Going but not Gone: Achieving Collective Success through an Unorthodox Decision
For as long as I can remember, I have always been driven to make things run better. It was exactly that drive that led me to found Snapcart, which was conceived out of my frustration when I could not get reliable and timely customer information during my 12-year tenure in consumer goods and strategic consulting. It was the same drive that pushed me and three other multinational cofounders to turn Snapcart from a pioneering startup into a leading offline data company that disrupted the market research industry — the first sector we focused on to monetize. And now, that very same drive has led me to the decision to assume a different role in Snapcart, one that I have come to realize to be more vital than keeping the mantle of a CEO.
The business model of Snapcart is deceivingly simple: we incentivize consumers to provide us with their offline spending behavior at a massive scale, allowing us to provide companies with reliable, real-time offline data. Executing this “simple” idea, on the other hand, is a herculean task.
Initially we built a product to collect proprietary data through the launch of our Cashback app and rapidly build the infrastructure and capacity required to effectively collect and process the data. We then quickly scaled to multiple countries–a calculated risk to understand the nuance of different offline data formats that we needed to decipher. We have identified hundreds of thousands unique product codes in each country we are in, all of which we identify using the machine learning models that we developed. We quickly realized that we needed to build three different tech ecosystems to effectively collect, process, and monetize offline data to scale; continuously improving these ecosystems is now a major part of our operation.
After over three years of growth — and as part and parcel of any growth process — Snapcart is now at a crossroad. We have learned a tremendous amount from every step we took, every experiment we carried out, and every pivot we did. We have built a very well-known brand within the consumer goods space and developed automation engines to strengthen our propositions. Throughout these triumphs, we learned something important: we either constantly adapt and innovate to ensure continuous growth, or we just stay in our comfort zone, become complacent, and reach an inevitable plateau. We chose to adapt and innovate. Hence our decision to refocus our energy and capital towards the next level of automation: simplify, standardize, and scale back up.
The first step we took was to streamline our operations. We had more than sufficient offline data collected from various channels to build our automation infrastructure. To give you a perspective, if you stacked all the physical receipts Snapcart had collected so far, well, let’s just say the Great Wall of China won’t be the only thing you could see from space. So yeah, we have a buttload of proprietary data. More data is almost always good, but right now more data means higher cost for the company with only marginal additional benefits. Our new structure now allows us to reduce unnecessary costs and reach optimum profitability.
More importantly, we decided to really identify Snapcart’s true strength and capitalize on that. We are committed to delivering state-of-the art products to our clients. In order to effectively go forward with this plan, we need to evolve significantly, including through introducing some essential changes to the upper management level. Allow me to explain.
As a pioneer in our field, we made it our objective to make offline data available and useful for absolutely everyone. To this end, we have been very successful; both our users and customers have embraced usage, engagement, and monetization. As a matter of fact, it seems that we’ve come to this crossroad very quickly — perhaps sooner than we expected — because our strategy was so successful that market adoption ran faster than product development. As a result, while we are always able to deliver quality service, we are starting to stretch ourselves thin. This is why we decided to refocus ourselves on our current strength, which is captured receipts data in urban cities. In the same light, we want to make sure that we go to market with a set of core products around which Snapcart can truly build its brand, consistent with our promise of delivering real time offline data. We can see clearly now that this is the lynchpin that we need to address. Hence, this is now our imperative: capitalize on our strength and refocus our energy to build a greater product around it.
Executing the new imperative is challenging to say the least, but we look forward to the challenge and we plan to do it with excellence. The true test of our resolve lies with the fact that Snapcart stands at the frontier of offline data analytics. This presents us with the unique opportunity to really lead the pack and be the innovators that we truly are at heart. This also means that we need to invent pretty much everything from zero. And when it comes to product development, we really have to push the limits.
Alvin Lim — Snapcart’s newest addition to the C-suite management rock stars and who is currently leading the company’s product and strategy — has successfully identified the direction of our core services that we need to build fast. We then require someone who can disassemble and simplify our platforms with speed, to deal with more than 400 machine learning algorithms we have built. With this complexity, we have to find an individual who understands Snapcart inside out, is equipped with the right domain expertise, has solid product prowess, and is able to drive our vision at the same time. Time is against us and it is extremely difficult to find the right profile in such a short timeframe. We do, however, have someone in-house who can confidently take on this responsibility. Now here’s the catch: that person is currently the CEO.
One might be tempted to think that a CEO can also take the lead on product development. This can’t be farther from the truth, especially when the product development function requires a full time job of exploring, experimenting, evaluating, inventing, coordinating and ultimately building things from the ground up. As the CEO, I have to oversee all functions at once, looking at the whole instead of focusing on one part. As the face of the company I also need to carry out various non-operational responsibilities such as fundraising and external relations, all of which take up a significant amount of time and resources. I can function effectively as one of them, but I cannot do both. At a crucial time like this, it makes perfect sense for me to lead the product thinking for Snapcart.
What ultimately made my decision was a full recognition of our company’s core strength: Snapcart currently has a leadership team that can make any multinational company envious. We have developed prototypes and scaled. We have invented models from scratch. We have built a strong culture in the company, with strong people development fundamentals. We made mistakes and solved them swiftly. Our team is solid, with complete and high trust amongst us, allowing us to be in absolute control on how we should share responsibilities and what team composition is the right one for a given condition. In fact, it would be a misstep for us to not make the best use of our team’s agility at times like this. As such, while we do not make light of our decision to hand over the CEO mantle, it was by no means an exceptionally difficult thing to do.
And so Teresa Condicion will be the new CEO of Snapcart. A veteran in market research and data analytics and a cofounder of Snapcart, she has been the powerhouse of data science at our company. Her leadership experience at Procter & Gamble makes her more than fully equipped to lead Snapcart as its CEO. With her impressive credentials, there isn’t a single doubt in my mind — or anybody else’s for that matter — that Teresa will be able to continue bringing Snapcart on its growth trajectory.
There’s an old Javanese adage that challenges the traditional view of leadership that implies you can only lead from the front. The saying goes: you lead from the front by setting examples; you lead from the middle by building and driving; you lead from the back by pushing forward. I’ve always liked that proverb, but now I can truly understand its meaning. I’ve been leading Snapcart since its conception from the front as CEO; I’ll be now leading it from the core, in product, where I’m currently needed the most. I’ll be building and driving it. And together with the new CEO, the leadership team, and the entire Snapcart family, we will make it run even better.