According to sources (in finnish), Fruugo didn't launch it's service yesterday at SIME, as it was supposed to. Kauppalehti (also in finnish) writes that the CEO Reijo Syrjäläinen has left the company, and the new CEO is Juha Usva. They are now in talks with VC:s about new funding. Their biggest investor so far is Queensway Developments LLC. Taneli Tikka has a good blog entry about Fruugo's mystery.
This is from Fruugo.com:
"We want to make it easy for consumers to buy the stuff they want, in their own language and using the payment method they prefer – without the hassle of exchange rates, complex shipping costs, taxes, or staying up all night worrying “am I actually going to get my stuff?” We want to help with all that."These problems have been addressed by many different e-commerce services, such as Amazon. Where is the beef? What is their unique value proposal? On ArcticStartup, Fruugo's Janne Waltonen commented that:
"Fruugo doesn’t have direct competitors as such, and most of the players concerned with Fruugo entering their space could actually rather be quite interesting partners (like Kelkoo and other product comparison sites for example)"
Every single company has direct competitors. At least that has to be the mindset. I mean if you don't have the competitors, you don't have a market either. If the problems that Fruugo's service is trying to solve are as described above, it doesn't sound like a disruptive innovation. It sounds like a mainstream service in an sustaining market. If it were truly disruptive, I could understand the "no competitors" comment a little better. But as it sounds more like late adopter service, you should create the competition, as competition is the fundamental condition for purchase. You just can't do early adopter marketing with late adopter product.
Also it has been reported that they have about 100-150 people working in Fruugo right now. I think that amount of people in a startup is pure madness. Even Google didn't need that many to get the service running online.
All in all, this all sounds very peculiar. I would absolutely love to see new big things coming out of Finland, but it just seems that either 1. The idea is too small and the effort too big, or 2. The idea is great and effort too small.
Lasse Enersen:
Adele Enersen:
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3 Comments:
Hey, don´t fruugo your start up!
The word "google" - without capitalisation of the "g" - is a common transitive verb.
Definition: to search for information about a specific person through the google search engine.
Seriously, I will not adjust any definition to the word fruugo. I still hope the best for everybody with their business. This is more like a note to myself, or Lasse. Take it easy, don´t fruugo too much!
And yes, if they release some kind of amazing new service in january, we may look like an idiots.
Well, then you may say this comment was pure NNSENSE!
Fruugo's direct competition is at least the same as with many Internet services: beer, sausages, sauna, sex and perhaps some telly on the side, with an occasional nap on the couch.
It's people's time, and the share of it, that you are competing for/against. Direct competitor is the sausage, and if your smart internet service let's go of the customer and seems boring for just a second - you can sure the sausage gets eaten, telly get watched and sex will be had. And you have just lost ;)
Hmm.. this is pretty good stuff, perhaps I should blog about this a bit.
Taneli: I think you have a good point there. And maybe someone should create an internet service where you can enjoy your virtual sausage whilst watching virtual telly and maybe even "cyber" at the same time ;)
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