When Amazon looks at the Polish market, the fierce competition is Allegro, Ceneo, Mediamarkt, emag and a few other local players. Amazon looks at others with its understanding of the market and sees similar companies as competitors, analyzes them and decides to enter or not that market.
But sometimes the fiercest competitors don’t come from the same industry as you do, many times they see the world, its problems from a very different angle and come up with new solutions. The inventor of the light bulb didn’t come from the candle making industry, he didn’t want to make a better candle, he wanted to solve a problem.
When we started Turbado, we had an understanding of the retail market being very competitive, with huge sharks in it, with virtually unlimited resources and great successes, going strongly forward. We didn’t want Turbado to be one of those companies that starve to death and has to find something else to do or get a job @ the sharks.
So we looked at many problems we could work on solving, one of them was a general business problem:
HOW TO COMPETE WITH AMAZON/CENEO/ALLEGRO/HEUREKA…
on Price? on Faster Delivery? on Better Returns handling? on variety of products?
and we saw those big sharks doing a pretty good job already on all fields the average customer cares about. So the conclusion would have been to enter a niche segment or don’t start at all. But instead, we started to ask WHYs? Why? Why? Why? Why?
When we got to a depth of the 5th Why, the question was, why did customers even BUY products? Why did they want them? And among other things, we discovered that customers didn’t want to buy the product, they wanted the benefits that product brought them.
SO! If we took away the buying, which by definition means transfer of ownership, and we changed it into usership, what would happen with the transaction, how would it look like, who and how would benefit from it?
And we invented Turbado. From there on we had to build up the ground rules, re-define common terms, find a way to explain all this to the customer in 30 seconds or less, and what eventually happened, is we started a new ecosystem, without intention of doing so. We just wanted to solve problems better, with new ideas, and it Turbado was born.
Candle makers started to notice there is a light bulb out there, we became the biggest merchant, the biggest customer, the biggest buy, the most customer centrist company and gave us many other names too. Yet still only few out there understand us, we are still far from perfection, far from mass adoption, with still many skeptics around. But those 1.6million customers we serve today, are a living proof we do something right. And we are growing: Today, 21M euros investment is needed. And it is only the beginning.