Digital shopping giant formed : Posse & Beat the Q merge

Two of Australia’s most successful shopping startups, Posse and Beat the Q, have merged, with plans to create the Uber or AirBnB of shopping.

The merged business will have half a million users and 56,000 shop relationships and handle over 400,000 transactions per month.Beat the Q is already Australia’s most successful mobile ordering platform, used by more than 450 cafes and 65,000 consumers who use it to painlessly order ahead and skip the queue.  The average user transacts 10 times a month.

Posse, which helps people find recommended shops around them, is signing up over 1000 merchants per week from all over the world and has developed a scalable network of shop owners and shoppers who communicate with each other through the platform. Of the 56,000 shops on Posse, 15,000 are in Asia.

The two businesses have raised a combined $5 million to date from investors including well-known Silicon Valley venture capitalist Bill Tai; Lars Rasmussen, lead Facebook engineer and co-founder of Google Maps; Simon Rothman, partner at Greylock Partners and former top eBay executive; Greg Wilkinson, founder of Reckon Software; Alex Harvey, global head principal investments at Macquarie Group; and James Spencely, founder of Vocus Communications.

“Posse is all about finding new venues whereas Beat the Q is about transacting at those venues, so the synergies are enormous,” said Posse founder Rebekah Campbell.

Beat the Q founder Adam Theobald said: “Our vision is to facilitate relationships between shop owners and customers while at the same time removing all of the friction from the transaction, from ordering to payment.”

Beat the Q acquired loyalty app e-Coffee Card in March this year. The combined business is considering further acquisitions as the market consolidates.

The company has good cash reserves as Posse raised $1.5M earlier this year and there are strong growing revenues.

“There’s a lot of excitement around the coming together of the businesses and we’re in discussions with some strategic partners to fund an acceleration of growth,” said Ms Campbell.

The company will reveal a revolutionary new product within weeks which includes the best of all three apps (Posse, Beat the Q and e-Coffee Card).

Mr Theobald said the market for retail apps was set for a major convergence.

“Consumers and shop owners are being bombarded with retail-related apps from coffee ordering to loyalty programs to bar tab apps,” said Mr Theobald.

“We believe consumers and merchants want one app that can do it all and that’s part of the vision behind this merger.”
Ms Campbell said the goal was to create the Uber or AirBNB of shopping; the success of these platforms was in large part because they help people develop relationships as well as transact.

“Using AirBNB is a very different experience to something like the ‘Stayz’ website – you get to see who owns the place, communicate with them and build a relationship,” Ms Campbell said.

“Our vision is to bring the same connection to shopping.  We bring shop owners and shoppers together.  We’ll facilitate a seamless ordering and payment experience and we help the people on both sides of the transaction get to know each other through private messaging, recommendations, loyalty and rewards.”

Source : Business First Magazine   October 28th, 2014 Asher Moses