3 Things: Guide to Loopholes, Ghost Warehouses, Intercom but Video

Happy Sunday! This one’s a fun one and all over the place ;-) 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:

• Guide to Loopholes

• Ghost Warehouses

• Intercom but Video

1. Guide to Loopholes

Every time tax season comes around, I’m always reminded about how ignorant I am when it comes to tax law. I hear stories about all of the loopholes and ways that people reduce or avoid paying taxes but I have no clue what they are or how to take advantage. Recently, I’ve been obsessed with a viral TikTok duet where the person asks “What’s a piece of information that you learned that feels illegal to know?” and others respond with some of the most crazy loopholes I’ve ever heard covering so many areas of life, finances, taxes, real estate and more. One of the funnier ones I heard recently is that it is illegal for anyone in the US under the age of 18 to enter into a legal contract, which includes purchasing anything from a merchant. That means that if a 15 year old goes into Best Buy, purchases a $1000 computer, uses it for 2 years, they can then go back to the store and say that they’d like to void the purchase as they were never legally allowed to enter the agreement in the first place… 🤯 

Someone should create a digital guide to loopholes targeted at Millennials and GenZ where they categorize, tag, and describe how each works in layman’s terms and who should take advantage of it. The guide can be continually updated based on any new changes in regulation and point you to the right direction on how to exploit that specific loophole. Given these learning will often save people a ton of money, there is a way to make this a freemium product where you give away some content for free to get users in the door and provide them value, and then put more details and some of the juicier loopholes behind a paywall. On top of that, the guide could also serve as an affiliate site to route consumers to professionals and services that help them take advantage of the loopholes in their respective categories. Fill the guide with successful user testimonials and you’ll have people salivating. There is even a B2B play here with corporate loopholes.

2. Ghost Warehouses

By now most people know what a ghost kitchen is, but before the pandemic, it was still a novel concept to have restaurants that served purely as dark kitchens for delivery. What is so great about these is that they fully utilize the space for food prep as opposed to wasting 40-60% of the space for patron seating. On top of that, the space can be used to prepare food for a number of restaurant concepts and menus as the interaction with the customer is purely online and via delivery drivers so kitchen space can be shared and single merchants can offer food under multiple brands if they choose. In addition to getting our meals delivered to us, most of us now get a huge portion of our groceries, everyday essentials, and even impulse purchases sent via e-commerce. In the last year, nearly 80% of US households have used a grocery delivery service, Amazon Prime now touts 126M members in the US alone, and there are over 1 million merchants selling their wares on Shopify.

Amazon has the scale to build massive fulfillment warehouses across the country filled with pick and pack robots to deliver in 2 days, but for a small organic grocer or someone selling exercise equipment on Shopify, it’s hard to compete and offer extremely fast turnaround. Given the glut of vacant retail space currently on the market, a company could build the infrastructure to turn a network of these spaces into ghost warehouses used for a hybrid of grocery and e-commerce fulfillment. Real estate is hard but by partnering with a large commercial real estate company, you could get access to their available real estate and match them with tenants. On the opposite side of the business, there are already a number of companies providing last-mile delivery to partner with, so the core of the business becomes being the orchestration and data layers between the real estate companies, merchants, delivery, and customers. Using data to understand what items and brands to put in which warehouse, when to restock, which partners to leverage, etc provides merchants with the ability to offer fast delivery, delight customers, and compete with Amazon.

3. Intercom but Video

Almost every website you go to these days, be it a tech startup or the DMV, has some form of live chat widget embedded so that you can immediately start asking questions and engaging with the company. Many of these start with a conversational AI chatbot that tries to interpret your query or give you options and offer potential answers. This usually fails and the bot eventually gives you the option to chat with a live human. You can only chat with a human during specific business hours and often end up waiting many minutes in a queue before you connect to a live agent. I’ve had many experiences where I’m waiting and start doing other things only to completely forget about the live chat and by the time I remember, the chat has been closed because I was inactive. Tools like Intercom, Drift, and Front have become quite ubiquitous and offer chat functionality and some additional marketing engagement and automation on the backend. They no doubt capture intent and help supercharge marketing and sales initiatives for prospects who are in the education or interest phases of the funnel, but I’m not sure how well it works for actual conversion or true opportunity generation.

The past year has brought video to all aspects of our lives and into nearly every platform. We communicate with our team, friends, and family over Zoom, salespeople learned to sell over video, and we’ve all attended many events on numerous virtual event platforms. There is an opportunity to turn intent on websites into actual conversions by enabling prospects to immediately hop into an immersive video experience with a company representative. New spatial video platforms like SpatialWeb or Pluto are introducing really cool ways of creating branded, navigable worlds that can be applied to B2B use cases. Imagine you land on a website, read a few pages, and then want to ask some questions about the product’s functionality. If you could click a button and get transported into a branded video experience where an agent could show you a demo and answer all of your questions, you can likely massively accelerate a sales process. The video, transcript, and any action items/next steps could be sent to your CRM and automatically assigned to the right person. Given the fact that talent exists everywhere and more US companies are adopting remote workforces, you could cover all hours of the day by hiring agents in cost-effective places like Brazil, Ukraine, India, Philippines (just examples). I could see a service like this replacing many of the chatbots on websites that exist today.

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