Ankorstore as a unicorn: some systems stuff
I didn’t think I was going to let much of my other professional experience spill into here too much as I wanted to keep things separate, but this has been a very interesting month for me. This month I was part of a start-up that was valued to be a unicorn, that means at more than 1 billion dollars, as part of the Series C round. As a result, I wanted to spend some time reflecting on what this meant, what this experience so far had taught me, but also specifically understand what drives such high adoption of any product. As for those that have heard me go on a rant about something, I am approaching this with a systems and dynamics frameworks, in understanding the platform and reflecting on inaglobe.
I joined Ankorstore back in September 2021, shortly after my expedition to the Afghan borderlands of Tajikistan. I joined motivated by a platform product that had a story of re-empowering its stakeholders in a changing context, in this case: independent businesses to thrive in a digital economy. I joined the Growth team as a Project Manager interested in the execution and strategy of projects and products that incentivise and build loyalty. I was also for the first time taking a step away from what I could consider passions of mine as I was entering the world of retail. This was an exercise of resilience and adaptation for me.
How I understand Ankorstore
Ankorstore is a B2B marketplace for independent brands and retailers. It is a platform where mom & pop shops come to purchase from smaller producers and brands to give their customers a unique set of products or experiences. Very simply, Ankorstore is a space where these two types of users come together to transact. As I have spent more time working on customer lifecycles and building experiences with my team, I have matured my understanding of what the marketplace is, and it has even helped me understand a little better how markets, regulation, subsidies, etc. work. Ankorstore is not just building a place to transact, it is building an ecosystem that fosters, enables, facilitates these interactions, and for that it is engineering products of all kinds — ranging from operational, marketing, fiscal, financial, digital, you name it. The conceptual space that Ankorstore is building for these relationships and interactions to take place is much more than just a marketplace. Building incentives within the ecosystem compounds any win-win that may exist simply in that relationship existing. That is why the idea and execution behind Ankorstore is so powerful.
On a more linear front, I see Ankorstore as a Sancho Panza of historical and artisanal brands in their evolution towards a digital economy, and in turn it is the platform on which new shops and entrepreneurs can buy and sell goods. Many of the incentives and tools being built are for existing brands to better leverage the digital space, and thus with one’s inclusion into Ankorstore, a brand is ultimately on a digital transformation journey. Ankorstore is also doing something that in practice I have often avoided as a product and concept designer/manager: it has given very proximate and human-supporting structures to the stakeholders involved. Initially, I thought that once you had a degree of product market fit you should decrease the proportion of contact you have with your users, and what I have learnt these last few months is that it should not be the case. This was a prejudice that I had formed out of focusing on the human-centricity of design at a concept level, as most of the projects I had worked on were very early-stage products. As Ankorstore grows, the experience on it changes, and so do the tools that it can provide and the more diversity of adopters it comes across. More than ever, keeping a close relationship with your stakeholders as you scale is paramount to make sure you are getting it right and not diverging from the North Star of the project. When a company scales, the need for an agile, test-and-kill approach is more important than ever.
If you want to read a little more on Ankorstore: Tomas Pueyo, Chief Product Officer of Ankorstore, presented the problematic beautifully in his post.
Parallels with inaglobe
Similarly to Ankorstore, inaglobe is a platform, and it has been the project that I have dedicated my evenings and weekends to for the past 5 years. We created inaglobe out of the need to build a structure that provided a sustainable innovation experience in higher education, that involved human-centred collaborative design. So naturally it is a slightly different kind of project, but in these 5 months at Ankorstore I can’t help but to have found countless learnings relevant to furthering inaglobe. I think of these in 5 main dimensions:
- System Dynamics
- Incentive models
- Agile methods
- Human-centricity/customer-centricity
- Digital transformations
System dynamics: What I mean by this is that within the platform you are building a space for interactions to occur, and thus creating a culture with a set of behaviours and relationships. These behaviours and relationships guide the productivity of the platform in the same way that Ankorstore seeks to build these dynamics such that the brands and retailers feel that the best place to interact is on the platform. For inaglobe, we are creating a platform for which we also need to nurture and build the ecosystem under which information flows and innovation takes place. We have taken a lot of care with expectation management, with the establishment of confidence, with the oversight on projects such that we can ensure a systemic approach to innovation, such that human-centricity in the design is protected and that collaborative design is fostered.
Incentive models: This and the point on system dynamics are tightly interconnected once a stakeholder is on the platform, but the incentive model with relevance to the platform begins when the users come to the platform. Incentive models build both loyalty and reiteration, and eventually balance/equilibria; but they also build allure and attraction. In the case of Ankorstore, I have learnt about acquisition engines, lead generation, and these are things that we were light-heartedly doing at inaglobe such as to “prove the model”, always assuming there would be a magical tipping point once we invested in building a digital platform. It is vehemently clear that this wouldn’t happen without structures that generated the leads or attracted the stakeholders into the platform. When you are leveraging a network effect, you can actively support that growth, and in fact it is your responsibility if you know of the compound effects that a larger network would produce.
Agile methods: Earlier this summer in Tajikistan, my tent-partner and now good friend Shaun said something to me that I hadn’t noticed I had wired so deeply into my behaviour. Every morning after breakfast, we had to clear out camp and the first step was to fold the amazingly asymmetrical rainfly our tent had (bear with me). So every morning I would, quite vocally, explain my thought-process around figuring out the best way to fold the very rainfly such as to keep it from wetting any of the content of what it was stored with in the tent bag (neither of us wanted to sleep in a wet tent when temperatures would routinely drop sub-zero). So one day Shaun said:
“You are clearly using agile methods to figure this out, you are project managing this whole exercise”
It caught me by surprise (and we couldn’t help but laugh about it) because I was simply trying to figure it out (spoiler: we figured it out after a few days). The last few years working on inaglobe, and through by professional work in design research and in start-ups, agile and lean methodologies have very clearly been incentivised: where you test at every go, you try things out and once you have found the optimum you move on and find the next thing to optimise. At both inaglobe and Ankorstore, and especially in the growth team, this is very clearly the religion which guides process and evolution.
Human-centricity (or customer-centricity at Ankorstore): This is a concept that was initially harder to draw parallels on as I am not part of the design team and so I couldn’t immediately infer the process by which design had occurred. However, it is without a shadow of a doubt that Ankorstore has managed a very high degree of Product-market-fit. One of the things that characterises Ankorstore, in my opinion, is the high-degree of internal transparency there is and how it’s a company that is highly product-led. To my surprise, in the middle of a massive scaling up exercise there was a big user-research project being conducted, and insights of which were shared to the entire company. For me that is a clear definition of how human centricity should guide the culture of work at a company, and especially in a platform product. In addition to this, one can see the customer-centric nature of Ankorstore with the amount of human contact our brand and retailers have with us. At inaglobe, human-centricity is a pillar of the projects that we source and our methodology of work, so it has been very interesting to see the result of a successful product-market-fit exercise, and subsequently how it needs to evolve as a company grows.
Digital transformations: As I mentioned earlier, Ankorstore is facilitating a kind of digital transformation for brands and retailers. At inaglobe one can draw a similar parallel, as we are trying to support more connectivity and collaboration between two entities that don’t usually work together through digital and remote means. The adoption of technology is at the centre of both the platforms’ mission, by definition, as they are digital ecosystems, but at the same time they are both tightly involved with the process of onboarding. This makes the process more human, a directive that drives both entities.
The difference in the challenge
Naturally, I also wanted to explain some of the very fundamental differences that exist between the two projects. Ankorstore is building a platform for an already existing relationship: retailers routinely buy from brands; they just didn’t have an ecosystem that enabled it so greatly. On the other hand, inaglobe is building a system by connecting two existing systems: that of higher education with that of sustainable development. Actors across these spaces have not historically collaborated in depth, and especially not on pedagogical grounds for STEM, let alone trying to build innovation. For this reason, the challenge building inaglobe is actually quite different.
Fundamentally, this piece was about reflecting on the learnings I am having at Ankorstore with respect to inaglobe. Ankorstore is now the third platform (as well as EXPeditions) product that I work on, and I am maturing my understanding of these as I internalise and reflect on the matter. I feel that a systems approach to understanding platforms is key. I am sure the learning journey is only starting, and I hope to write many more pieces as this one.
