Myjam

There is a say in Silicon Valley: "Software is eating the world". It surely is. The wide spread of software came with a cost. It ate brick & mortars and small businesses along the way. All businesses who couldn't afford to build tech teams in-house suffered from the growth of online businesses such as Amazon, Uber and Ocado. In addition, small businesses suffered from the investment that big businesses put into "software" such as Tesco, Sainsburys and the rest.

Small businesses can't compete on their own. And this is why we started Myjam. To help small businesses come together and compete. We're focusing on street commerce and starting with independent grocers. By offering them a complete solution to sell online, independent grocers can start selling online. Reach a new customer base and sell when it's raining. They can get a new revenue stream otherwise they couldn't get on their own.

Online grocery shopping is growing rapidly in UK, Europe and The US. The share of this market is almost 0 for independent grocery shops.

In London alone, there is about 6,360 independent grocery shops. In the UK there is about 25,000 grocers. These stores are managed by approximately 19,000 people. Adding a new revenue to these people can enhance their live significantly.

Online grocery shopping in 2018 was £12.8bn according to https://www.mintel.com/press-centre/retail-press-centre/brits-spent-12-3-billion-on-online-groceries-in-2018. 

Our goal is to bring 5% of this revenue to the individual grocers in the coming 2-3 years, that means each store will get an additional revenue of £25,000 per year.

We work with independent business owners who typically come from difference backgrounds: Asian, Arabic, Turkish, African...etc. 

UK and Europe have a representing community from almost every country in the world. With over 300 languages spoken. The independent grocery shops serve those communities because the big super market cover a minor selection of products in their international isle. These independent grocery shops are managed by 2-10 people and they don't have the capacity to build technical teams to help them sell online.

We help the independent grocery owners to serve their community and even to reach people from the community who don't have a specialty grocery shop nearby. Ex: A polish family living in an area with no Polish grocery shop within 10 miles radius.

Our solution is an end to end marketplace for exotic grocery. Think of Shopify with the addition of ready catalog and a built-in shipping and payment solution.

Our marketplace is https://myjam.store/ and one of our shops is called "Al Dimashqi". This is their page https://myjam.store/store/valve-brass-statue. Each shop has their own page/shop.

Our offer is:

1- A fully functional online marketplace.
2- Shop Digitization: We take pictures of all products in the shop, add name and description, categorize them and publish them.

3- Integrated payment and shipping solution.

4- Google my place management.

5- Customer support: we offer customer support on behalf of the shop.

Our solution was built under the assumption that grocery shop owners can't manage online store/presence beside their offline shop. We take all this responsibility off them. All they have to do is to prepare the order to be picked up.

Our solution is open source https://github.com/my-jam-store/gatsby-myjam and we use the following technologies:

Tech stack: JAMstack (Javascript, API, markdown).

Hosting: Netlify.

Frontend: Gatsbyjs.

Catalog: Airtable.

Images: Cloudinary.

Search: Algolia.

Payment: Stripe.

Shipping: Many (Stuart, DHL, Independent contractors).

Change in technology

In the last 10 years the barrier to entry in technology came down tremendously. A technology used to cost $1,000 in 2010 costs $50 in 2020. Think of hosting. Big supermarkets focused on building tech teams and buying big warehouses. Relying on the fact that small grocers can't afford that. Big supermarkets focused on fighting with one another and never thought about the small grocery shops. Because they can't build online presence. Well, it's changing now.

Change in demographics

People are moving around all the time. Cities are becoming more cosmopolitan. However, big grocery supermarkets haven't adapted to this change. They still operate in the same way. Big warehouses, fast turnaround, quantity over quality. But people still want to buy food they're used to all back home and in their childhood. A Canadian, Japanese, South African, Lebanese, Turkish, Brazilian and the list go on and on. They all have their own grocery that aren't available at Tesco, Wholefood, Sainsburys, Ocado. But they are available at the specialized store. However this store is not online.

The change in cities

Cities are becoming tighter. They are giving priority to bikes and less pollution. With more legislation make cities greener it will become harder for warehouses like Ocado and Amazon to deliver to the consumer.

We focus on technology and let grocery stores focus on products and location (close to the consumer). This formation is our innovation.

In 7 weeks onboarded two grocery shops and they agreed to start paying us a subscription fee. We extracted the following metrics from the 7 weeks:

Number of products: 3,000.

Time to onboard a store: 7 days.

Fulfilled order: 30.

We interviewed 30 potential grocery shop owners and we extracted the following data from the interview:

20 showed interest and wanted to start.

4 wanted to understand more about sales expectation and operations.

6 weren't interested.

With time and growth in sales and number of stores, it will become easier to bring new stores onboard.

We interviewed 40 consumers from different backgrounds (not English) and we extracted the following data:

35 confirmed that there is a need to online specialized grocery.

3 wanted to know more about the price.

2 said they can shop offline and no need for online shopping.

Number of people we are serving currently is 8 in 2 shops.

In one year we are looking to serve 600 people working in 200 shops.

In five years we are looking to serve 9,000 people working in 3,000 shops.

Our goal is to allow people to benefit from the digital revolution and to remove technology as a barrier to entry. Especially for small teams and solopreneur.

In year one we want to focus on enabling grocery shops.

During the next five years:

1- we want to find a way to help drivers to be independent and earn more than what they are currently earning with delivery apps like Uber Eat, Deliveroo and Amazon.

2- Test the possibility of allowing producers to join the market in a simple way. Currently, big supermarkets have a complicated process of adding new providers. Mass production is an important element. What we want to do is to allow small producers to join the market without going through the current process. Example: If there is a local jam producer with the capacity to produce 100 jars/week. This kind of producer can never sell on the likes of Tesco, Ocado and the rest. Because they need a producer with the capacity to produce 1000s or maybe 10,000s per week. This comes at the cost of price and quality. With our solution, a small grocery shop or a group of shops can put this item on the shelve and we can help them sell online.

This approach could change the lives of 100s of thousands of people because the market is huge but it's not open. Historically, a seller only needed to show up in the market to start selling. We want to bring this process back.

We can summarize the barriers to accomplish our goals:

1- Build the reputation in the market. This requires time and consistency.

2- Bring more grocery shops online. This requires equipments and a team to handle the speedup the process. By digitizing more products, it will be faster and easier to bring more grocery shops online.

3- Bring sales to our grocery shops.

1- Building reputation takes time. We know that and we're committed to be patient and close to our customers and make sure they will come back. We started to receive feedback, testimonies and repeat orders. One of the recent testimonies came from a customer who found us on Google:

“I placed my first order with Myjam recently. Unfortunately, one of the products leaked in the box. They were fantastic, and managed to turn a negative into a positive by the great way in which they handled my problem. The products were really good too, high quality and a fair price. I’ll be a regular customer from now on.”

2- Our plan is to raise fund in the coming 6-12 months. Until then we will continue to bring more shops on a slower pace.

3- We are currently relying on the shops themselves to spread the word. We're printing QR codes and distribute them around the shop to let the customer know that they can buy their grocery online. In addition, we started an experiment with online communities where we engage with them and understand what they need and explain to them what we're doing and how we serve their needs.

1- We are visiting stores to explain to them what we do and discuss how we can help them online. Once the store agrees to join we start the onboarding process by digitizing their store and upload the products online.

2- Once the store is digitized we do test orders and train the store on how to get the products ready to be picked up.

3- We've been working with different delivery companies to pickup and deliver the orders from our stores. We've been working with: Stuart, Royal Mail, DHL, UPS and Hermez.

We noticed that the nature of grocery shops in the Western World is very similar. They are:

1- Migrants who opened these shops to server their community.

2- They can't build an online store on their own.

3- They are managed by 3-10 people.

4- There sell same products.

In addition the nature of the market itself is very similar in the Western World. The market is:

1- Dominated by big players who focus on the mainstream and not the need of the communities. Ex: Tesco, Sainsburys and Ocado in the UK. Lidl and Edeka in Germany. Target, Walmart and Sam'sclub in the US. They don't cover international products. They don't focus on quality. Just quantity.

Our plans is to apply the same winning tactics in the UK on new markets like Germany and The US. There will be differences but starting an online grocery in The UK and Germany has more similarity and in common than starting a fashion company in both countries.

We're a team of 6. One works full-time (myself) and 5 work part-time.

We have 10 years of experience working with small businesses who want to go online. In my previous startup https://shopgo.me/ we helped 100s of merchants across 15 countries to setup their online store and we formed partnerships with payment, shipping, operation and management companies to help our customers sell online.
With our experience and the scalable solution we're building, we have a unique proposition to deliver success to this solution.

We started to work with shipping companies and the plan is to form a strong partnership with them. The likes of: Stuart, Royal Mail, DHL, UPS and Hermez.

The current relationship is still basic since we're in early days. We have an account with them and we place an order with them when we want to ship with them.

Our key customer is the grocery shop owner. Their customer is the consumer who buys the grocery.

Our business model is a monthly subscription. Each store pays $128/mo (£99). Unlike other marketplaces, we decided not to charge a transaction fee. Because we want the shop owners to make the most out of each transaction. In addition, there is an advantage for us over other marketplaces that the cost to bring a new business becomes less with every new customer until it becomes marginal. Because at one point there will be no need to digitize products for new shops.

Our plan is to fundraise in the coming 6-12 months to help us increase our revenue and reach sustainability in 18-24 months from the time we close the round.

For two reasons:

1- The prize can give us a great boost since the team is not getting paid and working part-time except me (I'm not getting paid but working full-time). The prize will allow me to hire the team on full-time basis and accelerate the execution of the plan.

2- The mentorship will help me personally in term of enhancing my leadership skills and get help from more experienced leaders. Every founder needs that and mentorship can be a great help for me and our startup.

Shipping companies like Stuart or Royal Mail or DHL. If we can partner with them it will make it easier for us to deliver order to our customers' customers.