Hi there,
Welcome to the 85th edition of Heartcore Consumer Insights. Curated with 🖤 every two weeks by the Heartcore Team.
If you missed the past newsletters, you can catch up here. Now, let’s dive in!
⚡️⚡️⚡️The Heartcore Annual Consumer Tech Report is OUT NOW with over 150 pages of content that zooms in on key industry trends in Web3, Gaming, Retail, Food, Health, and 7 other verticals. 📖
Some highlights inside the report include:
how crypto became a consumer phenomenon and rebranded to Web3
a look into the continued rise of the circular economy
how the next frontier of neobanks are striving for financial inclusion
& how travel intermediation is on the rise and travel agents are making a comeback
With so much happening in the consumer space since the pandemic 🦠, we are really excited to showcase our findings for 2021 and also look forward to 2022. 💡 Please share, comment and re-post the report - any feedback is also warmly welcomed as we start thinking about compiling next year’s report.
Read it HERE 👈🏻
The Pillars of International Growth - Phil Carter (Director of Growth at Quizlet)
International growth is inherently complex, and many believe there’s no reliable playbook for success. However, many companies run into the same challenges - and the smartest ones adopt the same best practices.
Product-Culture Fit: just because you succeeded in one country, don’t assume you can replicate success in other markets without an understanding of your unique strategic advantage. Why should a customer choose you over any other local startup that understands the market better than you do? The best way to measure progress toward product-culture fit is to measure local customer retention and look for accelerating organic growth. Companies that want to take this a step further can plot normalized customer growth across markets. By plotting monthly trips per city and normalizing based on the number of months since launch, Uber visually demonstrated “nuclear growth” in Chinese cities that were growing unusually fast.
Customer Accessibility: willingness to pay is an important factor that varies widely across markets. Making your product available in the local currency is a good start, but if you’re applying your domestic prices in markets where your target customer has less disposable income, then you’re unlikely to see much traction. Additionally, understanding local market payment needs is critical for achieving widespread customer adoption.
Universal Currencies (resources that can be leveraged in a geo-agnostic fashion): (a) Content: a lot of content is relevant across international borders, particularly after localization into native languages. One example of a company that relied heavily on content to scale internationally is Pinterest, which took advantage of its visual medium to expand rapidly into countries even before it needed to expend significant effort on language-level localization. (b) Connectors: B2C businesses often have early adopters who play an outsized role in generating content and word of mouth (beyond borders). Facebook famously built one of the first modern growth teams and leveraged Facebook’s greatest asset - its users - to accelerate product localization in international markets.
Populating the Metaverse - an Overview of the Early 2022 Landscape
Insights from early-stage marketplaces
The Netflix effect: the most powerful content marketing channel in the world
Depop: Inside the rise of Gen Z's favorite resale app
Common Mistakes In Defining Metrics
What is a good payback period
Five New Frontiers for NFTs
The Billions of Unbundling YouTube
How Noom's Founders Shook Up a $250 Billion Industry
🇪🇺 Notable European early-stage Consumer rounds
Nous, a UK-based startup helping households save more through essential contacts renegotiating/switching, raises $9M with Mosaic - link
Voilà, a Germany-based food-delivery service bringing fine dining experience at-home, raises $10M with EQT - link
LaCollection, a France-based NFT platform bridging the gap between traditional & digital art, raises $10M with Alven/Aglaé - link
Heygo, a UK-based platform offering live-streaming interactive tours with local guides, raises $20M with Northzone/Lightspeed - link
Zefir, a France-based startup making home-selling simpler, faster, and more certain by buying the property directly from you, raises €20M with Sequoia/Heartcore 🖤/Stride - link
NUMA Group, a Germany-based “full-stack” hospitality alternative to boutique hotels, raises $45M with DN Capital/Headline - link
Papier, a UK-based startup offering customizable stationery such as wedding cards, notebooks and notecards, raises $50M with Singular/dmg ventures - link
🇺🇸 Notable US early-stage Consumer rounds
Balanced, a US-based senior-focused digital fitness company, raises $6.5M with Founders Fund/Primary/Lux - link
RabbitHole, a US-based platform allowing users to earn crypto by using the latest crypto applications, raises $18M with Greylock/TCG - link
Rainbow, a US-based consumer-friendly crypto wallet, raises $18M with Seven Seven Six - link
Mos, a US-based challenger bank for students, raises $40M with Tiger/Sequoia/Lux - link
Everyrealm, a US-based startup investing in and developing virtual land in NFT-based metaverse games, raises $60M with a16z - link
🔭 Notable later stage Consumer rounds
Future, a US-based one-on-one digital training service with fitness coaches, raises $75M with SC.Holdings/Trustbridge/Kleiner - link
Clickalia, a Spain-based iBuyer, raises $86M with Fifth Wall/SoftBank - link
CoinTracker, a US-based portfolio, and tax manager for cryptocurrency raises $100M with Accel - link
Vivid Money, a Germany-based challenger bank, raises $114M with GreenOaks/Ribbit/SoftBank - link
FTX US, a US-based crypto exchange, raises $400M with Paradigm/Temasek/NEA/Multicoin - link
🖤 Heartcore
🎉 A warm congratulations to Zefir which we backed at seed, and a big welcome to Sequoia Capital!
Thrilled to welcome two new fantastic companies to the Heartcore Family:
🍽 Qlub, solving the long-standing consumer dilemma of paying restaurant bills by allowing customers to settle their bills quickly by scanning a QR code with their phone.
📚 Luca, building an innovative learning platform that offers pre-recorded K12 videos, gamified content, and AI-powered personalized study paths for students.
Heartcore Consumer Insights is a weekly newsletter covering notable consumer rounds and exits and top content in the B2C space.
