User blogs

Few tech sectors had more to gain from the events of 2020 than home fitness. Interest in the category was swift, as gyms were declared one of the bigger problem areas amid the worldwide spread of Covid-19. Suddenly home workouts were more than just luxury.

For YC-backed Aviron, it was the ideal time to pivot. The Toronto-based startup had been providing gamified rowing machines for the B2B market – specifically for use in high traffic settings like hotels and apartment buildings. It’s still a small operation with 10 employees and around $750,000 raised to date.

Suddenly the company found itself in attempting to compete for market share against tech giants like Peloton.

Of course, thus far Aviron’s own sales are considerably more humble than the cycling giant. Until now, the company has largely relied on word of mouth sales, having sold in the neighborhood of 1,000 rowing machines since launching for the consumer market in July. The equipment retails for $2,299 a piece – though you can find it online for less.

The company works with an ODM to create the machine. And while it touts some nice touches like a quiet nylon belt and 100-pounds of automatic electronic resistance, Aivron’s main differentiator is the software – specially a connected gaming experience via the built-in display. The monthly subscription runs $20-$30 and the company is quick to note that you can cancel at any time.

“Rowing engages 85% of your muscles,” founder and CEO Andy Hoang tells TechCrunch. “It’s low impact. There are a ton of benefits, but it’s super boring and super tough. When you combine it with high-intensity training, you have a death machine that pretty much no’s gonna want to do. What better way to make it fun and exciting than by putting video games on there?”

The system sports six different workout categories, including real time competition with other rowers. There are a few introductory workouts, to ensure that first-timers don’t injure themselves by just jumping directly into competitive rowing, but on the whole, the system avoids Peloton-style classes.

“Our workouts are short,” says Hoang. “They’re like 10-15 minutes. You do maybe one or two of them, and by the end of it, you feel like you’re going to die because it’s so tough. Peloton is typically 40-60 minutes, a little bit lower intensity and with less resistance. And obviously it’s a class led by an instructor, rather than getting chased by zombies.”

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/28/pivoting-to-home-fitness-aviron-offers-gamified-rowing-machines/

Three of the popular retail stock market trading apps that have hosted much of the activity related to the Wall Street Bets subreddit-spurred run on stocks including GameStop (GME) and AMC, among others, have removed all restrictions on their exchange by their users. M1, Webull and Public had restricted transactions for the affected stocks earlier in the day, along with Robinhood.

M1, Webull and Public all attributed the restrictions placed on these volatile stocks not to any effort to curb their purchase or sale, but instead cited the costs associated with settling the trades on the part of their clearing firm, Apex. All three platforms employ Apex to clear trades made by users via their platform.

In an interview with Webull CEO Anthony Denier, Yahoo Finance confirmed that the restriction was not something the company had any hand in deciding.

Public confirmed via Twitter that users can now buy and sell $GME and $AMC and $KOSS on the platform, thanks to the resolution of the Apex blocker. Meanwhile Webull noted that all three stocks are now also available for exchange via their app, as did M1 shortly after.

Other platforms like SoFi so far haven’t restricted the stocks, CEO Anthony Noto confirmed on Twitter.

Robinhood earlier issued a blog post noting that it is restricting a number of stocks tied to the r/WallStreetBets action to counter short-seller hedge funds, arguing that it’s doing so in the best interest of users. This has not seemed to have been much appreciated by most users, based on the reaction on social media to that action thus far. Robinhood at no time references any technical barriers imposed by any clearing house.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/28/webull-and-public-remove-restrictions-on-memestocks-after-citing-trade-settlement-firm-as-the-cause/

2021 is going to be another glorious year for e-commerce.

It is that time of the year when most of us are looking back at the “total addressable market” estimates to plan for specific campaigns. Unlike us, if you had your 2021 kick off in Q3, bless your soul. You are an enlightened being.

For the rest of you, for whom e-commerce is a strategic market, I have a question — have you built your total addressable market (TAM) and serviceable addressable market (SAM) estimates for 2021 considering how things evolved in 2020?

For most of us, research is a mind-numbing, repetitive exercise of clicking through links on Google until they all turn purple — at which point we start seeking the simplest possible explanation. For e-commerce, addressable market estimates come in the form of headlines from platforms like Shopify. The company quotes a merchant count number in its earnings calls and that becomes the basis for guesstimating the current TAM of e-commerce companies.

The other, rather simplistic approach is to look at the user-base count from several databases that publish tech platform-level user stats.

In reality, the simplest answer is not the right answer.

Mind the gap

Let’s take e-commerce shopping cart installations. Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce, BigCommerce and others publish installation numbers that run into millions.

Here is the dichotomy that should frame your TAM discussions.

E-commerce is long-tail heavy. Yes, there are millions of merchants, but e-commerce revenue is a fat-tail phenomenon — meaning, a disproportionate amount of e-commerce revenue comes from a few tens of thousands of companies.

PipeCandy publishes bottom-up TAM estimates with detailed data cuts by technology, logistics and payment system adoptions by firms across revenue tiers across all major markets. One of the common misconceptions we see in how firms misinterpret TAM estimates is that they equate revenue to spend potential.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/28/mind-the-gap-e-commerce-marketers-should-revise-their-tam-and-sam-estimates/

Twitter only announced its acquisition of newsletter platform Revue two days ago, but the company has already begun to integrate the product into the Twitter.com website. It appears “Newsletters” will soon be the newest addition to Twitter’s sidebar navigation, alongside Bookmarks, Moments, Twitter Ads, and other options. The company is also readying a way to promote the new product to Twitter users, promising them another way to reach their audience while getting paid for their work.

These findings and others were uncovered by noted reverse engineer Jane Manchun Wong, who dug into the Twitter.com website to see what the company may have in store for its newest acquisition.

According to a pop-up promotional message in development she found, Twitter will soon be pitching a handful of Revue benefits, like the ability to compose and schedule newsletters, embed tweets, import email lists, analyze engagement and earn money from paid followers. The messaging was clearly in early testing (it even had a typo!), but it hints at Twitter’s larger plans to tie Revue into the Twitter platform and serve as a way for prominent users to essentially monetize their reach.

Currently, the “Find Out More” button on pop-up message will redirect Twitter users to the Revue website. Wong found.

In addition, Wong noted Twitter was making “Newsletters” a new navigation option on the Twitter sidebar menu. Unfortunately, it was not shown on the top-level menu where you today find options like Explore, Notifications, Messages or Bookmarks, but rather on the sub-menu you access from the three-dot “More” link.

The tight integration between Revue and Twitter’s main platform could potentially give the company an interesting competitive advantage in the newsletters market — especially as Twitter has already dropped hints that its new audio product, Twitter Spaces, will also be used as a way to connect with newsletter subscribers.

In its announcement, Twitter referred to “new settings for writers to host conversations” with their readers. That likely means Twitter users would be able to not just publish newsletters with the new Twitter product, but also monetize their existing follower base, find new readers through Twitter’s built-in features, and then engage their fans on an ongoing basis through audio chats in Spaces. Combined with its lowering of the paid newsletter fee to 5%, many authors are rightly considering the potential Twitter advantages. If anything at all is holding them back, it’s Twitter’s less-than-stellar reputation when it comes to successfully capitalizing on some of its acquisitions.

Twitter declined to comment on Wong’s findings, but we understand these features are currently not live on the website. Wong told us she hasn’t found any indications of Revue integrations in the Twitter mobile apps just yet.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/28/twitter-is-already-working-on-integrating-newsletters-on-its-site-following-revue-acquisition/

Coinbase plans to go public by way of a direct listing, the company announced in a blog post today.

The cryptocurrency exchange was founded in 2012 and allows users to buy and trade decentralized tokens like bitcoin and ethereum. The company has raised over $540 million in funding as a private company.

Last month, the company shared that it had confidentially filed an S-1 with the SEC, we still haven’t seen those financials but we now know that they have opted out of the traditional IPO process. Direct listings have been slowly gaining popularity and given some of the most recent first day pops from tech IPOs, it’s unsurprising to see a company like Coinbase which is likely flush with cash thanks to recent gains in the cryptocurrency market opt for a path to public markets that involves less fuss.

Updating

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/28/coinbase-is-going-public-via-direct-listing/