Aussie start-up Posse relaunches for second bite at social commerce cherry
Australian start-up Posse has relaunched after a new round of investment.
The start up was formerly a music event ticketing peer-to-peer site, but closed down and relaunched after deciding that the core idea was not scalable in the Australian market.
The company has retained its name and online properties, but has an entirely new strategy and revenue model.
Posse CEO Rebekah Campbell told Mumbrella that although the company had undergone a significant shift in direction from the venture originally granted $758,000 in funding from the ministry of innovation, among other funding sources, “A lot of the value of the company is in the learnings.”
Posse is now a social platform that allows users to share their favourite places from all over the world with friends, and gives retailers the opportunity to recognise or reward their best customers.
The platform uses Facebook to connect users, who display their favourite retailers on a virtual street, connecting with friends to construct a town.
The commercial model is based on retailers signing up to view what advocates are saying about them, and also to add offers and vouchers to be redeemed by people who like their offering, and their friends in turn.
The new commercial model was developed through 30 rounds of user testing and focus groups, leading to the insight that the platform is built on.
Campbell told Mumbrella: “People will talk for an hour about places they’re passionate about. People want to be known by their friends for their good taste, so we created a site to appeal to urban dwellers with high discretionary income.”
Posse has received three rounds of angel investment and venture capital funding to date, totalling approximately $4.4m and is intended to break even by March 2013.
The site has a staggered roll-out schedule. It will launch its ambassador program on the 17th of July, with plans to bring celebrity ambassadors on board, with further social media and PR activity to support the public launch.
I was a heavy user of the original Posse and I understand why the idea wasn’t scalable. There are just too many different ticket merchants in Australia and adding an affiliate layer to all of them was just too complicated. Other solutions might have been:
* get acquired by a big ticketing agency, but I don’t think they would have seen a competitive advantage in slicing up their pie by splitting commissions with users.
* launch internationally, possibly doing more business but also multiplying the number of ticket provider clients and associated hassles
* seek to overturn the established ticket merchants with a better service for venues/promoters and customers – this is the approach eTix.com has taken, and it’s probably the hardest, but would have the greatest rewards.
Online ticketing still isn’t solved and I’m a little sad that Posse walked away from what were (in my opinion) its strongest ideas in favour of its weaker ones.
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online ticketing can’t be solved in scale here due to ticketek and venue deals.
that’s the reality.
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Rebekah is a lovely person and there is value in failed venture but 4.4mln investment in concept with less than 100k users seems like classic premature scalling…. Let’s review in 2014 🙂
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