The on-demand economy is a privilege of the affluent

In my last post, I wrote about how the consumer of the future is a renter, not an owner. These are all broad predictions that have many more nuances beyond an interesting title. A key underlying assumption of that prediction is that people can afford to "rent" what they need. That of course, is not necessarily true.

Many of today's on-demand marketplaces are focused on helping people trade money for time, i.e. you have to be cash rich and time poor to regularly use these services. If you can barely afford to pay for groceries, you probably can't afford to Instacart them all home every week. If you don't have a car and need to take public transport to work every day, you probably can't pay for an Uber there and back every day. Of course, there are solutions like UberPOOL or flash sales and discounts that allow usage of these services if there's an emergency.

However, marketplaces can be so much more than just time-saving options. They have the ability to be great people connectors and provide services to people who truly need them to improve their lives. I believe that two massive areas for opportunity exist in Finance and Healthcare. We are just starting to see companies take on some of these challenges and the future will only bring more.

In the finance realm, there's a great advisory opportunity. Today, the people who have financial advisors are primarily the rich but how could anyone not appreciate help to grow whatever income and savings they have? Additionally, there's a global opportunity to improve the lives of the unbanked. In the US alone, ~8% of people don't have bank accounts and that number only grows as you include developing parts of the world. Imagine how lives could change if people had an way to save, build and access their wealth.

Similarly, in the healthcare space, connecting people to affordable mental health practitioners could dramatically improve the state of people's lives. Telemedicine for the disabled and elderly, and preventative marketplaces for certified trainers and dietitians is again life-changing.

I'm excited to see more and more companies evolve the definition of the marketplace to develop services that do more than just save people time; instead, they create a better world.

This is the last post in a series of 3 about my thoughts on the future of marketplaces that has been adapted from a talk I gave recently. Slides are embedded below or found on Slideshare:

The consumer of the future is a renter, not an owner

I recently gave a talk on my thoughts on the future of marketplaces. These posts lay out that talk in more detail. This is post 2 of 3. (see post 1)

Today, we use the words consumer and buyer interchangeably. The default assumption is that if you're purchasing, you must be an owner. However, over the course of the last several years, this idea is no longer true. To me, the prime example here is legal media content from services such as Spotify or Netflix. 

I'm dating myself here but I remember buying CDs direct from Columbia House for years as a teenager and anxiously awaiting my latest shipment. I even remember waiting for sales at the local big box store so I could buy my own VHS tapes of my favorite movie. Now, I can't remember the last time I bought a CD, a DVD or for that matter, even a digital movie on any of the streaming services available today. A sample poll I conducted on Twitter with 200 votes reveals that 66% of people haven't bought a DVD in the past year. 

One thing that I thought particularly interesting about this poll was to hear why people still buy physical content and the primary reasons were international locations and lack of internet access. We're extremely fortunate in the United States in so many ways but this reminded me that access to almost anything is something that many of us take for granted. That said, I truly do believe that all marketplaces have the potential to be global and that any company that doesn't move towards that is invariably going to fail in the long-run. Netflix alone has announced availability in 130 countries and while the content is still to come, this is a clear sign of intent. While this post (and my PoV) is colored by my own experiences, I see these marketplace trends repeat themselves all around the world.

If digital content was the first step, then today, we see this renter versus owner model play out in the physical world too. This happens in such diverse industries as fashion (Rent the Runway, Le Tote), textbooks (Chegg) and even business equipment rental (Kwipped). Psychologically, the idea that owning is superior to renting is disappearing. The success of books like Marie Kondo's "The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up" is testament to the less is more philosophy becoming more prevalent than ever.

In the future, we'll own only the things that evoke a deep emotional response. And for everything else, rentals will do just fine.

Experiences are the next step in marketplace evolution

I recently gave a talk on my thoughts on the future of marketplaces and had requests to post it here. The next few posts will lay out the talk in more detail and slides will go up with the final post. This is post 1 of 3.

When we think of marketplace companies today, the first ones that come to mind are often companies like Airbnb and Uber. However, marketplaces have been around for thousands of years; they're a natural consequence of civilization. From the open air markets of ancient Greece to eBay and now Uber, there have always been people who needed something and people who could provide it.

Let's start with the two most recent shifts in marketplaces. First, the early 90s movement from physical to digital led by Amazon and Ebay. These companies removed the need to have supply and demand near each other, and the need to even know the other person in the transaction. Because the transaction was facilitated by a trusted third-party, the size of the marketplace was no longer dependent on personal connections. Second, the on-demand and sharing economy introduced the idea of making the most of excess capacity and paying for services rather than goods. And then, this spread across many different industries from transportation to fashion.

To me, it seems like the next evolution is the movement to experiences. The term experience can mean many different things but here, I'm using it in the specific context of a set of related services. While companies like Uber and Airbnb create great experiences, they're focused on a single step. Similarly, companies like Operator and Magic are aggregators so you have a single place to go but they also don't go from start to finish.

For example, if you wanted to plan a dinner party for eight people, no single service would help you organize your guests, set the date, find a chef, account for dietary restrictions, plan the playlist, select the wines and then cook and clean for the dinner party itself. However, to have a concierge who could manage the whole series of tasks with appropriate input from you would lead to an incredible dinner party experience. Now of course, there's a cost to doing all these things but many of these tasks already exist today in disparate services. You can use Doodle to find a date that works and get dietary preferences. You can use Kitchit and Taskrabbit to cook and clean. You can use Spotify and Pandora to find the right playlist. You can use Delectable and Minibar to supply and deliver the wine. All you need is someone to pull it all together. Once you connect the great solo players, the marketplace of experiences is like the conductor of an orchestra.

Whether it's a digital assistant who connects to all these services behind the scenes or an actual human being using tools that manage the connections manually, experiences are the next big step when it comes to the evolution of marketplaces.

The 3 secrets of the best conference organizers

One of my personal goals has been to become a more prolific and accomplished public speaker. Over the past year, I spoke at ten events ranging from smaller fireside chats of ~50 people to panels and keynotes at larger conferences with over 500 attendees.

I've learned so much about the craft of public speaking and while I still have more to learn, I feel confident about my ability to hold an audience and speak with substance and brevity. However, this post is not about being a good presenter; there is great content out there already that addresses that. Rather, it's about conference organizers and how to get the most out of your speakers. 

Organizing a conference is no easy task because there a million details that need to be managed. If you have a massive budget (e.g. TED), this becomes a lot easier but obviously not all conferences have that luxury. However, sponsorship is not the primary thing that determines a good conference. How you use the money and resources you have at hand is what really matters. The best conference organizers I worked with all did three things incredibly well, which led to to the best prepared speakers with great content:

  1. Clarity
  2. Communication
  3. Consideration

Clarity

I recently spoke at a conference where the themes were all over the place. The organizers didn't have a clear point of view on what they wanted their audience to get out of the conference or the talks. Most of the sessions were very tactical panels on a completely different set of topics than the keynote speeches which were all delivered in a short period of time at the end of the day in the middle of the conference. While all the talks were great, the lack of cohesion didn't make any sense to the audience, who looked noticeably confused.

In contrast, I've spoken at several conferences where each day had a clear theme, a set of speakers whose talks and panels matched it well and flowed into the next day. Having that sense of structure and clarity on what the organizers wanted the audience to take home made it much easier to create relevant content. Ultimately, it led to a great connection between speaker and audience.

 

Communication

People are busy and if you don't see them every day, they're apt to forget details. One conference I spoke at spoke to me three months before the conference and then didn't contact me again with any details to remind me of when my slides were due, preferred formats or even how to get to the conference. Fortunately, it was local and on my calendar. However, when I got there, the conference organizers then told me that PDF wasn't an acceptable format for slides and they could only present PowerPoint formats. After multiple conversations with the IT team, I was finally able to get my deck up. 

As a conference organizer, follow up with your speakers on a regular basis, reminding them of key details. As the conference gets within the week, let them know any last minute things, including the schedule and have the key A/V people on hand at the conference.


Consideration

I take speaking responsibilities seriously and spend significant time and effort preparing and practicing for conferences. Given that, I assume that organizers should be respectful of my time and appreciative of my effort.

This doesn't necessarily mean a cash payment but generally basic expenses like transportation and accommodations should be covered. For example, if you have to travel 50+ miles to an out of the way hotel, it's not unreasonable to cover the cost of a rental car or taxi. Either way, it's best to be clear and upfront at the beginning about who is paying what expenses rather than letting people make assumptions. As to paying speakers directly, I think it depends on the conference but even a small contribution to charity in a speaker's name is a nice gesture.

Lastly, a simple personalized thank you goes a long way. At a recent conference that I spoke at, I received a note a day later from the organizers that was a generic one sentence form letter. I'm not sure that they even bothered to attend my talk, even though it was a keynote type speech for the entire 300+ person audience. As a speaker, it felt insulting and I would have preferred to have received no communication at all. It doesn't cost money to treat people with respect and consideration, especially when they've put the time and effort in to try and make the event a success.

As a speaker, my goal is to present great content that makes your conference audience walk away with new ideas and a sense of inspiration. A conference organizer who proactively sends timely relevant details, provides a clear structure and appreciates your efforts ultimately creates the best conference speakers.

What happens when 2 become 1?

In the transition from singled to coupled, it's been interesting to find the things that I used to easily decide on as one person become much more difficult as two. Oddly enough, it's the simple questions that actually seem to consume more time. For example, the question of what we should watch together on Netflix remains a conundrum.

While Mashable spoofs this brilliantly, I can't help wondering why this feature doesn't really exist. Given that both my husband and I have profiles where we watch our distinct shows, there must be a way to use Netflix's recommendation engine to find a good intersection of things that we might both be interested in and haven't already seen. To be fair, our watching patterns are quite different but this seems like exactly the kind of problem that big data would be better at solving than the two of us.

Like Netflix, there are multiple products that we both use which could allow us to share profiles for matching information. So, here are a few newlywed questions that I would love to use data to answer:

  • where can a carnivore and a vegetarian go out to dinner and both be happy?
    • OpenTable/Reserve
    • Yelp
  • what wine would work well for both meals at said dinner out?
    • OpenTable/Reserve
    • Delectable
  • what should we do this weekend?
    • Sosh (I miss this product!)
    • Swarm
    • Eventbrite

Of course, these are all small things and there's not much risk in getting the answer wrong even in a worst case scenario. However, the ability to take two sets that may be markedly different and find the right intersection can be widely applied.

Ultimately, this process is about using data to negotiate a resolution that makes both sides happy. And whether that's Netflix night or a lasting peace treaty, having a neutral party that can propose solutions based on real inputs could be incredibly powerful.