E-bikes, D2C brands, and vertical marketplaces — what’s happening on college campuses?
As early stage consumer investors at CRV and recent Stanford grads (‘16), we love spending time on college campuses. College students can be some of the best early adopters and promoters of new apps and products, and we’re always excited get their thoughts on tech trends we should be following.
How do we access this demographic? We publish a weekly newsletter, Accelerated, with job postings, career advice, and important news for students and recent grads interested in getting into tech & VC. We have several thousand subscribers, and recruited nearly 100 of our subscribers from 25 colleges across the country to serve as scouts. We survey them regularly through text and email about what’s going on at their campuses.
For the past seven months, we’ve been collecting data on how our scouts feel about a wide variety of topics, from cryptocurrencies to new consumer brands to the recent influx of e-bikes and e-scooters. Every few months, we plan to share a couple of interesting insights with the broader community. This is our first Accelerated update, so we’d love your feedback and suggestions for future topics to cover!
E-Bikes/E-Scooters
While e-scooters and e-bikes are starting to infiltrate cities, our scouts report that they aren’t yet popular on most college campuses. 78% of our scouts haven’t ridden an e-scooter or e-bike — of those who had, e-bikes were the more popular option. However, 40% say they do see these vehicles being used regularly in their surrounding community. Of the e-vehicle companies, Limebike and Bird are far in the lead in terms of campus presence at 40%+ awareness levels among our scouts.
Bird and Waybots now offer only e-scooters — which our scouts said they were slightly less likely (38% versus 56%) to prefer over bikes. This could be because more of them have tried e-bikes, or because of the dominance of bikes on campus now — and the perceived need for a sturdier vehicle and a basket to carry heavy textbooks or laptops.
There are competing factors when it comes to the adoption of shared, dockless e-vehicles on campuses. On the one hand, docked bikes have bulky racks (we’re looking at you, Stanford), and students who own bikes struggle with parking, storage, and theft. Especially if campuses subsidize usage, shared e-vehicles make sense for a lot of students. On the other hand, students like the independence that comes from having a vehicle that they can customize and always have on-hand. Students also make frequent and short-distance trips — it’s tough to imagine them opening an app and hunting down a vehicle every time they have to get to class. Non-shared e-vehicles have therefore exploded on some campuses — like URB-Es at USC (available for rental, but many students just buy one of their own).
We also asked our scouts about which factors would be most important to them if there were to try an e-vehicle. Unsurprisingly, price was #1, followed by quality of the vehicle and proximity to them. Brand was the least important factor, in line with our past findings that college students frequently switch between competing platforms to optimize for price.
Live Entertainment
We’ve been spending quite a bit of time lately thinking about live entertainment — we published our thoughts on HQ Trivia and the rise of a new generation of interactive consumer apps. We asked our scouts about where they watch live video now — Twitter was the least used platform (73% never or almost never watch live content there), while scouts were fairly split on Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram.
Somewhat surprisingly, a tendency to watch live video on one platform wasn’t necessarily predictive of a tendency to watch on another. 45% of our video-watching scouts had similar viewing frequencies (e.g. once a week) across three or more platforms, but 55% had one or two platforms dominate their watch time, with almost no live viewing on the other platforms. This suggests that these viewing habits may be less about seeking out live content, and more about which platforms they already happen to be spending time on.
Interestingly, HQ Trivia itself took a while to spread to college campuses! We started asking our scouts about HQ back in November 2017, but didn’t hear that it popped up at most colleges until February or March 2018. Many of our scouts churned off of HQ within a few weeks — with busy college schedules that often conflicted with the noon and 6 p.m. (PT) games, and a perceived low chance of winning, students struggle to stay engaged — “time commitment” was frequently mentioned as a reason for churn.
Vertical Marketplaces
We’ve also been closely tracking the spread of online vertical marketplaces (we published a piece on the startups disrupting eBay), and polled our scouts on which platforms they use as buyers or sellers. Students were far more likely to be buyers across all categories — tickets (e.g. StubHub, Ticketmaster), electronics (e.g. Pricefalls, Gone), and clothes (e.g. ThredUp, Poshmark) were the most popular — but a small percentage operate on both sides of the marketplace, particularly in tickets, clothes, and shoes (e.g. GOAT, StockX).
Consumer Brands
The recent explosion of D2C brands has been top-of-mind for many consumer-focused VCs lately — Warby Parker, Glossier, and Brandless were the top-cited brands amongst our scouts. These brands often find success by going viral on social media, and seem to gain popularity by reflecting an “aspirational” lifestyle (maybe you’ll finally go to the gym if you buy those Outdoor Voices leggings!).
When we surveyed our scouts, we found that product quality was by far the most important factor to them, followed by price. Our scouts say that the “buzziness” of a given product and the sentiment around the brand are less influential in their purchasing decisions. However, to get a sense of product quality, they are likely to rely on recommendations from friends and peers, as well as online reviews that feel honest and fair. Brands, take note — students are sometimes swayed by influencer or referral-driven marketing strategies, but the content has to feel natural, not like an ad.
We also wanted to get a sense of how comfortable college students are with buying various products online. Many early D2C brands rely on an entirely online shopping experience, and count on millennial & Gen Z shoppers being willing to purchase a product sight-unseen. In-store touchpoints do seem to have become less important across many different types of purchases — for shoes and clothes, the two categories where scouts most wanted a brick-and-mortar experience, the average importance score was less than 3.5 (out of 5).
They’re more comfortable ordering things like home goods, accessories (handbags, jewelry, etc.), and health & beauty products online — often because these purchases are either a repeat purchase (particularly relevant for health & beauty) or a more expensive, considered purchase where research is done in advance and price shopping comes into play (accessories and home goods). Somewhat surprisingly, our scouts were less comfortable with an online-only purchase for groceries (maybe they don’t trust the Instacart markups?)
Thanks for taking the time to read this post! Interested in getting involved or learning more? Here’s a few things you can do:
- Subscribe to Accelerated! You can do so here.
- Sign up to be a scout. We ❤ ️our scouts. If you’re a current college student, you can sign up here. We’ll send you monthly surveys and occasionally text you about apps/products we’re looking at.
- Send us jobs. If you are a startup, VC firm, or accelerator hiring students and/or recent grads for a job or internship, feel free to email us at justine@crv.com or find us on Twitter @venturetwins.
