Thread by @ryan_caldbeck

1/ I love thinking about opportunities (or challenges) entrepreneurs can solve. I geek out about it on daily basis across every industry.

I wanted to share some of those opp/challenges to either elicit feedback or hopefully give others ideas.

I will start with consumer/retail.

2/ In consumer there are some meaningful problems that persist and are ripe for technology entrepreneurs to attack. Here are a few.

3/ Discovery- Retailers, investors and even consumers over the next decade will continue to struggle to find the brands that meet their needs. Retailers rely on commoditized retail sales data and an antiquated “buyer” systems that relies on tastemakers.

4/ There are hundreds of thousands of consumer brands, literally. It’s an industry 3x the size of tech but yet we expect the “buyer” at Whole Foods to know which chocolate bars to select by staring at the same data Safeway uses and then using his/her own “taste”.

5/ Investors fly to trade shows like Expo West (disaster) and consumers pick from what’s in front of them. A few think they are getting really sophisticated and buy another layer of retail sales data or pay some outsourced engineer to scrape LinkedIn or Instagram.

6/ As the industry continues to fragment this problem will become more acute.

Consumer needs dramatically more effective methods of discovery- driven by non-commoditized data. The tech entrepreneur that solves this will create a knowledge graph of consumer & retail.

7/ Btw if you think the answer is Google, try googling the “the best chocolate bars.” or maybe just the best healthy chocolate bars. What do we mean by healthy? And what does “the best” mean….etc etc.

8/ Evaluation- Related to discovery, but distinct, consumers/retailers/investors need more effective ways of evaluating products before committing. That commitment might be purchasing to eat, committing shelf space or investing into the company.

9/ Lots of potential solutions and I suspect it will take a few, all grounded in data. More effective comparison of reviews? Reviews that matter (today stars are so ineffective that many consumers are just looking at # of reviews-> gameable)? Or a better way to compare nutrition

10/ Consumers are expressing themselves with experiences and the brands/products they associated themselves with while also looking for product attributes that meet their needs.

I’ve said this is the Golden Age of Consumer before right?

11/ Today the “purchase” experience for too many products is a gamble. 50 years ago it was a gamble on safety. [That is why brands effectively originally started btw- to build trust particularly related to safety.]

12/ Regulations and standards have improved the safety issue in the US meaningfully. But it is still a gamble on things like taste and correct labeling (nutrition, attributes like organic, range free etc).

13/ So the consumer is left to gamble on whether the product meets their needs. Did the label tell the truth? Are there any hidden attributes/ingredients the consumer doesn’t want? Will the consumer like the taste/performance?

14/ The gamble is based off of gut feel, not data. I see inefficiencies to be solved. Oh and btw that gamble gets compounded at the retailer level (who is trying to guess what consumers want) and the investor level (who is trying to guess both what retailer and consumer wants).

15/ Distribution to retailers- Getting into retailers, particularly for emerging brands is a disaster. I am *offended* by some of the tactics brokers & distributors use.

16/ I wish the press would cover these bad actors, emerging brands would band together, the government would step in or anything to stop the abuse.

17/ But in the meantime the point is the inefficiency and ineffective methods to get emerging brands on the shelves of retailers big and small is astounding in 2019. If you said “exactly that’s why DTC makes so much sense” then......you aren't aware of true DTC costs.

18/ This is an omnichannel world. To scale most true consumable brands need offline success. But the unethical, unfair and outrageous tactics that legacy distribution partners employ make that success more difficult than it should be in 2019.

19/ There is so much opportunity for a tech entrepreneur to deliver dramatic value in this huge distribution landscape that I have thought on several occasions of doing it myself. We may in the far future but today it’s too much of a distraction today. I hope someone else does.

20/ Getting distribution and fulfilling that distribution are massive potential pain points to be solved. I have mixed feelings about doing YC style call for startups- but here my feelings are unambitious. The world needs these problems to be fixed.

21/ CAC- they are rising in both a macro (CPG-wide) and micro (as brand scales they pay more) sense. There are short-term hacks that some brands are finding (i.e. texting) but by and large online brands are in a CAC rut.

Solutions needed.

22/ The industry desperately needs new ways to acquire customers. Without it the only one getting rich is Facebook.

23/ Hiring- “Wait what? Ryan it's 2019 -hiring is overly competitive. There is no money because there are too many solutions.” Actually…….that's a pretty interesting misconception. Think about the solutions in SV & NYC: not just the recruiting firms, but Meetups, @Hired_HQ etc

24/ Now think about the geographical dispersion in consumer, the lack of equivalent job platforms. Ask 10 consumer entrepreneurs how they find talent. Most still rely on their networks and one of a handful of recruiting firms.

25/ As the number of companies continues to proliferate, and the large brands continue to bleed talent, some tech entrepreneur is going to solve this. May not be a billion dollar business but its a meaningful problem to tens/hundreds of thousands of employees.

26/ Many other problems in consumer/retail that should be solved with technology but I'll pause there for now.