How much can I get for this phone?
Okay, let’s give that a try.
Could this be the future of selling?
Try to sell this phone. iPhone 8, right?
And let’s see.
So you see your price?
$530? I’ll take that.
One man who certainly hopes so is Siu Rui Quek,
co-founder and CEO of online consumer marketplace Carousell.
Our mission at Carousell is to inspire every person in the world to start selling and buying.
And he’s embracing artificial intelligence to do it.
We’re doing a lot of things around AI. You know, we want to make selling even simpler.
So, today, you can already take a photo, your category will be suggested,
your title will be suggested, your price will also be suggested.
It’s the latest innovation from the seven-year-old Singaporean start-up.
One investors say could supercharge its ascendency into Southeast Asia’s billion-dollar ‘unicorn’ club.
I think Carousell is one of the few big deals coming out of Southeast Asia.
That would be some feat for three entrepreneurs in their thirties.
But it’s the kind of ambitious goal they’ve had in mind since day one.
Their story starts back in 2012.
Quek and his co-founders, Marcus Tan and Lucas Ngoo, were business students interning in
Silicon Valley as part of an entrepreneurial exchange program.
There they were inspired by presentations from Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey.
I think the one commonality all of them had was just this whole fascination for
using technology to solve problems and make a big impact.
And so Lucas, Marcus and I, that became our passion.
So, returning to Singapore, the boys got to work building a prototype app
for a classifieds business to help sell gadgets online.
Back then, platforms like eBay and Craigslist had already opened up the market
for online consumer-to- consumer classified sales.
But, according to Quek, in Southeast Asia, where smartphones are more common than desktops,
consumers wanted a faster, mobile-first solution.
The internet population here largely have leapfrogged the desktop internet, to come online through mobile.
So I think from a user experience standpoint, we actually really serve them well.
And users seemed to agree.
Within three days of launching in August 2012,
the app was ranked second among the top free lifestyle apps in Singapore.
But they soon hit a bump in the road.
Use of the app stopped growing, and the trio realized they had to pivot to make listing even simpler.
I think, when we first launched, the first couple of months was actually quite challenging.
User growth was pretty flat.
So we emailed everyone who signed up. We asked them, "Where did you hear about Carousell?"
We asked them what they actually liked about Carousell, what did they not like about Carousell.
And I think those insights were the most important, because when you take away
where you need to improve, what you’re not so good at, it leads to innovation, it leads to product improvement.
That shift brought them back on track.
Months later, they received a $35,000 university grant to keep the business going, before securing
more than $700,000 from major investors, including Rakuten, Golden Gate Ventures and 500 Startups.
My name is Vinnie Lauria of Golden Gate Ventures. I’m one of the early investors in Carousell.
They had that passion, that drive, which is number one you need.
They were solving their own pain point, their own problem, that’s number two check box.
And then the way they thought of building a product. They made something that was completely different.
You know, mobile, local, classifieds, on a mobile app.
Fast forward seven years, the company has now recorded 250 million listings
and received $150 million in funding.
Its latest partnership with OLX Group has put the company on a valuation of $550 million.
That funding has fueled its expansion into six new markets around the region.
And a host of new listings categories, including clothing, property, autos and even jobs.
For us, we’ve never really obsessed around unicorns, or valuation.
It’s always about, how can we serve a community? How can we solve meaningful problems?
How can we really serve this mission of inspiring every person in the world to start selling?
And, for us, that’s what we are obsessed about, that’s what we’re focused on.
And, you know, if you do that really well, I think valuations, titles like unicorns,
it’s a byproduct and will come because of that.
Though Carousell has its roots online, like many e-commerce marketplaces,
it's also seeing the value of having an offline presence, too.
For the likes of Amazon in the U.S. and Alibaba in China,
that expansion has taken the form of physical grocery stores.
Meanwhile for Carousell it means hosting community events where buyers and sellers can transact in real life.
I’m Eileen and this is Eden.
Eileen and Eden are founders of Vintage Wknd, one of 300 boutique retailers at Carouselland,
a three-day shopping event in Singapore.
The pair started selling vintage clothes on the app three years ago and have so far made $40,000.
We’ve sold more than like 15,000 items. So far so good. Paid off, yeah.
Monetization will now be the name of the game for Carousell,
which boosted revenues fourfold and cut losses last year.
The founders plan to do that via online ads, premium user packages and subscription services,
with a focus on their Singapore and Hong Kong market.
It’s a very simple business model. It’s actually mainly advertising, mainly premium visibility products,
and also subscription packages that we sell to car dealers and property agents.
Add to that AI developments, managing a team of over 400 and expanding to new markets,
and it sounds like a tall order.
But Quek, Tan and Ngoo are men on a mission.
In fact, they even previously turned down an offer of $100 million to offload the business,
so determined were they to carve their own path.
And, according to Quek, they’ve still some way to go.
You’ve often said you’re maybe only 1% done. Where do you stand on that now? Surely you’re a bit further along?
You know, I constantly tell the team we’re less than 1% done, even today.
You know, our vision is to create this world and lifestyle where second-hand is the first choice.
Sometimes that sounds audacious and crazy.
But five, 10 years ago it was kind of crazy to think you’d hop in someone else’s car
to get from point A to point B, but today you have Uber and Grab.
Five, 10 years from now, we want Carousell
to be creating this lifestyle where second-hand is the first choice.
It just makes so much sense. You save the earth. You save money. You make money.
You go on to create possibility for other people. It’s just win, win, win all around.