Investing in Nearby
Empowering local businesses and the people who love them
Since “the before times” we’ve known April Underwood well, from her time as Slack’s Chief Product Officer, as co-founder of #ANGELS, and of course as a Venture Partner here at Obvious. She has always led with her values, within every arena she has operated.
She had already been thinking about systems to support small businesses when we all locked down in March 2020. And then it got real.
As she had seen during California wildfires from years past, local businesses in her community struggled mightily from any disruption to foot traffic. Some closed forever after four-day power outages. With the onset of the pandemic, she quickly realized this spelled trouble: “I knew that a shutdown of not just days but weeks or months would present an existential threat to the businesses that make my community vibrant and unique.”
Despite local business owners evolving rapidly and doing their best to survive — taking phone orders, launching online stores, and more — it remained as challenging as ever for community members to support their community businesses. She found it was “just as hard as it had always been to find out which stores exist, whether they sell online, and how I would get products from them.”
And as many purpose-led entrepreneurs do, she heard the call — and answered it with deep conviction.
After conducting hundreds of interviews with shoppers and shop owners, the insight was clear: people want to shop locally, but find it too challenging. They feel guilty about funneling money to Amazon instead of keeping it in their hometowns. It all boiled down to one, simple question:
“Why on earth, in 2021, is there not an easy way to shop from the stores in my town, online?”
Seriously though. Why?
Leveling The Playing Field
The purpose of Nearby is clear: empower local businesses and the people who love them. The best way to do this? Leveling the playing field for local businesses who are up against centralized giants delivering homogenized products from “far away.”
There’s more than tech that fuels Nearby: the model helps these businesses strengthen ties between one another. It enables them to team up to create virtual storefronts for the entire community, truly making for a “whole is much greater than the sum of the parts” platform. Ultimately this will ensure that those storefronts on every Main Street will continue to thrive long after Covid-19 is behind us.
Nearby began as a proof of concept in the Fall 2020 with Oakland, with over 40 merchants (and growing). As they scaled from a one-car delivery operation to a city-wide fulfillment solution, the team quickly and definitively answered two key questions:
- Does the market — both consumers and merchants — want this to exist? Yes, yes they do.
- Does the market like what they’ve built? The answer here, too, is a clear yes. NPS is through the roof.
In the months ahead, Nearby will be growing its business in Oakland, honing the playbook, launching in new markets, and continuing to identify merchant needs that they can address.
Supply Chain’s Canary in the Coal Mine is Nearby
April’s leadership with Nearby marks a shift in the supply chain industry toward what we call the Supply Cloud. The Supply Cloud allows for businesses, large and small, to build a digital twin of their operations. They can now connect with customers locally and far away via both digital and connected fulfillment solutions. Large enterprises everywhere have been benefiting from the supply cloud for some time. But few companies have been able to really take advantage of these solutions at the local, community level.
Amazon taught us how e-commerce can (and should) seamlessly work for consumers. Shopify reminded us that small businesses are brilliant. Nearby is now bringing it all back home: supporting local businesses is best for helping build and sustain our communities. Through stories of local entrepreneurship and their beautiful creativity — especially the pride they inspire in us all — we have come to know that these businesses are essential to our local identities. One of the only things they have been missing are better tools to help them thrive in this new economy, including best in class online solutions.
Nearby is reminding us what matters most.
We are honored to now count April as both colleague and portfolio CEO, and thrilled to support Nearby on the road ahead.
