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Flashcards - ALL

1
Q

What are you making/building?

So what are you working on?

A
  • we’re not your typical YC company
  • we launched our b2b food delivery platform in 2016
  • the pandemic really hit our core busienss and accelerated our plans to move beyond food

now, we’re turning caterspot into a b2b super app for managing your workplace

  • a marketplace for users to order prodcuts/services for their workplace (catering, pantry, gifts, activities/experiences,remote worker engagement)
  • tools to help with the buying process and to engage/connect your teams

Ex. Adele…

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2
Q

Introduction of ourselves

A

Hi I’m Camilo from Colombia, I’m CaterSpot’s CEO and I oversee sales & business development and HR.

Hi I’m Amanda from Canada, I’m the COO. I oversee Product, Marketing and Finance.

We’ve known each other for 10 years and have built 2 tech startups together, and we were also part of the management team for foodpanda, a b2c food delivery platform by Rocket Internet in Latam.

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3
Q

How long can you go without funding

A
  • Our current burn is ~3k per month.
  • We have runway for 18months at this level.
  • We plan to be cashflow positive in Q2 latest.
  • We are default alive
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4
Q

What is your burn rate?

A
  • about 3000 per month
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5
Q

Have you raised funding?

A
  • we have raised total 1.6M from a local singapore family-office and angels
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6
Q

How many users have ever engaged

A

17k users from 5400 companies have placed at least 1 order

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7
Q

How many currently active users

A

end of 2019: around 500 monthly active companies

recent months: 120 monthly active companies

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8
Q

Total revenue

A

Lifetime: 15m gmv

0.9M 2016, 2.7M 2017,4.2M 2018, 6.2M 2019. This year we estimate 2M, we were previously projecting 13M

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9
Q

So revenue dipped, what do you expect it to be next year?

A

2021 expected: 7M

we expect our sales to normalize around june

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10
Q

Total costs, fixed and marginal

A

end of 2019: fixed costs 120k, variable costs $27k

recent months: fixed costs 40k, variable costs

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11
Q

Acquisition funnel conversion rate

A

Pending

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12
Q

Customer acquisition cost

A

Avg blended is $5. In 2019 we spent $1200 on marketing activities per month and acquired more than 200 new users per month.

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13
Q

AOV

A

$300

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14
Q

Gross margin per order

A

$50

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15
Q

Commission rate

A

Blended Avg 20% - 15% avg for vendor delivery and 25% for caterspot delivery

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16
Q

What is your growth like?

A

we grew 50% yoy in 2018 and 2019

this year sales were dropping from feb to april, recovering to 30% in nov

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17
Q

What’s the conversion rate?

A

website conversion (session to transaction) - this year 1%, 2019 3%

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18
Q

What is your user growth rate?

A

Pending

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19
Q

retention rate

A

Pending

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20
Q

LTV

A

Pending

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21
Q

What has your MoM growth in the past 6 months?

A

Pending

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22
Q

What do you expect this MoM growth rate to be in the next 3-6 months?

A

Pending

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23
Q

Who needs what you’re making?

A

Mainly office managers, admins, hr managers and facility managers

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24
Q

What’s new about what you make? Why is your product different?

A

There are no other b2b platforms that allow companies to manage these different areas of their workplace in one place. We think the technology we’re building beyond the marketplace it’s very innovative and will be our unfair advantage to retain and capture the full wallet of our customers.

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25
Q

What are the top things users want?

A

large variety of curated b2b suppliers, easy ordering and reliable experience

others

  • corporate payments (not out of pocket)
  • easy procurement (quotation generating, invoices meet their company requirements)
  • tools that help with manual tasks (ex. group ordering, recurring orders)
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26
Q

What are your users doing now?

A

Users are left to go directly to the many vendors or use b2c platforms

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27
Q

What do you understand about your users?

A

We’ve spoken with so many customers and been on the ground to really see what they go through and what they need. We really care about their problems and we know we can build a great product that they will love to use (and that will capture their entire wallet).

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28
Q

How do you know customers need what you’re making?

A

We’ve spoken with 2,000 of our customers to understand what they need & to qualify their company spending behaviour. We have a very clear idea of the opportunity, the use cases, the value proposition, and product roadmap.

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29
Q

How much time and money do users in your target market waste before switching to your product/service?

A

n/a

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30
Q

How big an opportunity is there?

A
  • we think there is a market of $2B in every city
  • Every company can use our platform
  • companies have huge monthly budgets for these products, estimate on average$5000+
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31
Q

How many $B is the market?

A
  • we believe APAC to be $24B
  • calculated based on our own qualification data of 2000 companies for catering & pantry, estimated for other services
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32
Q

How many people are in your target market?

A
  • top tier business cities usually have 2k+ large corporations, 50k+ SMEs
  • any company could be a customer for 1 or many of our verticals
  • our best companies will be medium and large companies who have a high budgets for their workplace
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33
Q

How fast is the market growing?

A
  • b2b ecommmerce growing at xx%
  • other trends: online ordering penetration, covid, office culture / employee perks, more US tech companies setting up in other markets and redefining what a good work place looks like
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34
Q

What are some trends in your target market, and related markets?

A
  • online ordering penetration
  • consumer preferences (used to more digital services and will want same experience in their jobs, especially millennials who in the workforce)
  • covid / future of work
  • office culture / employee perks - more US tech companies setting up in other markets and redefining what a good work place looks like
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35
Q

Who are your competitors? Who might become competitors?

A

There isn’t a company doing what we’re doing

We have competition from:
B2B food platforms
Thriver - a workplace culture app
B2C superapps that may expand their offering to B2B
B2C platforms in each of our areas (food, grocery, activities, gifts)

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36
Q

Which competition do you fear most?

A
  • super apps - sheer scale of user base and customer loyalty

- b2b food players like us who can follow and beat us to market before we can expand

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37
Q

How many users do your competitors have?

A

We couldn’t really find another company doing what we’re doing, but if we were to speak strictly about the B2B food space - the most familiar competitor for you guys would be EZCater - we estimate they are in the $100-120m revenue mark pre-covid. In our region, our closest competitor in B2B food is Rocket Internet’s EatFirst in Australia with $4m in revenues.

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38
Q

How much are your competitors making?

A

If we were to speak about the B2B food space - the most familiar competitor for you guys would be EZCater - we estimate they are in the $100-120m revenue mark pre-covid. In our region, our closest competitor in B2B food is Rocket Internet’s EatFirst in Australia with $4m in revenues.

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39
Q

How does your product work in more detail?

A

marketplace will allow companies to order food, order pantry snacks & drinks for the office, book team experiences & activities (including virtual experiences), buy gifts for team birthdays and employee recognition, buy supplies & equipment for the workplace, and order treats & care packages for teams working from home. We’ll continue to extend our b2b smart tools for the marketplace.

The corporate account tool allows companies to manage users, budgets, payments, invoices, and workflows. It will also provide data and reports to view insights on spend & team feedback.

The employee app will connect the orders placed on the marketplace so employees can have visibility on upcoming meals, activities, pantry deliveries and also leave ratings & feedback.

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40
Q

What has surprised you about user behaviour?

A
  • surprised some users still want to call / go direct to a vendor rather than checkout in 2 clicks
  • too comfortable/lazy - too lazy to switch and end up sticking to recurring boring vendors
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41
Q

What have you learned so far from working on your product?

A
  • more complexity ordering for groups / business

- b2b procurement complexity

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42
Q

What is the next step with the product evolution?

A

we’ll be busy for the next 1-2 years working on:

1) new workplace verticals
2) tools
3) Operational Scalability

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43
Q

What part of this are you going to build first?

A
  • we have the platform for catering & pantry
  • we’re currently working on setting it up for more product types (ready in January)
  • next we’ll focus on the corporate account
  • then the employee app
44
Q

Who is going to be your first paying customer / who was your first paying customer?

A

an alumni dinner party

45
Q

What is your distribution strategy?

How will users find out about you?

A
  • current: organic search/seo, retargeting, limited b2b sales upselling our platform customers
  • next plans - activities to reach our end users/decision makers:
    lead gen & outbound, performance marketing, strategic partnerships, conferences/events, procurement deals
46
Q

How are you meeting customers

A

Most customers find us online
We have also met many in person through b2b sales meetings, have done a lot knocking on doors (sending out bd guy up and down office towers all over cbd)

47
Q

How do you get users?

A

We currently acquire users via organic search (we’ve focused on SEO), word of mouth and some B2B sales. We spent $1200 avg on marketing per month in 2019.

48
Q

How much does customer acquisition cost?

A

Avg blended is $5. In 2019 we spent $1200 on marketing activities per month and acquired more than 200 new users per month.

49
Q

How do users know they need this?

A
  • they are already searching for these products/vendors. Most of our traffic comes from search.
50
Q

What makes new users try you?

A
  • convenience, easy to use platform, lots of supply, top brand partners
51
Q

What makes new users reluctant to try you?

A
  • existing supplier they always use
  • need for a customized order,
  • missing right supply options
  • existing relationship / previous regular orders with a caterer
52
Q

How will you overcome that resistance?

A

Pending

53
Q

What’s an impressive thing you have done?

A

In our first year we made a lot of mistakes and the business almost ran out of money. We had the last $1k in the bank, had just retrenched into life support, but never gave up, we focused relentlessly on adding value to the customer profitably and managed to turn the company around within 6 months.

54
Q

Tell us something surprising that you have done?

A

let go of an experienced and valuable COO, because he was too emotional and became toxic for our company culture

55
Q

Tell us something surprising that has happened.

A

We were always concerned with the b2c food delivery giants that would come and compete with us, and yes for years they have had their own B2B vertical, but they have no idea how to get market share. Corporates still prefer to use us.

56
Q

Tell us about a tough problem you solved?

A

On-time order delivery. In our first 6 months of operation, we were delivering only 60% on-time, we knew that consistent on-time delivery was critical for corporate clients. We went through 4-5 Logistics Directors until finally we were able to bring on-time delivery to 93% and never looked back again.

57
Q

What’s the biggest mistake you have made?

A

Spent too much money on marketing on year 1, before we had any product market fit. We thought we could force it and it almost killed us.

58
Q

What’s the worst thing that has happened?

A
  • running out of money (ended up being the best thing)
  • 2 failed acqusition deals
  • embezzlement
59
Q

What obstacles you will face and how you will overcome them?

What problems/hurdles are you anticipating?

A

The biggest obstacle for our business is covid - offices being closed, uncertainty over future of workplace. We will follow this progress closely and just like we’ve done, we’ve been adjusting our offering and platform to adjust to the new normal

60
Q

Why will you suceed?

A
  • we understand and care about the customer
  • it’s a big market,we’ll have first mover advantage
  • sustainable business model that makes money
  • ## approach differently than typical marketplace - onboarding / integrating companies to capture full wallet and highest retention
61
Q

What’s your flywheel?

A

Pending

62
Q

Why did you pick this idea to work on?

Why did you choose this idea?

A

we saw a need for b2b food delivery as the online shift that occurred with b2c food delivery had not yet occurred for catering companies and bulk corporate orders and we really liked the business model where the basket sizes are so much larger, the unit economics are very profitable and the deliveries are preorders.

63
Q

Why are you uniquely qualified to work on this?

A

we’ve spent 5 years working on the problem and speaking to so many customers, we have so many learnings and expertise now

64
Q

Why do you want to dedicate your life to working on this?

A
  • problem and product excites us
  • there’s so much to do / solve / make (for our customers, our vendors, new areas to develop)
  • needed globally and doesn’t exist yet
65
Q

How will you make money?

A

we charge commissions to vendors for every order

66
Q

How much money could you make per year?

A

1b gmv, 200M in revenue being in just 20 cities

we think we can do more than 20 cities, but this example shows the feasibility & potential

67
Q

How does this become a billion-dollar company?

A
  • 2000 monthly active companies, spending $2,000 per month

- in 20 cities

68
Q

If your startup succeeds, what additional areas might you be able to expand into?

A
  • further into b2b ecommmerce
  • office culture / workplace experience tools
  • employee perks
69
Q

Why did your team get together?

A
  • We’ve known each other for 10 years
  • we worked together in the past and found that we work very well together and complement each other in terms of skills/strengths/weaknesses while sharing same values, ambitions
70
Q

How did your team meet?

A

We met 10 years ago and became friends while we were both doing internships in Buenos Aires

71
Q

Who is “the boss”?

A
  • Camilo is CEO and does b2b sales, vendor partnerships, fundraising, shareholder mgmt.
  • Amanda is COO and does operations, product, marketing, finance
  • we do strategy and decision making together.
  • How? we find that we come to agreement after “spirited” discussion. the right answer usually comes with one of us being able to convince/persuade the other or compromising between our ideas.
72
Q

Who in your team does what?

A
  • Camilo is CEO and does b2b sales, vendor partnerships, fundraising, shareholder mgmt.
  • Amanda is COO and does operations, product, marketing, finance
73
Q

How do we know your team will stick together?

A
  • we’ve been working together for 8 years. we’ve already chosen to stick together through multiple companies, many tough times and circumstances
  • still have the same ambitions and dreams as we did when we started
74
Q

Why are you the best team to build this?

A
  • we care the most - we’ve been working on it for 5 years and still love/care
  • we never give up
  • we’re hardened founders: we’ve been doing this for many years, we’ve been through the tough times and made it through
  • 5 years of learnings about what our customers need
  • starting with food also ws the most difficult - customer experience is most difficult and we mastered it
75
Q

What domain expertise do you have

A
  • startup experience
  • food delivery
  • marketplaces
  • customer sales
  • partnerships
  • product development
76
Q

What systems have you hacked?

A

We’re not technical, but

77
Q

What else have you created together?

A

Duriana - we launched duriana, a c2c mobile marketplace in Malaysia and Philippines
Foodpanda - We were first team in Latam for Foodpanda, b2c food delivery

78
Q

Why did duriana fail?

A
  • grew supply side of market too fast
  • relied too much on paid marketing
  • strong competitor (carousell) who had better product and strategy
79
Q

Why did we leave duriana?

A
  • we were hired by the venture builder to launch Duriana, we were not the owners
  • we wanted to do our own
80
Q

What’s the rocket science here?

A
  • food: corporate/bulk food ordering is much more complicated than usual food delivery (dietary restrictions, formats, info needed for decision making, high stakes, on time delivery, multiple stakeholders to please)
  • the right corporate tools - if set up right, we can lock in customers and have high barriers to swtiching
  • -
81
Q

What are the key things about your field that outsiders don’t understand?
What do you know about this space/product others don’t know?

A
  • how complicated the decision making process is for b2b vs b2c (ordering for groups)
  • importance of reliability & delivery experience (on time delivery, correct order)
  • how much companies spend
  • how many “things” companies need in a product (invoice workflows, quotations for budget approval, supplier registrations, etc)
82
Q

What do you understand that others don’t?

A
  • the user: how they operate / their pains / needs / use cases. we’ve spoken to 2000 customers.
  • our users have high budgets with little regulation of their spending (compared to usual purchasing / procurement)
  • also contrary to usual b2b purchasing, these purchases rely on variety and ordering from many vendors
  • this makes the marketplace extremely powerful
  • all the manual things our users have to do and how we can help them (labels, printing menus, collecting team orders, surveys for preferences / feedback)
  • catering - we’ve talked to b2c players and we have clear expertise and deep knowledge compared to their teams
83
Q

Why isn’t someone already doing this?

A
  • b2b marketplace wave hasn’t hit yet and we’re excited to get there first
  • i think our users and areas can be overlooked for the b2b purchasing side
84
Q

What keeps you up at night?

A
  • someone eats our lunch
  • big b2c player launches a competing service
  • covid recovery takes much longer than expected
85
Q

Six months from now, what’s going to be your biggest problem?

A
  • will covid recovery be on track
86
Q

What’s the funniest thing that has happened to you?

A
  • renting a 1-person office meant and fitting a10 people team there
87
Q

Are you open to changing your idea?

A

We’re constantly iterating and evolving our idea. We think we’re onto something great though, so we wouldn’t be open to pivoting.

88
Q

Have you considered [some twist on your idea]?

A

… “hmm no we haven’t, but that’s definitely interesting and something we’ll check”
or
“yes, we did try that but it didn’t work bc a, b, c”

89
Q

10 years into the future, why would you fail?

A
  • we didnt figure out the right tactics to retain or capture company’s spend
  • we got beat to market because we didn’t/couldn’t raise money needed to expand at the right time
90
Q

what are some things that you don’t know

A
  • when covid recovery will come, vaccine etc

- how companies will respond after covid relating to changes in their workplace

91
Q

We don’t fund you what would you do?

A

1) we have other investor leads
2) we’ll continue to build ourselves with current resources and prove the new model over next 6 months and try to raise again for expansion

92
Q

In what ways are you resourceful

A

we always figure it out

  • launch of caterspot - quick execution, recruited team to work for free, got tech agency to work on credit
  • managed to navigate our way through this pandemic with our sales down 80-90%
93
Q

Someone just showed us an idea like this right before you guys. I don’t like it. What else do you have?

A

This is our only idea and we’ll be doing it no matter if you guys are interested in investing or not.

94
Q

Will you reincorporate as US company?

A

We will reincorporate our holding company in Singapore

95
Q

Why so small after 5 years?

A

1) spent too much in year 1 on marketing
2) didnt want to make that mistake again and waited too long to rehire marketing team
3) trouble fundraising as investors said our rmarket was too small
4) didnt master retention

96
Q

Why you white people have an advantage over local Asians building this?

A
  • we’re not new, we’ve worked in asia for 8 years in 4 countries
  • we’ve done business globally (asia, latam, north america)
  • we don’t want to build just a regional player, we want to be a global company
97
Q

Why can’t they use foodpanda/deliveroo

A
  • food comes late / in multiple deliveries due to bike capacity
  • don’t offer a lot of food formats like platters, buffets, mini buffets, live stations,
  • missing inforamtion for ordering like dietary details, quantity inforrmation and serving size recommendation
  • missing business tools
98
Q

How do you envision the future of workplace?

A
  • more flexi work
  • important to have a great workplace to get employees to want to come to the office
  • new ways to keep teams engaged with hybrid remote/office working
  • we dont think offices are going away fully, most of our biggest customers miss the office and want to go back
99
Q

Most companies in Silicon Valley are working from home? Why are you doing stuff workplace related?

A
  • wfh definitely meant that things like food and pantry were not in demand
  • other areas we want to develop are covid-friendly ex. activities can be virtual activities, corporate gifts are booming since there is no birthday/work anniversary celebraitons in the office
  • timing could be great as companies are scrambling to find solutions to engage their teams in this new type of workplace
100
Q

Which geographies are you looking at?

A

APAC, Global

This doesn’t exist yet and we plan to target “business cities” globally, starting in APAC

101
Q

What moves did you make when the pandemic hit?

A

Sales

  • remote catering / care packages
  • donations
  • home delivery meal plan
  • corporate wfh meal plans
  • looked into treat card
  • virtual experiences
  • pantry marketplace
  • covid-safe virtual food court

Costs

  • wage cuts
  • retrench
  • cut subscriptions / server costs / staff expenses
  • cut offices

Strategic

  • fundraising
  • roll up
  • M&A talks
102
Q

What are you going to do next?

A
  • we will launch the B2B super app in Jan
  • we’re partnering with all of the vendors as we speak as well.
  • start marketing
103
Q

Who will be your next hire?

A
  • CMO / marketing team
104
Q

Use of proceeds

A
  • speed up vendor acquisition
  • marketing
  • PR rebrand announcement

With that we’re anticipating to speed along our growth rates ahead of demo day.

CP: i think we want to find an easy way to explain how we’re going to rapidly grow for those 3 months. I don’t have answers for that.

105
Q

Why should we invest

A
  • huge market opportunity
  • clearly defined customer behaviour, pains and expectations - we have a clear product roadmap to serve them
  • proven team that has 5 years learnings, deep expertise and with the ambition to build billion dollar business
  • we have $15m in sales and have healthy base of corporate customers to upsell
106
Q

How do we expand?

A

Pending

107
Q

How do we launch new cities?

A

Pending

YC (3 decks)

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