Jun 16, 2020
Today’s guest is David Ng, co-founder and CEO of Pollen, a community sales-as-a-service platform empowering brands to turn their fans into resellers. We began our conversation by diving into Pollen’s business model – understanding the challenges and opportunities of a B2B model versus a B2C model, dissecting the key value proposition and the key stakeholders’ relationships of social commerce, highlighting the difference between social commerce and multi-level marketing. Lastly, we discussed the competitive landscape of social commerce and how Pollen positions itself among the competitors.
Key highlights from our conversation
Direct to consumer brands and social commerce go hand in
hand
A lot of famous direct to consumer brands became
popular due to social media so what social commerce does for D2C
brands now is to enable them to go one step further from engaging
their community through contents to turning them into resellers for
the brands.
Key difference between multi-level marketing and social
commerce
Multi-level marketing is focused on the recruitment of other agents
where the bulk of the income comes from instead of selling for the
brand while social commerce focuses on selling for the brand by
attracting people who can build personal relationships with the
buyers.
The key value proposition for social commerce is centred around the hypothesis that “I am more likely to buy it from someone I trust as opposed to buy it from someone whom I don't know or by seeing a brand’s advertisement”. There are three key stakeholders at the heart of social commerce – the brand or supplier, the resellers and end consumers.
Casual sellers make up the bulk of the reseller
network
75% of the community piloted at Pollen is made up of casual sellers
who are potential buyers too while the remaining 25% of the
community are hardcore sellers who see social commerce as a way a
main income generating engine.
Non-commodity type products are more suitable for social commerce such as fashion, beauty, food, wellness, lifestyle because purchasing decisions for such products depend on a multitude of factors beyond pure functionality and price alone.
Content at a glance with time-code
(01.26) David’s background story and the journey to founding
Pollen
(03.22) Snapshot of Pollen’s business model
(05.09) Direct to consumer brands and social commerce go hand in
hand
(07.43) Difference between social commerce and multilevel
marketing
(11.46) Casual sellers vs hardcore sellers
(13.36) The B2C element of social commerce
(16.04) What types of products work best for social commerce
(20.05) B2B vs B2C social commerce business models
(32.20) Unicorn discussion: the fine balance between profitability
and valuation
Episode links
Pollen: https://www.pollen.store/
Jumper AI: https://jumper.ai/