Spindle Inc. (fka SPDL)

[patentminer2013]

If you read this article and see what they are looking for in the next $100B start up its not hard to see Spindle already has a lot of these pieces.


Mobile-Enabled Commerce Will Yield The Next $100B Startup


http://techcrunch.com/2014/06/07/mobile-enabled-commerce-will-yield-the-next-100b-startup/

Mobile Payments. We define Mobile Payments companies as those that provide mobile payment infrastructure, mobile point of sale systems, and direct mobile payment solutions. This is a challenging space, characterized by razor-thin margins, large capital requirements to achieve scale, and fierce competition from credit card companies and PayPal. Successful entrepreneurs in this category must be good at accurately assessing credit risk. Given how difficult it is for payment companies to reach the scale required for an IPO, it’s also critical for entrepreneurs to keep M&A opportunities open to their companies as an exit option. One example of an exit in this category is the recent sale of Check (PageOnce) to Intuit for $360M.


Retail Enablement. We define Retail Enablement companies as those that facilitate mobile-based retail transactions either by helping potential customers discover items they want to buy online (contextual commerce) or by helping them find offers offline (in-store marketing, mobile couponing, and location-based offers). Most of the companies in this category depend on location tracking and/or push notifications to present the right customer with the right offer in the right place at the right time. Winning is all about engaging with users intelligently to establish habit-forming behaviors without being intrusive or annoying.

Mobile Retail. We define Mobile Retail companies as those that extend web-based retail platforms to mobile or build mobile apps to sell goods to customers through smartphones and tablets. In “E-Commerce is a Bear,” Bonobos CEO Andy Dunn argues that e-commerce startups have four survival strategies to compete against Amazon: proprietary selection, proprietary pricing, proprietary experience, and proprietary merchandise. All four strategies can be improved by leveraging advantages unique to mobile platforms. That being said, the current set of breakout companies are focused most on differentiated experiences. These companies are shifting the customer experience by embedding natural smartphone services such as picture taking and messaging.


Marketplaces. We define Marketplace companies as those that facilitate transactions between buyers and sellers of goods or services either on mobile as an extension of web-based marketplaces or through a mobile app. The key to any marketplace is achieving liquidity, which companies can do more quickly by extending their marketplaces to mobile. Some marketplaces like HotelTonight and FOBO that involve local, time-sensitive or untethered transactions have gone mobile-only, recognizing their platform is fundamentally better on smartphones. Winning in this category is all about acquiring buyers and sellers cost-effectively and matching supply and demand efficiently to make transactions as frictionless as possible.

On-Demand Services. We define On-Demand Service companies as those that provide services to buyers in a short timeframe either through vertical integration or aggregated supply. While many of these companies function as marketplaces, we place them in this category if they provide fulfillment on-demand (usually within minutes or hours) and/or provide real-time status updates to buyers. Smartphone features like location tracking and push notifications have only made these services possible in the last few years, which is why this category holds so much opportunity. Many On-Demand Services function as utilities. This means that winning in this category is all about price and convenience, both of which are driven by who has the most scale and the best algorithms governing vehicle dispatch, delivery routes, and fulfillment.

App-Based Services. We define App-Based Service companies as those that provide services to customers entirely within a native mobile app. Given that users experience these services immersively on their smartphones, designing an intuitive user interface and seamless user experience can be the difference between success and failure. Entrepreneurs building apps in this category should emphasize accessibility, engagement, and retention. They should also take advantage of the digital nature of their products to conduct low-cost experiments, continuously refining their products to optimize their conversion funnel. Cumulatively, these optimizations translate into customer delight and more attractive economics.

The rise of m-commerce represents the most important wave of retail innovation since consumer brands first began selling goods and services online 20 years ago. Given the size of the m-commerce opportunity, entrepreneurs who successfully execute on new mobile business models before the rest of the market stand to reap outsized returns. Especially exciting are new categories of consumer-facing businesses such as On-Demand and App-Based Services that could not exist prior to the smartphone – and are sure to spawn a stampede of new unicorns.