Stackable Virality & the Birth of Microbrands and Virtual Restaurants

tl;dr as search engine-based platforms like Amazon and GrubHub achieve massive scale, new ecosystems are forming. These viral networks open up opportunities for new and existing companies to rethink their approach to product-channel fit.

The birth of microbrands

Amazon is quickly becoming the retail search engine of the internet. Amazon generated $2.8b in advertising revenue in 2017 and Wall Street is forecasting Amazon to hit $20b in advertising revenue by 2020 (for comparison, Facebook in 2017 did ~$40b in ad revenue across all its platforms). Where is this fast growth coming from?

Amazon has adopted a third-party selling model. There are now over 2 million Amazon sellers worldwide with 140k generating >$100k in sales. Even large companies are selling on Amazon; Nike sells over 16k products on Amazon.

It’s still early days but companies that can understand how to navigate this channel will have tremendous growth potential. Just like in SEO on Google, Amazon sellers can optimize their SKUs to rise the ranks for relevant keywords. As a result, sellers drive high volumes of high-intent traffic with negligible marketing costs.

Similar to microbrands appearing on Instagram, we are already seeing Amazon launching private-label brands of its own. What’s stopping existing businesses from doing the same (or maybe they’ve already started)? As Amazon’s search engine learns more about our behaviors…