire to go back in time to create the future. A few that might be interesting:
Drive in theaters for new TV show or movie premiers/drops - In a time when movie theaters are dying and everyone has multiple streaming subscriptions, take an asset light approach and treat this as a product drop. Create fun venues with ticketed shows, bring food trucks to provide food/booze, and create instagram worthy scenes to build social hype. This is easily scalable and repeatable across the country.
AR geocaching - Instead of requiring people to actually hide physical objects in random places, use AR to allow people to hunt, discover, and capture items and then choose what they want to “leave” behind. There is a huge community aspect here which lends itself well to a digital format.
Book clubs - this has been attempted multiple times, but maybe the timing is right! SO many people want Goodreads 2.0 so I know there is demand here.
Board/card games - We’ve all learned this year that even if you can’t be physically together, video conferencing still lets you involve distant family and friends in birthday celebrations, happy hours, and even weddings. Why not play board or card games over video with each other? There are clearly trademark issues so you’d need to either partner with existing game makers or create your own new viral games. Cards against humanity tonight anyone?
2. Checkr for Vendors
Frequently during the hiring process, an employer will do a background check and employment verification for prospective hires. This process involves personal reference checks and calling previous employers to verify employment, role, and dates employed. Depending on the nature of the work, it may also involve a more comprehensive background check. Companies with a high amount of temp seasonal workers (ex e-commerce that does most of their business during the holiday season) typically use a 3rd party agency to manage both the hiring and the background checks of these workers. With the rise of gig economy platforms like Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, and Doordash, companies needed a scalable way to rapidly onboard thousands upon thousands of on-demand workers. Enter Checkr who took on this burden and built an AI-powered technology to automate and streamline the process. The company has raised over $300M since 2014 by top VCs and is rumored to be generating well north of $100M annually.
On the flipside, enterprises work with hundreds, if not thousands of vendors, many of which are SMBs or individual contractors and freelancers operating their own LLCs. The average enterprise today uses 288 SaaS apps and most enterprises can’t even keep track of the number of vendors and suppliers they use. To become an approved vendor, there are many hurdles that the business needs to jump through to verify their identity, business filing, legitimacy, security, and other services. Information like TIN, web presence, business address, SOC2 report, PCI compliance, etc must be collected and monitored. Many recent advances in technology make this an easier problem for a 3rd party to handle using OCR to extract information from paper documents and government filings, and using AI to search and monitor the web for presence and activity. Given the current nature of cloud security and data privacy, there is also a need to continually monitor watchlists and for any breaches that occur with vendors. It seems that this process is currently extremely manual, slow, and human intensive so automating and outsourcing this piece of procurement and vendor onboarding could be a huge win for enterprises and could also improve security in hard to control and monitor areas of the business.
3. Glossier for Fitness
When Emily Weiss started her blog Into The Gloss in 2010, it began with interviews of celebrities and influential women discussing their beauty routines. This coincided with rise of “BeauTube” or beauty and makeup focused YouTubers like Michelle Phan, Zoella, and Bethany Mota as well as the overall creation of an influencer class built on the back of social media. Women became obsessed with reading intimate behind-the-scenes stories of how their favorite influencers get ready in the morning, what products they use, and what routines they swear by. After 4 years, this fledgling blog turned into Glossier, an entire beauty platform with their own lines of makeup, skincare, fragrances, and even accessories. By 2019, the company had raised $100M Series D from Sequoia valuing the company at $1.2B.
I’ve never been personally interested in beauty or makeup. I’m woefully ignorant on most things pop culture, influencer, and celebrity. But… I’m extremely into fitness and endurance sports. Beginning with the huge success of Kayla Itsines and her Bikini Body and Sweat workout apps, and now with the rise of cult and connected fitness programs like Peloton, Tempo, and Barry’s Bootcamp, trainers are becoming the next batch of influencers. I would love to hear what workouts Alex Toussaint or Ally Love actually do. I’d want to know what brands of workout gear they use when not on camera. And, I’d absolutely read about the diet and favorite recipes of my favorite celebrity trainers. I think there is the opportunity to start with a blog similar to Into the Gloss and turn it into a platform for all things fitness. Now that we all wear athleisure all the time, it’s a perfect opportunity to create a new line of athletic apparel, protein bars and shakes, and also act as a platform showcasing and selling all the latest and greatest connected fitness products and digital workout apps.
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 subscribe and share with a friend or two!
~ Elaine