Challenging Amazon's dominance

Then, how do you connect the right consumer to the right expert? How do you make sure you have enough of these experts available online? How do you ensure that customers would have someone to talk to when they wanted? I would break down the problem, and then get intimidated about it.

...for various high-consideration categories, consumers still often feel more comfortable seeing products in-person, or going into a store and asking for guidance.

We’re going to do about $45 million of topline revenue this year. We’ll end the year just below $100 million run rate.

That’s where Curated comes in: it’s an expert-driven commerce platform that leverages category experts to guide shoppers to the right products. Today, it’s focused on adventure sports like skiing, cycling, golf, fishing, and camping and hiking, but has an expansive future plan encompassing all specialty retail categories.

Our background in recruiting led to the way we approached this problem; Curated is very future-of-work focused, vs. retail-focused.

For the past 15 years, I've had the idea that, as a consumer, I should be able to raise my hand, say what I'm looking for, and have a company come to me. So instead of attention, as in the attention economy, you’d have intention—being able to broadcast one’s intention for something, and having that presented.

you have to think of experts as revenue generators instead of cost centers. By involving experts, you increase the conversion rate, which decreases customer acquisition cost. Customers pay for half of their compensation [through tips], and the return rate is about 1%, which is about an order of magnitude lower than competitors in the industry, so t... See more

We realized that the right experts were people who perhaps had a totally different day job, but they were passionate about that particular thing. Most of our experts don't do this full-time. They might be an engineer, who just does this on nights and weekends. They just love talking about mountain biking or whatever it might be.