🥣The Operational Plan

Demand first or Supply first? Or Both?

In a marketplace, supply has to come before demand! Even before then, we had to decide which segment to focus on & what users to target first. That being said, vetting user experience meant we had to launch a one-sided to simulate to shoppers what the marketplace would look like. So we worked with a strategic set of sellers to create vast supply at Amazon with >90% coverage of all non-apparel categories (which is ~8% of Amazon's net sales).

Supply

Supply, the easy part! 😌

First Target: The top 50,000 of the 1M+ registered sellers on Amazon account for >80% of Amazon's 3rd party GMV sales. And >90% from that population that we interviewed signed up after seeing our seller and shopper demo. That's >200 sign ups from the top 50,000 sellers, incl. some from the top 100 seller list.

But why would Sellers sign on with Dema with no shoppers at first?

Sellers want shoppers. Dema would eventually bring them. Still, on day one, we didn't have any. So we designed an incentive mechanism (reduced seller fees) and zero-cost no-change ease of integration with that in mind. This has resulted in attracting >$2B in seller GMV signups with very limited effort. We've checked off seller product-market fit!

GMV Objectives

Seeding at 200 sellers with 2-4x growth per Q, our targets are to secure seller GMV coverage of ~10% at $25B in Year 1, 30% at $80B in Year 2 and 60% in year 3. As a note: Amazon's non-Amazon seller GMV is $260B. Based on our current experience, we expect seller acquisition costs to be <0.1% of Year 1 GMV and <<0.01% of lifetime GMV.

Demand

Finding the right shoppers! 🛍️

Our initial shopper

• Buys goods mostly at US retail e-commerce marketplaces. '22 SAM: $1.2T (US), 2022

• Shops at Amazon 2-5x per month at 80th percentile with an AOV (Average Order Value) of $30+. While we cover all age groups, in the 13-30 year old category, there are many profiles. We're keying in on TWO (2):

  • Decentralization proponents: User who have participated in the crypto decentralization cycles of 2016-2018 and 2020-2022. Some have understood & tasted what decentralized infra promises. In the US, there are ~20M users and they're easily identifiable in the social-verse via hashtags. We have secured a source of ~2M emails/account handles for these users out of the ~20M estimated to exist in the US.

  • Bargain seekers: Care mostly about price & less about convenience. Feel "the system" does not incentivize giving them sufficient opportunity. Estimates vary between 30M-50M of the 140M shoppers on Amazon in the US fall into this category. They are best reachable via social profiles since they typically search for coupons & watch a list of bargain channels. They're viral referrers because they generally want family & friends to benefit from the same bargains they are exposed to.

Objectives

Seeding at 7k shoppers with 2-5x growth per Q post stage 2 launch, we are targeting recurring monthly GMV of $100M & ARR (@ net 2.5%) of $2.5M at 5M active monthly shoppers at the end year 2. We plan to publish LTV and CAC along with other metrics as they're realized.