Having recently resigned from PAP Corp, a C2C transaction platform for used luxurious items, I’d like to share what I have done and my lessons learned with this company.
Achievements
- Documentation
The first difficulty that I encountered in this company was that there was no written things I could refer to or study to catch-up. Although we had subscribed Notion, nobody was using it except for the product team. The reason of no usage was supposed to be that many people didn’t know how to use it or couldn’t recognize the power of collaboration and connectivity that cloud collaboration tools such as Notion and Google Drive could bring.
So I started using Notion and showed how to document many things such as business policies, contracts, meeting notes etc. I persisted to use Notion documents while having meetings by sharing them on the screen so that everyone could see them. Things started to change as people got used to this system and started using it. After the change, it became easy to track histories, chase followups and catch up for new joiners.
2. BI structure and data-driven culture
One more important thing that was missing here was a business intelligence structure and a data-driven culture. No one was chasing numbers systematically, but each individual or team was digging manually and separately. All data related works were being done manually, therefore very time consuming, and this made the company resource allocation very complicated because many people were tied up to these manual data works.
I worked on listing up main metrics for each part (seller side, buyer side, logistics & inspections, consignment business etc) to make CHIC Metrics Report, which showed those important metrics on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. This report was to fulfill many purposes — monitoring overall trends, making decisions and detecting abnormal signs.
The second part — making decisions- was the key part here since I always think all tech companies should be data-driven. With this report, we were finally able to discuss and make decision based on data. I also contributed more in this regard by making all necessary analyses such as unit economics with LTV&CAC.
3. Logistics & authentication system
Since I had spent a long time in O2O businesses, I instantly noticed that I had to enhance many things in regard to the logistics and authentication functions when I first visited the authentication site. I had two authentication teams that were responsible for logistics and the authentication of used luxurious items. They were great authentication inspectors, but not good in other areas.
As they were working manually on Google Spreadsheet, the authentication records were not accurate, person-specific, susceptible to missing and changes and above all not digitized. It was therefore so hard to collect relevant logistics and authentication data on a real-time basis, which hindered timely decision makings.
Thus I started a project with related people that was to develop a logistics system which included a logistics back-end system and authentication application so that authentication inspectors could use to record all authentication photos and reviews. A last mile delivery system was included in the plan, but excluded in the phase 1 due to the shortage in development resources.
When the project was done after few months, there was a huge progress in terms of operation efficiencies as we were able to track and manage items and data very easily, and detect any warnings beforehand within the logistics system.
4. Monetization
Maybe this part seems to be the most important one because all corporation should make money for sustainability. I made tremendous contributions to the following monetization by deep-down analyses, coming up with right numbers and making timely decisions.
- Purchase transaction fee on buyer’s side (3% by the time I left)
- Seller transaction fee on seller’s side (1% by the time I left)
- Inspection fee for the inspection and authentication service on buyer’s side (30k per item by the time I left)
- Launched consignment business (10% consignment fee by the time I left)
With the no of transactions and corresponding fees, I was able to compute the time period needed to achieve the BEP, and all metrics were promising and on track at least when I was with PAP. Now? honestly I have no idea :)
5. Operation optimization
Scaling up your business without operation optimization might lead your business into jeopardy and actually many tech startups showed these cases. While I was with PAP, the first thing that I did every morning was to turn on my laptop, open the metrics report and go through all metrics one by one.
If there was anything unusual or things to improve detected, I dug deeper to decide what following actions were needed. If needed, I raised the issue on meetings and brought people together to solve the issues. This had been, and was a daily routine of mine and I still work like this.
In PAP, I constantly monitored everything to connect dots company wide for better solutions because I always work like this and believed this was the best way I could contribute to the performance of the company.
Lessons learned
There were also lessons learned as follows.
- It was a good lesson to learn and experience various types of monetization. The monetization plans and execution I mentioned above were fairly successful and this was the experience I truly cherish here.
- As a leader, you should be a multiplayer as well as a problem solver yourself especially in an early stage startup. Unfortunately not all leaders were this type in PAP corp, and it was hard then to change the team to my expectation. I realized again how important it was to recruit right person, especially leaders, at the right time.
- CEO’s experience and capability is what matters the most in the early stage startup because this would oftentimes confine the limit of the company’s capability. In other words, the company would not be able to grow more than CEO’s capability. In this regard, I should have requested more delegation and empowerment in order to circumvent this situation.
- Before joining any company, I’d make sure about my R&Rs unless I join as a co-founder with full authorities. Here I tried to do and get involved with everything what I thought was necessary to the company, but some people didn’t like this and tried to put a boundary to me. I was very disappointed and thought this company didn’t know how to fully utilize my capability.
- I would never ever join a tech startup with the majority owned by a big corporation because this would highly likely make an external funding very difficult, especially in S.Korea.
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December 17, 2023 at 10:56PM
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Achievements and Lessons Learned In PAP Corp. | by Ryan Ki-Yon Kim (김기년) | Dec, 2023 - Medium
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