YouSaid · the spoken record

Sebastian Mejia

lines on the record: 47
first: 2021-07-29
most recent: 2021-07-29
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I would have to say that my mother, I grew up and when I was 20 I lost my father so I was always a very entrepreneurial person that had to break ground in my life early on. And I would say my mother in moments where we didn't have just a lot of resources. You know, she was always stepping up and creating support when there were not a lot of resources. It's probably a very latent thing to say about our relationship with our mothers, but I always go back to those moments of hardship, knowing that without having much, she was creating out of thin air, you know, opportunities for me to be able to grow and do what I wanted to do. So I think that's a very important thing that she did for me. And she's a big part of my story.”
2021-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Sebastian Mejia - Mastering On-Demand Convenience - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 44] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Decisions, it's critical. And I would also say that for you to scale a business, it's really, really important to understand with a lot of clarity and precision what it is that you need to do, especially in our case that we're talking about a multivertical product. So it's already complex. We've written a lot of cities, a lot of markets, but what is that we need to do? And it's this idea of the flywheel that I described before and making sure that you're allocating resources 100% almost of the energy of the company and the capital into this flywheel because you know that that's what drives the long-term value for the company. So clarity is also”
2021-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Sebastian Mejia - Mastering On-Demand Convenience - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 44] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's always around this is a highly operational, complex business. It's a function of incredible talent and people. It's a culture of very entrepreneurial, very adoer culture with a lot of attention to detail that is very core, but keep on building the team and making sure that you complement your team with people that have seen more scale and that understand these systems. And I think that's fundamental. And on top of the people function is the system that you have in place that help you make better decisions on a daily basis. And that means using data to understand what investments are doing well, what investments you need to actually correct. And you're basically almost reforecasting your business on a weekly basis. So you need to have a lot of systems in place to be able to look at the right set of data that allows you to make those allocations.”
2021-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Sebastian Mejia - Mastering On-Demand Convenience - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 44] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going to fintech. I think fintech companies also will go into commerce. And that happens because you just get the best of both worlds and you get to have this better economics and you get to, in our case, we were moving money around the ecosystem. We had to build technology to be able to do it. So it was natural for us to start developing technology in the financial services. So that's another aspect that is really, really important. And in the future financial services are going to be fundamental to everything that we're building.”
2021-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Sebastian Mejia - Mastering On-Demand Convenience - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 44] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The interesting aspect that we haven't spoken about is what we're doing in terms of financial services. So given that you already have this engagement with the users, given that you already have access to what they buy, how they buy, understanding of the customer behavior allows you to do really good credit scoring, allows you to understand what customers could actually have a credit card. And when you blend them together, it becomes very interesting. And you start seeing a lot of synergies. You see customers using the rapid card buying more frequently, much more engagement, higher average order values. And you actually get to bank and you actually get to buy in the same place. So all of those rewards and all of the points and all of the benefits of a card actually get also spent inside Rapping. So you have an additional spin to the flywheel. So I think it's natural that commerce companies”
2021-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Sebastian Mejia - Mastering On-Demand Convenience - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 44] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Crypto with more of the traditional economy. Excited about this idea of it's going to be the intercession of crypto and commerce. And again, it's this idea of, look, crypto needs distribution. It needs access to users. It needs integrations with merchants. It needs product-friendly user interfaces. She's going to be only for crypto fans. And I think companies like in the consumer space in general with crypto are going to be able to do a lot of stuff just starting to look into this and learn, but I'm curious and excited about it.”
2021-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Sebastian Mejia - Mastering On-Demand Convenience - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 44] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The data is all over the place, but what I understand is that you're talking about maybe 70 to 90 million crypto holders. The majority of that is going to be Bitcoin. But one of the interesting things about crypto, I think, is that you're seeing more adoption and more interesting solutions being built in markets where you just had really, really bad stories around currencies or you don't trust the system. And it's hard to move money around. And that's where you start seeing interesting creative solutions and crypto has a lot of different alternatives here that you can use. So you get to see stable coins being built to see wallets. You get to see, of course, the traditional exchanges that are doing really well in Latin America. And I'm talking about crypto exchanges, of course. I still think that we're in the very early days of this intersection.”
2021-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Sebastian Mejia - Mastering On-Demand Convenience - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 44] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With these things that are part of my loyalty program and these tokens, if they're increasing in value and actually change them and take them into traditional currencies through my wallet, I think that's going to be much more attractive than your traditional credit card points that don't have either of those things, or at least spending them or getting them as benefits is much harder.”
2021-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Sebastian Mejia - Mastering On-Demand Convenience - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 44] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's psychologically if you're a user, and I think one of the problems with all of these loyalty programs that we've used forever is that they're not that fungible. Sometimes you don't spend them. Sometimes you don't know that you have them. This idea of actually rewards, it's cumbersome. You have to go to a platform. You have to log in. You have to actually book your flight with the points. It's just so many other steps. So I think what's really interesting here is that not only you can actually get those benefits and spend it immediately in an ecosystem like ours, you have certain points or certain tokens. You can actually spend them and get your products immediately. But if you start seeing actually true value in those tokens, then you can actually convert them to fiat currencies or real money. What's real money now, but it's a whole different conversation. I think those two things of you can actually spend them really fast and get concrete benefits.”
2021-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Sebastian Mejia - Mastering On-Demand Convenience - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 44] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we're going to get to see a lot of this intersection between commerce and crypto even more. It's very easy to explain, right? Crypton is distribution. We love it because it can help us execute our business with more velocity.”
2021-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Sebastian Mejia - Mastering On-Demand Convenience - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 44] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That product piece is very critical. And lastly, I would say, how do you continue to add more value to Prime? How do you make it like a real no-brainer? And there you have all sorts of partnerships that you can do benefits that are unique to Prime members. And it could be benefits around a more exclusive or premier customer service, or it could be benefits around certain launch of products, playing with this idea of if you're part of a program, you're going to get additional benefits. I think it's also quite interesting. And then more futuristic, I think there's going to be a continued intersection between prime or loyalty programs and what you can do on a blockchain, which is very exciting because imagine that you can now make those really core users some sort of owners of a specific, whether it's a token or owners of part of your business that you're using very frequently.”
2021-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Sebastian Mejia - Mastering On-Demand Convenience - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 44] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then when you have that, you need to embed it in the product. So Prime needs to work in a very seamless way with the whole user experience and you need to be able to see it. You're saving this amount of money because you're a prime member or Prime is going to give you certain access to certain benefits and you need to see it throughout the user journey.”
2021-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Sebastian Mejia - Mastering On-Demand Convenience - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 44] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think the two principles are going to be around frequency and multiverticality, those two things need to be key to prime. And then there's a whole set of learnings around building the business model case around prime. And that's challenging because Prime has this ability to help you think about the business in a very long-term way because you know that it's an engagement driver and you know that those users are basically going to stay in your ecosystem forever if you continue to give them a really good service and you still need to balance out the economics on a unit economic level on every order for the program to scale in a healthy way. So doing that in parallel, I think, is really critical. And our unit economics on prime work quite well. And then the other dimension is how do you actually communicate in a very clear way? So there has to be a perceived value that is very evident for a user.”
2021-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Sebastian Mejia - Mastering On-Demand Convenience - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 44] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Their value and in a hyperlocal business that has all of these other categories of products, then it's going to be a default option in your brain to say, look, if I'm going to buy restaurants, I go to Rapi, if I'm going to buy pharmacy, I'm going to go to Rapi because I'm already prime. And then it continues like this throughout the life of the user. I think the programs of prime tend to have more benefits when you are able to bundle more products into one. I think the single category membership programs, unless you have very high frequency product, make a little bit less sense. Why would I do it? I'm going to buy this in this e-commerce business maybe twice a year. Do I need to be prime? Not really.”
2021-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Sebastian Mejia - Mastering On-Demand Convenience - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 44] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The name wasn't that original, I have to say, but it worked. We started thinking of prime as a way to, especially connecting a deeper way with our power users. And we started seeing early on that you're going to have specific cohort of customers that are just going to be engaging the most with your product. And I think that applies to a lot of e-commerce companies where you have this concentration of GMB coming from a select group of users. When we started thinking about prime, the idea was also how to drive more value to those power users and how to actually create that additional spin on the flywheel so those users that were already buying a lot were buying more because it makes a ton of sense to actually be a prime member in a product that allows you to deliver anything. And the perceived value is very clear. You're basically paying $7 and you get deliveries at no cost above a certain average.”
2021-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Sebastian Mejia - Mastering On-Demand Convenience - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 44] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At the beginning, you know, it was well, you guys are like X plus Y, any type of US analog company. And we're like, okay, let's take a step back. We're going to explain what this is different and we're going to explain what is the problem that is unique to our region. So I think now you get to see investors that have seen great returns, that have interacted with really great entrepreneurs that understand the market nuances really well. that have gone deep into independent countries, right? Like not only Latin America, but go deep into Brazil and go deep into Mexico and understand all of the nuances of their specific industries, whether it's in e-commerce, whether it's in fintech. So we're talking about a community of investors that is way more knowledgeable, that have teams dedicated to Latin America now that are, some of them dedicated teams with offices even.”
2021-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Sebastian Mejia - Mastering On-Demand Convenience - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 44] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really good business focus on solving real problems. Go deep, ask why deturious. There's so many industries that are backward still that that's what you should be obsessing on because capital is there. One other thing that makes me very excited about building Latin America.”
2021-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Sebastian Mejia - Mastering On-Demand Convenience - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 44] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Economical violence. So that creates a lot of entrepreneurial culture and people that are just very resourceful and have a ton of greed and perseverance. That, I think, answers a lot of the key things that make Latin America attractive today. When we were starting out building an e-commerce business in Latin America was super alien to many of my investors today and many of them did their first investment in Latin America through us. But I remember talking early days about macro, about why this market is perfect, why there's a lot of industries that have never moved forward and they were not really understanding it until now that you get to see more successful stories and great entrepreneurs building great companies. And now that conversation is way easier. So my advice now to entrepreneurs in Latin America is not, hey, how do I raise money? But I'm like, listen, just build a real.”
2021-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Sebastian Mejia - Mastering On-Demand Convenience - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 44] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can answer that with sharing what was my story as an entrepreneur. I'm originally from Colombia, but I had the opportunity to study abroad and work in different parts of the world. I was always asking this question of why don't we have more truly transformational technology companies in Latin America? And the reason why I was asking that question is because when you look at the market, you're talking about basically 650, 700 million people, how about the population of China. You're talking about half of the GDP of China. You're talking about two times the GDP of India. You're talking about the same population of all of Southeast Asia, but twice the GDP. You're talking about mobile penetration, internet penetration. You're talking about a very creative entrepreneurial community. All of our countries have had infinite crises of all sorts political.”
2021-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Sebastian Mejia - Mastering On-Demand Convenience - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 44] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very open space. I know some brands are going to get there, more traditional FMCG companies are going to get there. Some restaurants are getting there, but there's going to be a lot of challenger entrepreneurs that are coming up and are going to see the opportunity and going to be able to navigate this world way better. But they're going to still use a brand in my view.”
2021-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Sebastian Mejia - Mastering On-Demand Convenience - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 44] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To the customer experience in e commerce where you're actually doing like this in the journey from the traditional ad to the purchase because it's all happening in the same place. I think they're going to have an enormous advantage. We get to see a lot that the most successful dark kitchens are run by our partners. We're not in the business of creating digital brands. We want to empower the restaurant and the chefs that are well known that have amazing creations, they end up being the ones that perform the best. I do think there's a lot of value to the brand, but it's only going to happen to those brands that really embrace this idea of decisions being made in an instant in an e-commerce platform, this idea of really engaging with performance marketing, growth, tech companies, not in the traditional brand way that can move very fast and being able. I think it's a very, very...”
2021-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Sebastian Mejia - Mastering On-Demand Convenience - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 44] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think they are for sure moments where you're going to actually want the product that is maybe the cheapest or maybe you're not going to be that connected to a specific brand in your purchasing decision. And I'm sure there's going to be opportunities in that space to actually build businesses that are, let's say, unbranded, that are more brand agnostic. However, I do believe that brand plays an important role, especially in a world where getting attention of customers is going to be very important, whether it's from a customer acquisition or is actually to generate an order inside a marketplace. How are you going to choose one brand to another? And I think it's going to be about the story that those brands tell, the mission that those brands have, the brands that can navigate a marketing world that is very digital, that is very connected.”
2021-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Sebastian Mejia - Mastering On-Demand Convenience - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 44] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we're just starting to scratch the surface of this. And at the beginning, we were just thinking about what would happen in the restaurant space, what would happen when you actually start having your products delivered faster. And again, we were comparing it with very bad or slow e-commerce experience that are more legacy. And there, it's obvious if you eat, you're going to at least have a very large fraction of those meals that are not cooked by you sorry, but actually delivered. So you're going to cook less, you're probably going to buy less groceries. When you start having your groceries delivered, it's a little bit of less trips to the supermarket, less, hey, I'm going to buy the stuff for the next month, but I'm going to actually buy the stuff that I need for the week, next couple of weeks. So that was, I would say, version 1.0. Now, version 2.0 is, look, I'm actually being able to deliver stuff extremely, extremely fast.”
2021-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Sebastian Mejia - Mastering On-Demand Convenience - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 44] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That the economics improve, you start seeing that the experience for your couriers is better. So I would say one of the most intriguing things that we've learned and one of the most exciting new initiatives, I always believe that if you were actually to do it in a sequence, it's way better to actually grow in a very asset-like way. So you're focused on building the network, you're focused on organizing the size of the marketplace with technology, which is extremely valuable and difficult to do. And once you have that scale, you start verticalizing your business, not the other way around. Because if you want to verticalize early on, it means that you have to invest a lot of money and you're going to be able to expand much slower. I think it's a natural evolution for asset-like business to actually start going more, let's say, asset heavy.”
2021-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Sebastian Mejia - Mastering On-Demand Convenience - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 44] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Low CapEx way as opposed to being opening a lot of stores or expensive footprint stores, you can do it using your brand, you can do it in microfulfillment centers. So we started doing that after we got more scale. And I would say this is an effort that we've been doing for the last 12, 18 months. But once you start doing it, you start seeing that there's a lot of advantages to the core business model of what we're doing. The experience is great for the users. You actually get to deliver really fast that has a very interesting effect on the frequency and the retention of the users. Getting things delivered in seven minutes is really fascinating. And it starts out tearing your mindset of, well, why do I need to order a big order and just stash it in my pantry for a month? I think that's going to affect behavior of customers in a very profound way.”
2021-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Sebastian Mejia - Mastering On-Demand Convenience - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 44] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was always our mission to be a partner of our merchants. And when we started to verticalize the business, we have several hundred dark kitchens, several hundred microfulment centers or dark stores. We always did it with this idea of how do you actually help businesses digitize themselves faster. Now, imagine that you are a supermarket or imagine that you are a restaurant. All of a sudden, not only you have the users and the logistics of a partner, you have this physical infrastructure that you can use and connect already your brand and your users and say, look, I'm going to actually expand from two stores to 10. And the capex is zero. RAPE is actually my partner. Or it's similar to a supermarket. If you want to expand faster,”
2021-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Sebastian Mejia - Mastering On-Demand Convenience - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 44] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know if this is a scale effect or a network effect, but when the flywheel starts to really spin in a market, you start seeing all of these very interesting effects of you have cakes that are decreasing, you have higher word of mouth, you have more merchants that are coming to your platform, you have more couriers coming to your platform. The whole marketplace starts to thrive. And that's, I think, another thing that you get to see when you have a critical mass in a specific city. One interesting nuance that I would add is that here it's network effects or scale effects, I think you get to see them much more on a city-by-city basis than necessarily a country. This is more connected to the nature of a hyperlocal business that you really need to focus on a city and treat it almost like an independent market because a user in one city is not going to have any connection with another city. At the end, you're buying from local merchants. You got to look at them also from a credit.”
2021-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Sebastian Mejia - Mastering On-Demand Convenience - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 44] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's different from network effects that are maybe more connected to networks of different type of products, whether it's social media. I think in e-commerce, you're talking about much more scale effects that come with this concept of, hey, I'm doing enough volume of orders to actually pay off for all of these very expensive investments that I've done throughout time. And there is this connection with SkeleFX that I think you see it when you basically do a very easy calculation and say, look, I'm doing this amount of orders and I'm generating X amount of dollars on contribution margin per order. That means that my total contribution margin is X and that's allowing me to actually finance many of these investments that I had done early on. So I think that's a very easy way to explain it more from a financial perspective than you also get to see ScaleFX.”
2021-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Sebastian Mejia - Mastering On-Demand Convenience - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 44] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Region very special is that early on we saw that structurally Latin America not only had this advantage of density that allows you to deliver really fast, but also has disadvantage of you can actually order for a dollar, a dollar fifty, pay the couriers two times the minimum wage, and you end up having an average order value to delivery cost ratio that is the highest in the world. So I compare that with the US. I think in the US, customers don't get the velocity of delivery. I think in the US, you end up paying 20-30% more for the cost of food.”
2021-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Sebastian Mejia - Mastering On-Demand Convenience - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 44] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Horizon. And in my view, this is about building really big businesses. There's clear scale effects in this type of businesses. And you've seen them in companies that are public in this space, that are just very profitable. And then what does the business look like in the next five to ten years? Because the market is clearly there. The business model clearly works at scale. So you need to keep on investing to be able to get to that critical scale as fast and as quickly as you can. while doing it with growth and doing it with healthy unit economics. It has to be the three. Otherwise, you are running a very profitable business, but you're small scale effects don't actually kick in or you go to an undisciplined business and you're basically destroying your economics and you end up with a business that is just unfundable, let's say. But we managed to do it very early on and to finalize, I think something that also makes”
2021-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Sebastian Mejia - Mastering On-Demand Convenience - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 44] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hole just keeps on getting bigger, the more orders you deliver. And in our case, we learned early on that we actually could grow extremely fast. And I'm talking about a business that has grown 24x in the last three years, while also having healthy unit economics. Of course, you can allow certain evolution of the unit economics. You cannot expect a certain zone to immediately have positive contribution margin, but you know that it's going to get there in a short period of time. And you know what are the levers that you're going to pull. So that's why it's really important to start from there in the early days. You start making that as part of the culture, as part of the way you operate the business, that attention to detail, that attention to every line of the unit economics. And I think it's totally about doing both. Now, if you have the growth and you have the healthy unit economics, you need to take the long-term...”
2021-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Sebastian Mejia - Mastering On-Demand Convenience - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 44] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a very good question. I think if you really want to build a solid business, we win the network by actually having a sound business model early on. And that's very critical because if you have the right utone economics, you know that you can accelerate the business and grow. These businesses grow really fast. So scaling with really, really bad unit economics becomes very, very difficult. And I think it also creates a discipline. These are low margin businesses in which you need to own each of the lines of the unit economics and constantly optimize them. Sometimes you're going to make certain trade-offs that are aligned with a certain strategy that you're taking in each city. But those trade-offs needs to be within a boundary of healthiness in your unit economics. Otherwise, you're basically scaling a business where imagine if you're growing 100% year over year,”
2021-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Sebastian Mejia - Mastering On-Demand Convenience - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 44] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think so. We are big fans of Mate1, for example. Mate2 is a fascinating business. You're talking about arguably the best delivery company, but on top of that, they have these stacks of additional products. I'm talking about marketing services. I'm talking about advertising. I'm talking about travel and hotel bookings. And what they've proven at scale is that you can build a really large business. And I'm talking about close to a thousand cities in China. And it always works like this. It's all about, okay, what happens in this neighborhood? How can I deliver faster and better quality? Do I have enough restaurants in the specific neighborhood? So that's one company that has done it really well at scale.”
2021-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Sebastian Mejia - Mastering On-Demand Convenience - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 44] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Companies need to build a local presence, and it's hard for a foreign company to actually replicate this because of the level of depth at which you need to operate”
2021-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Sebastian Mejia - Mastering On-Demand Convenience - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 44] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Deliver in a very affordable way as a customer, you're paying $1 to $1.50, then you're still allowing the couriers to make two times the minimum wage. So the model works really, really well. And then you have to have all of the dimension of catalog really, really tightening into what you do. And by that I mean all of this integrations with inventories, with catalogs as real time as possible. That, in my view, is a very, very hard thing to replicate. That's why I have this idea that if you look at all of the e-commerce companies in the world, the majority of them that deal with, let's say, infrastructure or the ones that really thrive in their specific markets tend to be local, with very few exceptions and the exceptions are much more the companies that do drop shipping or that are exporting from China into the world. But if you really understand that you got to deliver fast.”
2021-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Sebastian Mejia - Mastering On-Demand Convenience - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 44] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Could be talking about two kilometer radiuses for a specific zone, and then it's not only how you actually draw the zones in a city. You also have Latin America with a lot of income disparity. So it's not your perfect Manhattan really. It's much more mixed, you know, and you can have a very wealthy neighborhood next to a neighborhood that is not wealthy at all. So you have to navigate all of that hyperlocality aspect. And then once you set those polygons, you're basically delivering inside those zones. And then what I mean by local is that you also have to integrate with the stores inside that specific zone. You have to position the couriers inside that specific zone. But once you do that, the marketplace starts to thrive because the customer experience is amazing, 10, 30 minute delivery. The courier experience is amazing because they're super productive. You don't have to do a lot of long distance. Structurally, that also means that you can.”
2021-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Sebastian Mejia - Mastering On-Demand Convenience - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 44] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going to be the products that are stocked out with more probability to just better integrations with the supermarkets. Not all of these companies have a proper API where you can actually connect with and understand what is the assortment that they have in the store. So you basically end up using flat files and you need to have data that is coming in. You have to clean that data in so it connects actually with your core catalog, which is the nervous system of any type of e-commerce business. So that represents a lot of different challenges. Today RAPI is operating with more than 200,000 points of sale from restaurants to retailers of all sorts. So the data challenge, I think, is very, very intriguing. It's something that we are investing a lot of energy and time.”
2021-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Sebastian Mejia - Mastering On-Demand Convenience - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 44] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That supermarket and the restaurant business is quite different. I think in the restaurant, you basically have two options to actually integrate with what happens inside the business. You can use a tablet or you can use an integration with the POS. So you're basically getting as close as possible to the kitchen that gives the restaurant owner the ability to actually update the menu, the ability to pick the cooking time and select it, depending on the dish that you're cooking. So you got to go really deep in the operations of the restaurant. Then when you go into the supermarket space or the retailers, you're dealing with inventories per store. You're dealing also with inventory levels. So you need to make sure that you have the sortment, but you also need to have some sort of measurement or way of identifying with certain products are being stocked out. And that's a big, big challenge that has a lot of different angles that you can tackle it from machine learning to project.”
2021-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Sebastian Mejia - Mastering On-Demand Convenience - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 44] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going, placing the order as if it was a random customer. A lot of the things were built as we learned. And many of the things had to be built from first principles very early on because it's not that you have a lot of tech stack or logistics stacks that you can just jump on and use to launch. It's one of the challenges of building in the emerging market, but I also think it's an advantage because you get to build this very core competences that tomorrow are going to be very valuable business, right? I see ourselves doing all sorts of services on top of these pieces of the stack, whether it's logistics, whether it's customer service, marketing tools, et cetera.”
2021-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Sebastian Mejia - Mastering On-Demand Convenience - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 44] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I remember us doing the deliveries early on. I remember us being on scooters, making drops, testing the courier app. And from there, we started to evolve the product and we started to also engage couriers to make it better. For us, part of the mission was super critical on how we're going to make these guys not only more efficient, but we're going to make sure that they're paid very well and that they're making significant more than their minimum wage. And I'm only talking about two sides of the marketplace, right? If you introduce the merchant side of the marketplace, that's another layer of complexity. And at the beginning, when we launch, we really didn't understand how to integrate with catalog of a supermarket. How do you actually integrate with a 30,000 SKU store? How do you make sure that you have relevant inventory in real time? How did you integrate with the restaurant? Rapid when we launched, we didn't even have tablets. We didn't have integration with POS systems. So it was literally.”
2021-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Sebastian Mejia - Mastering On-Demand Convenience - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 44] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're basically offering donuts in exchange of downloads. And that was our customer acquisition cost. And we also had to do the same thing on the courier front. And one of the interesting insights is that although e-commerce is still very small and it was way smaller back then, you had a culture of delivery. You had a culture of calling the restaurant, calling the store. And there were couriers already working. They were just completely disconnected. There was no network bringing them together, making them productive, making them more efficient in the way they routed. So we didn't have to go against, let's say, culture. We didn't have to go and educate couriers and even go ahead and educate deeply the customers because they already understood that delivery was this thing that existed. We just applied technology to organize all of these agents and these atoms, let's say in the physical world to make them function more efficiently.”
2021-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Sebastian Mejia - Mastering On-Demand Convenience - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 44] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Previously, we had experience building companies, but it was more enterprise. And we were basically selling software to supermarkets. So we got some sort of idea of how the industry worked, but we wanted to do something completely different, focus on the customer. So we basically started building and initially that convenience product had a very limited assortment. I'm talking about 1,000, 2,000 SKUs. basically said, well, we already have this consumer facing app. It's going to be very easy to build all of the logistics behind it. And of course, that's not the case. When we initially launched, we had no traction whatsoever. So it was literally us trying to understand what was going on with the customers, why they were not engaging with the product. So rapid from the beginning had this DNA of being very hyperlocal and very gorilla. And that meant that we literally went out to get customers on board it and talking to customers.”
2021-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Sebastian Mejia - Mastering On-Demand Convenience - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 44] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And when we first launched, Rapi was born as a convenience store on demand. That was our initial idea. But we had this button that allowed customers to order anything they want in a free text form. So imagine that you text and you just let us know what store we should go to pick those products. And for us, that was a great way to understand customer behavior, iterate from there. Rabbi evolved very early into a multivertical product by listening to customers and by iterating really fast. And initially that convenience product started to become a restaurant business. It started to become a pharmacy business. It started to become a big restaurant business.”
2021-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Sebastian Mejia - Mastering On-Demand Convenience - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 44] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Structurally, you Advantages in Latin America that I think exist in this market. And it's quite different from the US in terms of. How densely populated these cities are. So, you're talking about Arguably the most urbanized region in the world. And believe it or not, when you take a Mexico city or a Sao Pablo, you have densities that are higher than Chinese cities or Even Hong Kong That means that you can have a value prop for the users in which you can deliver really, really fast with a very broad assortment.”
2021-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Sebastian Mejia - Mastering On-Demand Convenience - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 44] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You would live your life in these cities. You're talking about very dysfunctional, challenging cities A product like It's pretty different from what you see in the US. I think in the US, There's many more options where you can buy, but I don't think you get Product that allows you to have this ultra fast engagement. That is extremely flexible to That ends up having this very profound engagement with the user. We”
2021-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Sebastian Mejia - Mastering On-Demand Convenience - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 44] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Still, really, really underpenetrated. So that way you build the future of e-commerce is by creating products that allow you to have this very fast delivery. I mean, I'm talking about 10 to 30 minutes, and a flexible career network that allows you to actually deliver all sorts of different products in each of the cities that you operate. And that is basically a product that allows you to have a very, very high engagement. Product that allows you to have the mindshare of the customer, a product that allows you to have this expansion of the LTV, of the users. Just a superior business model In terms of the advantages of how you Have a long term relationship with the user Turns out to be a product that customers use. A really high frequency, and as part of their core life, it's hard to understand.”
2021-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Sebastian Mejia - Mastering On-Demand Convenience - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 44] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now imagine that you have a product that allows you to have anything delivered in minutes. We are operating across the region focusing Latin America. Today we're talking about nine markets, roughly 200 cities. And in each of those cities, we go very deep zone by zone. And in each neighborhood, we allow customers to basically access rapid as a way to solve their day-to-day needs. A bulk of the business that we do is focus on restaurants and also several categories in the consumer product goods business. But we also deliver other type of categories inside retail. What you need to understand in terms of scale is that Latin America is the fastest growing e-commerce market in the world, but it's probably one of the most underpenetrated. And that's even after COVID and all of the fast acceleration of the movie in terms of technological adoption.”
2021-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Sebastian Mejia - Mastering On-Demand Convenience - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 44] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source