2022 Coopsight—Grow Together
February 16, 2022
By: Alara Tuncer
Co-founders of Coopsight, George Chichua, Thomas Yee and Erol Bickici, are participants of the NYU Sprint from NYU Shanghai. Thomas Yee begins our conversation by saying that “it’s been a crazy ride.” He goes onto explaining how observations they’ve made in China have shaped their start-up. “In China there’s really two big ecosystems—think of everything in your life as either Pepsi or Coke. And what I mean by that is when you go out and use any sort of technological service, it’s just Alibaba and Tencent.”
Thomas walks me through his typical day. “If I were to wake up and let’s say I want to eat breakfast. Usually there’s Uber eats, right? Well, there’s actually, Uber eats owned by either Alibaba or Tencent. Then if I want to pay for something right, let’s say I want to pay for that food, then you either use the wallet by Alibaba like digital fintech or Tencent. Let’s say I want to go outside and I want to rent a bike. Oh look, I now use the Alibaba bike or this is the Tencent bike.” This includes all purchases. “Want to pay for the metro? Want to buy tickets for anything, like a concert? Maybe even go to another province in China—you buy the airplane tickets using this because it is owned by them. You buy the rail tickets because it is owned by them. So everything is just very much interconnected.”
It’s crazy how related everything is from a data stand-point. Since Thomas is American, he acknowledges that this may seem very “antitrust,” having all your purchases connected to just two corporations, but from a technological standpoint this has many advantages. There is simply more “potential for newer solutions that can come out” due to the data.
Thomas clarifies the concept to me further. “A form of a new business is something called Community Group buying. It’s the combination of big data plus delivery plus ecommerce. Essentially it’s pretty much finding a way to lower costs on groceries because they have all the control on the supply chain.” Thomas adds that it’s like “a whole fleet” because they have control from all the way on the top until the delivery at the bottom. When delivery is usually considered a luxury, since they have the “understanding of the entire pipeline, they’re able to somehow lower the costs by more than 20 to 30%,” thereby appealing to lower income communities as well. Therefore, more data becomes more accessible by everyone.
Thomas goes on to add that “it would be difficult to have this in other places because it would be very economically invalid,”, an observation of the data-driven market system from which their idea and business model has derived.
So, what is Coopsight? It began with a question: “why aren’t ecosystems and this idea of sharing data between each other, between different companies and startups not already exist?” They thought “maybe there is a chance for us to test out whether start-ups and companies would be interested in building their own microcosm and ecosystems.”
Thomas goes on to say that for big tech companies, an ecosystem already exists. An obvious example is Amazon, which also owns Whole Foods. “And, if you look at their revenues, they’re not really e-commerce. That’s not where their money comes from, it’s actually AWS, their cloud services.” Looking at Apple, “some people are suggesting they might make a car someday.” Simply put, “everyone is trying to diversify.” So, the founders of Coopsight thought why not bring the forces of start-ups together so that they create an ecosystem together?
Initially, this is exactly what Coopsight aimed to do. Prior to the sprint, they had about 500 start-ups that were matched with each other. But they had trouble tracking the relationships of the start-ups that were connected. Working with the advisers at the Start-up Sprint program they also realized that their idea was “like a million feet above the air.” Obviously “people care about this” but they were confronted with questions like “where do you find the people? Who would really benefit from this? And how do you convince them?”
So, while their initial idea was a “platform for startup founders to try to connect with each other to make an ecosystem” they were confronted with the fact that “startup founders generally don’t have the money to do so and second of all these founders usually don’t have a product yet.” Although “it would be easiest for start-ups to integrate their products,” to build an ecosystem, the feasibility of start-ups to fund building an ecosystem is still very unlikely. As a result, Coopsight had to shift their idea to fit the needs of their consumers.
Thomas explains this to me using chemistry as an analogy: “atoms are businesses, compounds are partnerships, and a mixture of compounds is an ecosystem.” So, to build their idea top-down they first decided to focus on singular partnerships—the relationship between one company with another. This allowed them to discover “the business for partnerships.” Looking at examples in Silicon Valley who are already employing successful partnerships they realized their target consumers: “midsize to large-scale businesses.”
As a result they have become a stepping-stool for these companies to take their businesses to the next level. Surveying the field in more detail, with many interviews with field experts, the founders of Coopsight are now more aware of the problems they face when building partnerships and that is “partner acquisition.” For the consumers of their partnerships, a good question is always going to be “who fits me best with the products I can offer?” So, Coopsight is intending to do more than LinkedIn, which wastes a lot of time. Their goal is to use their understanding of the market data and historical partnerships to create a map of which partnerships will work in order to optimize and ease the route of new partnerships.
Today, if you were to go to Coopsight with your company, they would intend to determine “who would be the best partner to match you with” based on the data with an automated platform that they are building. On their website they call it “grow together by matching with peers.” With a brilliant but very large area, the founders of Coopsight have come a long way. As CIE we wish them the best of luck in their future endeavors!