3 Things: Vendr for Shopify, Little Free Toybox, Public Domain Books as Podcasts

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-promotion so can use your help)! This past week I’ve been thinking a lot about:

• Vendr for Shopify

• Little Free Toybox

• Public Domain Books as Podcasts

1. Vendr for Shopify

With the unbundling of SaaS, the average seed stage company has 34 independent SaaS subscriptions. I previously wrote about the idea of a Startup SaaS Bundle and this has been one of my most highly demanded ideas. When you look at Shopify, merchants now face a similar issue. You might have Klaviyo for email marketing, Privy for pop-ups and cross-sell banners, Smile for loyalty and rewards, and Yotpo for product reviews. Tapcart might run your mobile app, and Grin might run your influencer marketing. Then you have social media accounts and ads to manage across Facebook, Instagram, Google, and Tiktok. When you add up all of these different solutions, you get an incredibly expensive, complex, and diverse stack that needs to be procured and managed.

Companies like Vendr (who just announced a $150M Series B fundraise) and Tropic help startups buy and save on software by analyzing their stack (or anticipated stack), accounting for their budget, and handling all the procurement and renewals. They negotiate on your behalf, track usage, and manage all relationships with vendors. This model translates perfectly to Shopify merchants. These businesses in particular tend to run very lean and index more heavily on marketing and operations when it comes to hiring so having a company handle all software selection, purchasing, and management makes a lot of sense. They also tend to be more cost sensitive as less have raised outside capital, so the ability to bundle companies and negotiate deals could help save merchants a ton of money. Measuring usage and ROI would also help figure out which solutions to keep and which to get rid of. By focusing on this demographic, you’ll start to understand which solutions work best together and which move the needle the most for brands and can start suggesting those to their customers.

2. Little Free Toybox

In 2009, Little Free Library was founded as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit to encourage neighbors to exchange books in the form of mini libraries that go in front of your house. If you’ve ever been walking around and see what looks like a large birdhouse filled with books, that is one of the 90,000+ Little Free Libraries around the world that have facilitated the sharing of over 120 million books. When the organization was founded in Wisconsin by Todd Bol, he created the first library in the shape of a one-room schoolhouse as a tribute to his mother. The original goal was to surpass the 2,508 free public libraries that Andrew Carnegie had built and they were able to exceed that number by 2012. By 2016, the project had expanded internationally and today, you can find Little Free Libraries in 91 countries and on every continent except Antarctica.

I am a huge proponent of the circular economy and thinking through any ways to reuse, recycle, or upcycle and have always loved the concept of the Little Free Library. I find the majority of the books that I see in the cases tend to be geared at children, so what if you could take the same concept and create the Little Free Toybox which encourages the sharing and reuse of toys among neighborhoods. An organization could design a fun looking “toybox” as the signature design, similar to the schoolhouse look of the libraries. Families could purchase a Little Free Toybox from the website and fill them with toys that they are done with but are still in good condition and could use a new home. You could even have a pet version with pet toys, clothes, and other non-consumable items.

3. Public Domain Books as Podcasts

Public domain refers to all creative works where there is no exclusive intellectual property rights. This can be due to a work being created before there were copyright protections (in the US this is anything published prior to 1924), or a copyright having expired. When it comes to books, public domain pertains to any book that was created without a license, a book where its copyrights expired, or a book where rights have been forfeited. In most countries a copyright expires on January 1st, 70 years after the author dies. You can find many lists that show what works will be coming into the public domain each year and Project Gutenberg showcases over 60,000 free eBooks that have been digitized and can be downloaded on a Kindle or other eReader.

While Audible (which was founded all the way back in 1995) does around $630m in revenue, which would come out to about 3.5m subscribers at $15/month, podcast listenership tops 100 million in the US with 80 million listening weekly. There has been an explosion of more highly produced, scripted podcasts with studios and networks popping up and pouring resources into their content. Spotify spent over half a billion on content like Gimlet Media, The Ringer, and The Joe Rogan Experience while Amazon has purchased Wondery for the mid 9-figures. A company that knows audio production could take the most popular works in the public domain and create engaging, high-quality podcasts. Audiobooks that are 10+ hours of content can be daunting to many but if you break it up into 30-60 minute chunks with cliffhangers, you could engage a much wider audience. Today the main form of monetization for podcasts is still advertising but it is becoming more sophisticated and more lucrative with programmatic ads and the increasing number of people who consume podcasts regularly.

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