Then I built a platform for a kind of network of experts for professionals who could help find raw materials for a fee from a finder – a company like Nestlé looking for an important ingredient in a particular country, or is there someone I’m with? can talk about grapes in France? We gathered nearly 40,000 people around the world, each representing their market, and we compensated people for their connections.
We gained a lot of intelligence through that process.
Energy and chemical deals were quite big, the frequency was lower and the deals were dominated by a few big players, whose influence is huge. So 70 to 80 percent of the network questions from experts came from agriculture and we realized that the market is completely fragmented. No one is dominant.
With products, there are thousands of products and varieties that have never been standardized. So in the beginning we put resources into building a data architecture to structure the scientific varieties, crop types, packaging and grading. Without such a structure, you can never accumulate this kind of data.
So we became a kind of center of gravity. And once our mass was big enough, we could standardize it.
Can you tell us something about the role of market intelligence on your platform?
We collect the data and the data becomes intelligence, and the intelligence attracts users, and many of them become premium users and become our buyers, our suppliers. They start transacting with us, and those transactions create more data and feed back to our data intelligence. So there is a flywheel effect that gets stronger over time.
When dealing with Tridge, our suppliers can deal with many buyers at once without deploying sellers in many countries. And that aggregate demand gives us a better bargaining position.
