Many people ask me how I knew about YC back in early 2007. It was Founders at Work for me. It took me a few years to get my hands on a copy of the book (Amazon didn't deliver in Romania back then), but the content was incredibly useful and completely original.
Reddit also had a play in it. At the time it was the competing Digg Upstart, or that's how everyone saw it. I distinctly remember a blog post after Reddit was acquired by Conde Nast, where the founders said they went out for ramen and for the first time ever it didn't matter who picked up the check at the end of the meal. That pushed me to apply to the program.
It might have been the early days looking back -- but YC seemed like a big thing even back then if you were into the startup scene. Between Reddit, Stripe and Auctomatic (Founded by Harj Taggar and Patrick Collison, which to me meant european founders are welcome in the program) you could sense that everyone involved with the group was continuing the stories I read about in Founders at Work.
Also founder of Two Tap here. Just to clarify on the above:
1. Pricing and inventory are realtime with Two Tap -- taken live from the merchant site when a shopping session is started. If only a size S is available on the merchant site then that's what we make available for shoppers in our carts. Merchants don't have to do any integration or manage this process.
2. Reliability has been a non problem for a while, we have a guarantee that we don't lose orders. And the process to confirm orders is async like Amazon -- step 1: we've received your order; step 2: your order is confirmed.
3. Two Tap supports over 1000 retailer integrations.
Pretty much what we're building at Two Tap, a gateway API that can be used to order any product from a supported retailer's inventory and benefitting from realtime product data (inventory, price etc).
A huge benefit to being an independent API is that new features become available for all of the supported stores in a matter of days (vs months-years-never if each retailer would have to update their API).
You're right on a lot of accounts. Let's talk, can you get in touch at hello@ please? Happy to talk about all of this.
The main difference now is that both retailers as well as affiliate networks are actively trying to push this model once they've seen they can make 5x more money from the same amount of impressions.
Also, the publisher gets to keep PART the relationship -- the one dealing with the users interaction with their product. The relationship with the retailer that sells the product is also kept intact -- consumer loses just one touchpoint (a visit to the product page) but gets same confirmation email, returns, customer support etc. The retailer has same load on servers and gets the exact same user data they would normally (shipping, email, address, billing, payment etc).
Oldnavy and a few other retailers are not active yet. We've pre-built these integrations despite not having requests to sell their inventory just yet.
I'd mention more on the BD side but can't at this point for competitive reasons. The fact that we currently support sending orders through to 450 retailers does not mean we have deals in place with all of them, but that the infrastructure is built to allow this to happen -- if affiliates or publishers get an approval from retailers or the affiliate networks that govern this. Perhaps we should make this clearer on the supported stores page.
All in due time. The industry as a whole is being pushed to decide which models they will embrace -- and as always some will be slower to adapt than others. The pressure comes from lost revenue on mobile which makes retailers a LOT more flexible now compared to even 6 months ago when talking about this.
Considering multiple format screens and devices fragmenting retailers distribution channels over the next years this is set to become an even bigger chapter down the line.
Good question. That's because this method doesn't scale and fails as a solution to the industry's challenges.
There's companies that are trying to get retailers to implement APIs but this leads to a fragmented ecosystem. Year's past payment processors that sold "pay/checkout with ..." buttons and wallets have failed to achieve significant merchant adoption despite being fuelled with marketing spend in the billions.
The solution everyone embraces seems to rely in building an independent and neutral piece of infrastructure (an API) that any publisher can integrate and that plugs into every checkout out there. It's the missing pipes in ecommerce, anyone can use it and nothing really changes (we don't process payments, it's all automated etc) -- and conversions go UP.
I'm repeating some ideas in the post but on the publisher side it's worth noting NONE would entertain the idea of integrating multiple APIs -- one for each merchant. Did I also bring up the required combined efforts of all merchants to keep those APIs up & running? :)
So pro-scraping because it's the only way to build adoption in ecommerce.
This is strongly correlated with brand values they push in certain marketing campaigns and both returns as well as excellent service are promoted.
Flipping it you could say they attract people that do returns more than avg.
We're fetching the live data only for the products requested via an URL. Two Tap mimics a consumer visiting the retailer and getting that info for themselves which also allows retailers to retain their analytics layer with no negative impact.
Our current supported stores span the top 500 as well as a number of specific integration requests.
Yes, you could say that. We're laying down pipes in ecommerce so you can send an order to a merchant from anywhere on the web in a standardised API.
Retailers can extend their reach and make their inventory shoppable from anywhere with an internet connection and publishers can build ecommerce in their apps.
At least one of them might have been using our technology in the backend, especially if they're one of the top 5 shopping search engines.
The downside to feeds is that they become obsolete very quickly, especially if the product is popular. Products sell out very quickly, retailers lose money on traffic they can't onboard and shoppers get frustrated.
Yes. It used to be more controversial 2 years ago.
They're only reticent to not getting the consumer data, breaking the relationship with shoppers or not processing the payments. And control over who sells their inventory obviously -- which is already in place through their relationships with affiliate networks.
Tick those boxes and they're cool with it and supportive. That being said we're still expanding tech support for retailers faster than BD can can keep up -- 75 new retailers monthly at this point. That's why we're pushing all our affiliates to get an approval before using Two Tap in order to keep getting affiliate revenues.
Experiments from Twitter and Facebook also do a good job at educating the market which works in our favor -- at least merchants learn what they don't want :)
Correct. We don't get any input from the retailers. Two Tap can get product availability info and place an order just by having the product URL, nothing else.
Also, the full retailer inventory is available, unlike FB or other models that require the shop to upload a certain number of products.
Completely agree! Returns and not breaking the retailer's CRM is key in the space. Retailers are happy especially because we're not breaking their relationship with consumers nor obscuring payment/shipping data.
It's very difficult to find and build a model that's accepted and actively supported by all stakeholders in the ecommerce space and we're very excited by current efforts in the industry. Long story short, we've had no complaints or confusion from consumers so far on returns, customer support etc. By now most consumers are aware of in-stream or remote buying and following basic guidelines helps a lot too (clearly displaying the retailer logo, user messaging etc)
And yes, PCI DSS compliance is also crucial to storing and handling credentials. We're going through the process again this year at Two Tap, but the effort is worth it.
I suspect there's also an inverse correlation between the amount of money raised at an early stage and founder focus going forward.
It's easy to interpret a large seed round as early success and become side-tracked or overestimate what your company's impact really is at that stage. Which can impact focus and lead to disaster.
This is great news! Two Tap (YC W14) offers a buy button for any app and we're regularly seeing multipliers on conversion rate on mobile when streamlining the checkout.