Ruminating a little bit on the future, and a little bit on the past
We have a great synopsis of the learnings we gleaned from our past event and have some exciting news to share about how we're thinking about the future of SMB Syndicate
👋🏾 Welcome Back! What to Expect in This Month's Newsletter
If you missed our event with Vinbase, you’re in luck with today’s newsletter! In it, you’ll find a high-level overview of the event with the fantastic co-founder and CEO, Rachel Woods. Additionally, we have some exciting news from the crew about ways you can get involved in the SMB Syndicate. As always, SMB tech fundraising is on 🔥 so check out those updates as well.
📜 What's New With the Crew?
We are so excited to announce that we are looking for interns! Over the course of the last year or so, we have been working on content, community, and support for the founders, operators, and investors in the SMB Tech space. Now, after having done our first public event, and a series of strong newsletters in collaboration with some of the leading VCs in the SMB Tech space, we're excited to ramp up our work! We are looking for additional support to help us scale. If you're interested in supporting us from a content-perspective, events-perspective, and/or community-perspective, we'd love to speak with you. We think this could be a great opportunity for folks who are thinking about taking the leap into the SMB Tech space, whether as a founder or an investor, and who are looking to familiarize themselves more with this space while also working closely with the SMB Syndicate team. If you're interested in learning more, please fill out this quick airtable form and we'll get back to you as soon as possible. Thank you and we look forward to reading your application!
📰 SMB News Roundup
Meta is bringing like-minded partners together with its SMB community to address important topics. The first event, attended by SMB partners in Asia Pacific, was in partnership with Xero, an online accounting platform specifically designed to help SMBs. The event explored the challenges of SMBs in keeping good financial wellness, revealing how technology is creating stability in unpredictable times. Read More.
Bolt is challenging Shopify and trying to lure SMBs to their e-commerce platform. Read More.
MeridianLink, which provides modern software platforms for financial institutions and consumer reporting agencies, announced on March 10th that it intends to buy StreetShares, a FinTech for small business lending to accelerate MeridianLink’s small business lending capabilities. StreetShares was founded in 2013 and raised $34M in funding, according to Crunchbase.
Fishtail, offering trade finance for SMBs, announced their $4.5M seed round in February.
Pickle, a conversational intelligence platform focused on the SMB sales rep, announced their $2.4M seed round in January.
✍🏾Deep Diligence
Thanks to everyone who was able to join our event last month with Rachel Woods, co-founder and CEO of Vinebase! The focus of the discussion (over provided wine, of course!) was to learn how building verticalized end-to-end solutions can give companies an edge when building for SMBs. A summary of the conversation is below for those who weren’t able to attend:
Background: Rachel left her role as a data scientist at Facebook to start Vinebase at the beginning of the pandemic. Her mission has always been to create a world where independent wineries can tell authentic and mission-driven stories alongside state-of-the-art shopping experiences.
Before starting Vinebase, Rachel noticed a few important characteristics about the wine industry:
It’s a massive, $75B market made up of ~11,000 wineries
99% of those 11K wineries are SMBs
Because of the way wine is distributed, it’s very difficult for small wineries to scale up. In fact, 1% or less of all wine producers sell 75% of the market volume
Winemakers tend to be farmers and artisans and therefore don’t have the knowledge required to create robust e-commerce businesses
It’s clear that the wine industry is broken by looking at these stats. In order to be strategic around execution, Rachel pointed out the importance of studying legacy companies that have achieved success in similar verticals. She described this as a way to figure out shortcuts and learnings by watching adjacent transformations. One particular company she’s taken lessons from is Slice, the marketplace that connects consumers with local pizza shops. Rachel has had the opportunity to connect with early employees of Slice to learn about some of the early experiments they ran and other best practices.
The next big topic of the session was around this very specific customer - the winemaker. Rachel is no stranger to the wine industry (check out her blog: The Wine Nerd) and came in with a large network and understanding of the customer. However, she didn’t know everything and didn’t limit herself to hiring a team of wine experts. So what’s the best way to better understand who you’re selling to? Get on the phone. New employees are constantly on the phone with customers to learn their needs and how to best serve them. The company also plans outings at wineries and goes wine tasting to better understand the customers’ day-to-day operations. What is the customer doing? What are they using to do it? This was a great way of learning how important a mobile-friendly platform is, given that the customer is tending the vines during the day and generally not at his/her computer. Forming these intimate relationships is also crucial for product development. Rachel spoke to the importance of being extremely thoughtful with the roadmap and how they use the Shape Up method, which focuses on solving problems in cycles.
The final topic of the evening was Vinebase’s new product launch, which is Vinebase-powered websites for wineries. Rachel came to the conclusion that this was necessary after noticing that wineries weren’t seeing consumers buying through Vinebase as their own; and those who did tried to transact off of the platform to avoid paying the commission. Through speaking directly with customers, Rachel and her team learned that 1) Providing customers with their own websites would align them fully with the mission; and 2) The pricing structure was wrong for the business they were trying to create. Moving to hosted websites and transparent pricing fundamentally changed the company’s relationship with its customers. And, as Rachel notes, it’s important for all founders building marketplaces and/or in verticalized spaces to take a step back and think about the businesses they truly want to create and how each decision drives customer experience and alignment.
The recording is here for those who would like to watch the full interview.
📅 Upcoming Events
None yet, but we’ll keep you posted!
Thanks for reading!
Sydney, Jen & Tessa