RedeDots

It is an exponential social network of over 220k people engaged in fair trade and sustainable business.

Our context: the shrinking of the jobs market as we know it and the rise of the gig economy.
Our inception: a closed Facebook group started in the midst of a jobs crisis, pledging for everybody to open their address books and exchange information. The first members were the cream of Sao Paulo creative economy, but the news quickly spread and today all kinds of people tell their stories and buy and sell frenetically in the virtual equivalent of a thriving street fair. A sense of purpose and strong rules created a circle of trust: the group is invitation-only and each new member is scanned by volunteer moderators, to keep the culture of generosity and openness.
Our business: a hybrid of marketplace and social network that goes live in the third week of June. It will allow this incredibly lively conversation to continue flowing and it will enable people to transact efficiently and smoothly at the same time. We are one of the possible answers against to the dark side of the gig economy: local, sustainable, fair and human. Stories are the center of Rededots and this how we make impact continuously and keep the business good.

Our competitive advantage is that we already have a 220K (and growing almost 800 new members a day) in our user base and they are all committed to our philosophy in a strong way. So we can say we do not have a direct competitors as no one has done this before. The closest we have in Brazil is called Elo7, but it has no space for services vendors and no social network interaction. Right now we don't have a strong, undisputed artisan marketplace or service broker in Brazil, so there is a huge opportunity.

Rededots has leveraged something as commonplace as a Facebook group so far, to hold its community together. The new marketplace will provide these people tools for transactions, that are also standard in the industry, and also some unique features. We also offer social relationship intelligence and marketing automation and other tools that are widely available in the market but, often, not affordable to the micro entrepreneurs.

Our first and foremost goal is to become a new kind of peoplespace. A perfect hybrid of conversation and transaction, a combination of social network and marketplace, where the glue that holds the community together is trust and the result is a sustainable machine for generating abundance.
Our secondary goal is to become enablers and curators of this wonderful social experiment, helping the community give birth to whatever services it needs for its growth.
Our third goal is that Rededots occupies the space left by the erosion of the job market in Brazil.

Rededots will soon service more than 75.000 vendors and one million users throughout a collaborative network of creatives, artisans, service providers focused on microentrepreneurs. We strive to offer the lowest transaction fee of the market in order to provide an inclusive business environment, empowering all social classes in a horizontal approach with several tools such as microcredit financing lines, as well an comprehensive business, finance, and online selling training content aiming the independency and development of our vendors and their suppliers, creating a positive impact on the whole business chain, culminating in affordable products and services to the community.

61.3% of our users would not be easily able to sell online due to the high costs and complexity of a traditional e-commerce structure mostly available in two forms: 1) Hire a company to develop an ecommerce platform and integrate it with expensive payment, marketing and courier services; 2) Join and software as a service platform where it is possible to list their products and services, with commissions fees that cost twice as much as our commision fee. We will not only offer a simple, easy-to-use marketplace with low commission fees, but also provide help in onboarding the system.

A survey done with users inside our platform shows that 76,1% of the vendors who offer services and 57,3% of product sellers has the Rededots as their main household income. Thousands of others supplement their income with sales on Rededots. This is a Facebook group with no tools to enable transactions, and that has shown no signs of diminished growth or engagement in three years.

Kuki Bailly, founder of Rededots, has a background in design and innovation.
Maria Ercilia is a digital pioneer in Brazil - she started to work in Internet businesses in 1995 - she found a pioneering UX consultancy and in 2014 she sold a 60% stake to WPP.

The leading executive team is composed by David Dieguez, an experienced CTO that has co-founded 3 successful organizations in the last 12 years and; Melina Passi, UX and UI designer. She has worked at Elo7, a Brazilian artisan marketplace, and is also the founder of CaixaCosmo, a curated box of Brazilian design.

We believe that these two aspects are complementary, and they constitute a blueprint to get benefit and growth out of social networks or marketplaces. Instead of extracting too much out of transactions and transforming people's interactions and interests into products, we increase value in transactions and everybody benefits. As the community grows exponentially, the offer of different products and services will always increase, creating a loop of endless opportunities within the platform: people taking care of people.

Our growth strategy is to have a design thinking and product development department watching over the community's needs on a daily basis. This department identifies opportunities and helps the community incubate and develop new businesses. Artificial Intelligence and research mechanisms will be used to provide solutions to the whole community. The solutions we are already working on are financial services, such as unexpensive, easy to obtain credit, alternatives to banking etc. A solid reputation system to benefit good vendors, as well as local logistics solutions (one of the key problems in Brazil).

We are designing a tool / algorithm that will be able to identify all the services and supplies providers inside our network to serve other members to fulfil their product / service chain. I.e.: The platform will identify a member that offer raw material and another member that offer courier services to deliver the product sold through the platform and the platform will properly split the payment received from the buyer within the members involved in the process.

It will be hired AI researchers as well code developers summing up to 8 people.

Our biggest internal risk is the management of the spirit of the community, based on trust, human stories and fair exchanges. From what we have learned so far about community management, we believe this is totally possible, but it needs constant attention.
The external risks are the lack of resources to overcome technical obstacles fast enough.