The post was originally published in Russian on Startup of the Day. Alexander kindly agreed to republish what we think is of great value to our readers.
There are a million and a half active sellers on Amazon. These are very similar businesses with very similar business processes, and there are hundreds of specialized SaaS for them, doing something useful: measuring, prompting, optimizing.
Quite a few of them are super successful juggernauts, there may even be a unicorn (although not a very famous one). Most of them lead a quite modest existence. On the one hand, each of them has a bunch of direct competitors, client acquisition is expensive. On the other hand, the sellers on the marketplace have their problems, they also get closed on a regular basis, and for a SaaS it means a drop in LTV. This is not to say that software for sellers is not a very good business, but it also doesn’t bring fountains of money to the founders.
Carbon6, the Canadian startup of the day, saw an opportunity here. It purchases these specialized SaaS and uses them to build package offers for sellers. If you want analytics, why not have surplus management and search term monitoring on top of it. If you want surplus management, why not have analytics as well. The offer is relevant, some agree to it, the client acquisition cost drops, synergies arise. Several services in a bulk work better than a single one. This approach is apparently similar to that of Thras.io and similar services, but they purchase the sellers, not tools for them.
As of now, Carbon6 offers its clients 10 different SaaS. It recently brought in USD 66M of investment, so the list is bound to grow soon, there is money to purchase more new products.
#saas #store #roundb #usa
Translation: Kostiantyn Tupikov
Alexander made his career in Russian internet companies including Mail.Ru, Rambler, RBC. From 2016 to 2018 he was Chief Strategy and Analytics officer in Mail.Ru Group. In this position, he worked on M&A, investments, and new project launches. In 2018 he became Deputy CEO in Citymobil, a Russian Uber-like company that was invested by Mail.Ru Group and Sberbank (the biggest Russian bank), then he left the company to launch his own projects. Now Alexander is a co-founder of United Investors – the platform for co-investments in Russian early-stage startups. His blog #startupoftheday (#стартапдня) is one of the most popular blogs about startups in Russia.
