Dipsea
A multi-billion dollar market opportunity hiding in plain sight
We are excited to share that Bedrock has co-led a $5.5M Seed financing round in Dipsea alongside our friends at Thrive Capital.
Over the past decade nearly every large consumer market has produced category-defining mobile companies — from finance to shopping to food to music. It can sometimes feel as though all of the best ideas have been taken.
Yet founders consistently surprise by creating new markets and reimagining existing ones in a mobile context. The big unlock is in finding a market that has been overlooked and underexplored — where the innovation to date has not come close to matching the consumer demand.
These are very rare.
Last year I met Gina Gutierrez and Faye Keegan, the founders of Dipsea. As they explained their vision, it became clear they’d had found one of these markets.
In their words:
Dipsea is an app for short, sexy audio stories that set the mood, spark your imagination, and immerse you. Within the app, subscribers get access to an ever-growing library of bite-sized and exclusive stories (with both narrative stories and non-narrative guided pieces).
It’s a well-known secret within the book industry that Romance drives the publishing market. However, if you don’t work in the industry (most people), it is quite easy to dismiss this genre of storytelling as “niche.”
Yet the facts don’t align with that narrative. Romance is the #1 book genre in the U.S., generating $1.5 billion in sales annually. That’s 30% of the fiction market. Online, Romance is an even bigger driver — 45% of all Kindle eBooks sold are Romance. There are about 30 million dedicated romance book readers, with many purchasing more than once per week.
Beyond this core audience, the best content has the potential to break out even more broadly. The Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy sold more than 125 million copies worldwide. The movies have grossed north of $1.25 billion.
It is hard to find a consumer market with such good fundamentals that has seen less innovation.
Dipsea is mobile-first and audio-based to bring the story to life in a greater way than text on a page. Spotify’s acquisitions of Gimlet and Anchor have finally shifted the popular narrative toward what has been evident for a long time — when done well, audio is among the most compelling and broadly appealing forms of storytelling. Dipsea stories are 10–15 minutes and easily accessible (an average romance audiobook can be 10 hours).
The content is delivered through a subscription model. Pay once and listen as much as you’d like. As I’ve written about before, this allows Dipsea to start building a positive flywheel in the business between new content and more subscribers. While today they have 75 stories, they’ll add more over time — and experiment with different content based on what their customers want.
This is precisely the type of overlooked and underestimated opportunity we look for at Bedrock. We’re excited to be their partners as they build a category-defining company in this under-explored (but massive) consumer market.
