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BEYOND UNICORN: Private Investors' Knowledge Base - [Founder Talk] What it takes to win the social commerce race with David Ng from Pollen

[Founder Talk] What it takes to win the social commerce race with David Ng from Pollen

BEYOND UNICORN: Private Investors' Knowledge Base

Today’s guest is David Ng, co-founder and CEO of Pollen, a community sales-as-a-service platform empowering brands to turn their fans into resellers. We began our conversation by diving into Pollen’s business model – understanding the challenges and opportunities of a B2B model versus a B2C model, dissecting the key value proposition and the key stakeholders’ relationships of social commerce, highlighting the difference between social commerce and multi-level marketing. Lastly, we discussed the competitive landscape of social commerce and how Pollen positions itself among the competitors.

Key highlights from our conversation

Direct to consumer brands and social commerce go hand in hand A lot of famous direct to consumer brands became popular due to social media so what social commerce does for D2C brands now is to enable them to go one step further from engaging their community through contents to turning them into resellers for the brands.

Key difference between multi-level marketing and social commerce Multi-level marketing is focused on the recruitment of other agents where the bulk of the income comes from instead of selling for the brand while social commerce focuses on selling for the brand by attracting people who can build personal relationships with the buyers.

The key value proposition for social commerce is centred around the hypothesis that “I am more likely to buy it from someone I trust as opposed to buy it from someone whom I don't know or by seeing a brand’s advertisement”. There are three key stakeholders at the heart of social commerce – the brand or supplier, the resellers and end consumers.

Casual sellers make up the bulk of the reseller network 75% of the community piloted at Pollen is made up of casual sellers who are potential buyers too while the remaining 25% of the community are hardcore sellers who see social commerce as a way a main income generating engine.

Non-commodity type products are more suitable for social commerce such as fashion, beauty, food, wellness, lifestyle because purchasing decisions for such products depend on a multitude of factors beyond pure functionality and price alone.

Content at a glance with time-code

(01.26) David’s background story and the journey to founding Pollen (03.22) Snapshot of Pollen’s business model (05.09) Direct to consumer brands and social commerce go hand in hand (07.43) Difference between social commerce and multilevel marketing (11.46) Casual sellers vs hardcore sellers (13.36) The B2C element of social commerce (16.04) What types of products work best for social commerce (20.05) B2B vs B2C social commerce business models (32.20) Unicorn discussion: the fine balance between profitability and valuation

Episode linksPollen: https://www.pollen.store/ Jumper AI: https://jumper.ai/

06/16/20 • 38 min

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