Carousell: An App that Reinvents the Online Marketplace

IntheBlack, November 2016 

54 hours isn’t long: barely a weekend. But in March 2012 it was long enough for three young Singaporeans, two of them still studying, to put together a working demo for a new app at a startup competition. A very productive 54 hours, it turned out: their idea won, and today has evolved into Carousell, a mobile classifieds app with 41 million listings that operates in 14 cities worldwide.

“It started,” says co-founder and CEO Quek Siu Rui, “as a solution to a personal frustration.” He had found the process of selling things online to be onerous and inefficient. “You often needed a pretty good idea of how the forums or online stores worked, as they were built for different purposes and not a marketplace.” Quek and his colleagues, Marcus Tan and Lucas Ngoo, felt that “selling should be as simple as taking a photo, and buying as easy as chatting.”

The view coincided with the increasing use of the smartphone as the main device with which to access the internet, and with a desire for simplicity among users. The Carousell app – whose first version launched in the Singapore iTunes store in August 2012 – allows one to post a listing in 30 seconds, using an in-app system for photography and chat, rather than having to juggle SMS and email outside the app. It has also tapped in to the growth of specialist communities. “We have die-hard Lego fans, bike enthusiasts, comic collectors, and even sneakerheads,” Quek says.

That said, success wasn’t instant, and the first 18 months showed disappointingly slow growth. They tried everything: selling discounted postcards for downloads, visiting pop-ups and flea markets to tell people about the app. “That was when we realized that having a great product alone is not enough,” Quek says “Most people are social creatures and want to be where their friends and family are.” Building the community by word of mouth was the key to growth, “and continues to remain a cornerstone of our community engagement in all our markets today.” Raising S$1 million of seed funding from Rakuten, Golden Gate Ventures, 500 Startups, Danny Oei Wirianto and serial entrepreneur Darius Cheng in November was a confidence boost.

These days, a corner has clearly been turned. They crossed one million listings in December 2013, 5 million in August 2014. Sequoia Capital led US$6 million of Series A funding in November 2014, and the company raised $35 million in private Series B funding last year, which “has given us a tremendous boost” as the company expands into new markets: Taiwan, Malaysia and Indonesia in December 2014, Hong Kong and the Philippines this year.

But the founders like to say: “We are less than 1% done.”

“Carousell aims to become the world’s number one classifieds marketplace, so that every smartphone user in the world is empowered to buy and sell without any hassle or fuss,” Quek says. Work continues on improving discovery with data science, and scaling infrastructure for speed and stability. “There is still a long way to go.”

BREAKOUT: One piece of advice

“Instead of encouraging excessive consumption of brand new products which drain the earth’s depleting resources, we connect sellers who have things they no longer need, with buyers who need them more.”

OR

“The three things that set us apart are simplicity of use, the inspiring experience of browsing on Carousell, and our community.”