Creative Idea Powerhouse

For the young entreprenuer, elevator pitch seems challenge, especially you need to sell your idea in less than 1 minutes. Just imagine you are the guy who going to pitch the investor who going to invest in your company for millions, and you have this golden opportunity of less than 1 minute (about the time for elevator to go from Ground Zero till you walk out from the elevator with smiling face). Every phrase and word you use will decide the chances of you winning the interest of your big investor to further look at your BIG PLAN.

Paris-based Zlio.com is a white-label online store for anyone, working with partners including Tesco, Apple, Littlewoods and Play to allow people to set up their own shopfronts.

The site launched in France in 2006 and in the US recently. The site deals with the complexities of the online payment system, and members take a share of the products sold through their site. One average, members make around $300 per month but the biggest users have been earning $3,000.

Zlio has 18 full-time staff and has had funding from two German business angels and from Mangrove Capital.

Founder Jeremie Berrebi explains how it works.

• Explain your business to my Mum.
“With Zlio you can open your own store even if you have nothing of your own to sell. You pick from products offered by our name brand merchants to populate your store, and sell anything you’re interested in online.”

• How do you make money?
“We generate sales for our merchant partners and take a percentage of these sales.”

• What’s your background?
“I’ve been in the internet industry since 1994, when I started working with Compuserve. After that I worked in a number of internet-related companies including managing an online forum for the Tour de France and acting as online manager of EMME. For about a year and a half I wrote for ZDNet France and then, founded a first company called Net2one, a news search engine which sold to TNS in 2004, and started focusing on the concept of Zlio in July 2005.”

• How many users do you have now, and what’s your target within 12 months?
“Right now there are more than 200,000 stores on Zlio.com and we work with 350 merchants worldwide. By the end of the year I hope that has increased to 1m Zlio shops.”

• What’s your biggest challenge?
“Our biggest challenge right now is transforming Zlio into a global business. Currently 75% of our users are in France and we’re starting to see a lot of interest from other markets, including the US and UK, but we’d like to see our worldwide distribution grow as quickly as possible.”

• Name your competitors.
“Amazon aStore is really the only other company out there offering something close to what we do.”

• What’s the weirdest business experience you’ve had so far?
“In my last company I was trying to motivate the team and told them that one day we would take a company trip to Euro Disneyland. A few months went by and I had almost forgotten about this promise, but one day I had 20 upset employees storm into my office and demand the trip. They were ready for the rides!”

• If you had £10m to invest in another web business, what would you invest in?
“I would invest in Stardoll. I like that they sell virtual goods for real money and have proven it can be a successful business.”

• Are we in the middle of a new dot com bubble?
“I don’t think we’re seeing the same environment that we did in 2000. The difference is companies have now figured out how to make money with online businesses. However, I do think certain industries are seeing a heightened level of activity like the photo-sharing and social network categories. This is the natural result when a new industry is forming; you always have a lot of people trying to do the same thing in hopes of being one of the few winners.”

• Where do you want the company to be in five years?
“Our vision is to create the largest digital sales force in the world. We want people to be able to sell products all over the world from online catalogues.”

• Are you the next big thing?
“We haven’t seen any real revolution in the e-commerce area since Amazon and eBay. While it seems a little over-eager to say that we’re the only next big thing, I do think that Zlio is the company that will drastically change the e-commerce landscape for the first time in a decade.”

The e-Business industry has evolved dramatically since year 1997, when Jeff Bezos started the first online bookstore Amazon.com (B2C model); Jack Ma started the largest online business trading platform Alibaba.com (B2B model); and eBay.com’s world largest online auction site (C2C model). When time passed, the e-Business players started to evolve themselves into other business model; such as Alibaba.com tried to venture into C2C model using Taobao.com; Amazon.com trying their luck again by launched the C2C model of aStore.com to boost their online revenue. All these investments has raise a question to many online veteran, are the existing business model for Amazon, or Alibaba have hit the boundaries, or the entire internet commerce market are emerging to a new era, where be the best in single business model may longer secure and sufficient to sustain competitiveness in the next decades of internet growth. Are C2C the last piece of unconquered land for all internet businesses? After the C2C model, what will be the next big wave for internet commerce will look like when the industry leaders such as Google and Microsoft aggressively promoting ‘Cloud Computing’ and ‘Web 3.0 – Semantic Web’ platform?
One of the other interesting facts of e-commerce was raised by the Chief Editor of Business Next magazine, the leading Web and Technology magazine in Taiwan. The Web 2.0 is slowly fading out and getting less attention from industry due to many Web 2.0 companies failed to show new profitable business models, and will soon be replaced by Web 3.0, which has started to capture the lime-light from the media and public attention. The shift of Web 2.0 to Web 3.0 not merely a technology shift, but it will also indicate the end of PC dominated online era, and move to mobile online era. It also indicated the shift of market domination from United State driven in pass decades, to Asia lead e-business environment in the next 10 years. China has the largest subscriber base for mobile phone, and in next 3 years, China will be the number one English speaking country in the world. South Korea, on the other hand, is currently the ‘Most connected’ country in the world with highest internet penetration rate with fastest internet connection speed infrastructure.
In Platform2u.com, we have spent substantial time to follow the internet industry trend, research on the internet technologies, critical success factors for all e-Business models and building case study on successful e-Business companies such as Alibaba.com, Amazon.com, and even Zlio.com the new rising star in e-Business industry. We also studied the e-Commerce and Internet development reports from mainstream research firms such as Accenture, Morgan Stanley, and IBM; as well as web-base research firms such as e-Marketer, Asia Digital Marketing Association, Forrester Research, and FabelNovel Consulting. We have concluded our researches and studies for the future internet commerce industry into the following table.
• China will be the largest e-commerce market by overtake United State due to recession and recent global economic crisis – Business Next
• Majority of the e-commerce operators are comprise of less than 5-man companies which lead to potential falling of e-commerce industry in Asia – Accenture
• In 2008, consumer internet traffic has surpassed corporate internet traffic usage – Morgan Stanley
• Majority reports and media neglected China power. Three largest social communities in US, MSN (200mil members) + Facebook (85mil members) + MySpace (80mil members) still can’t compete with single largest social community in China – QQ.com with more than 500mil subscribers!
• Social commerce will be the next wave of e-commerce initiative that utilizes the power of social networks such as Facebook, Myspace, Blogs and Online TV.
• Business at the speed of thought – Bill Gates. To be the next leading internet company, speed is the key challenge. Speed of Internet, speed to go-to market, as well as speed to multiply the members’ growth in week.