Listia is a mobile marketplace where you get rid of things you don't need and get stuff you want in return, for FREE. In episode 21 of the Crowd, we connect with Gee Chuang, the CEO & Co-founder of Listia to hear about his journey in the collaborative economy.

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Transcript:

Kevin:            This episode of The Crowd is brought to you by Near Me. Power your marketplace with Near Me.

 

Hi. Welcome to The Crowd, a podcast by Near Me. We’re talking about peer-to-peer marketplaces. We’re talking about collaborative economy and we’re talking about thought leadership. We’re talking about all these things, any and all of them with some of the best minds in the field. And of course, I’m your host, Kevin Cohen.

 

Hi, I’m your host Kevin Cohen and I’m super excited about today’s interview. I’ll be joined by Gee Chuang, co-founder and CEO of Listia. Gee, welcome to the show.

 

Gee:                Hi, Kevin. Great to be here.

 

Kevin:            Yup, thank you. So, for all of our listeners that aren’t familiar with your business, what is Listia?

 

Gee:                Yes. So Listia is a peer-to-peer marketplace for trading new and used goods. We’ve got about 7 million members who’ve traded over a 100 million items so far. We’ve been trying to create the most rewarding way to help you declutter your house, get rid of the things you don’t use anymore and trade them with others in the marketplace to get stuff that you actually will use and will love.

 

Kevin:            Very cool. Well, before we jumped in to learning more about Listia, I’ve got some rapid fire questions for you.

 

Gee:                Sure.

 

Kevin:                        What book do you recommend most often?

 

Gee:                So one of the books I’ve read most recently that I definitely recommend to anyone sort of in the start up world is The Hard Thing About Hard Things. It’s a book written by Ben Horowitz and it’s really just a great book that talks about, not only advice on building and running a start up but also very practical advice on all the things that can go wrong while you’re trying to create your company. Oftentimes I’ll go to it just to read about problems that he faced while building appsware. A lot of times it’s because I might be going through something that’s really difficult and when you go and read that book, you realize that most of the problems you face day to day really aren’t that difficult compared to some of the things that he went through. So it’s just a lot of awesome practical advice in there.

 

Kevin:                        Wonderful. Where do you spend most of your time online?

 

Gee:                Online I do, I guess, I do a lot of reading and media consumption. So I spent time reading a lot of the tech blogs like TechCrunch. I spent time on Hacker News and reddit, to keep up with different topics whether it be tech or hobbies that I have like golf or reef-keeping which is a new hobby of mine. Yeah, I also spent time on Facebook, you know, keeping in touch with family and friends, things like that. I guess the product I use most these days is Listia, just keeping up with what’s going on with the community and listing stuff I don’t need and sort of getting a lot of toys and things for my kids as well.

 

Kevin:                        Besides Listia, what peer-to peer marketplaces or services do you use?

 

Gee:                Yes, so the ones I’ve used the most often are, you know, when I’m in the city, I’ll use Uber or Lyft and then in the past I’ve used TaskRabbit quite a bit, especially to find sort of a handyman or delivery people for heavy things or office furniture, things like that.

 

Kevin:                        So when you are not working, what do you like to do?

 

Gee:                These days, I like to try to get some exercise in by playing some golf. I think golf is one of those hobbies where it allows me to relax, get back, in tune with nature and not sitting at home whole day or in the office all day and get some exercise at the same time. So I do a lot of that. Mostly I just spend time with my family. So I have two boys, age five and seven. Then we go riding with the family up to SF, sightseeing, different things like that.

 

Kevin:                        You’re a busy man.

 

Gee:                Yeah, yeah, definitely.

 

Kevin:            So let’s learn a little bit more about Listia. What did you do before Listia that led you up to starting that venture?

 

Gee:                Yes, so I actually studied EE in college. I went to Cornell. I moved out to the Bay Area and worked in hardware and networking. So I was designing like routers and firewalls and things like that. But at the same time in the background I had always worked with my good friend and now co-founder, James Fong. We’d always worked on different websites, mobile apps, different basically consumer or social apps in the past. Before Listia we were working on a site that would help people find good deals on shoes and inkjet printers and car parts, all sorts of various different things. They’re mostly related to e-commerce and marketing and were just getting into sort of the social world. Our shoe site actually allowed you to take photos of your shoes and upload them. So basically working out on a lot of different web projects and while some of them did fairly well, none of them were as big as a product or a company as we had hoped and so when we had the idea for Listia, it kind of shifted all of our attention over to that and said, you know, this could be really big one day. Let’s take everything we’ve learned building other apps and websites and really apply it to this idea and see where it takes us.

 

Kevin:            Between the concept and the idea actually being executed on, how long did that take? What year was that? Give us the specifics on that?

 

Gee:                Sure, it was – let’s see. It was probably the end of 2008. As I mentioned James and I were always working on different things. We had lunch together every day. One day James said, you know, there is, – he was having trouble actually getting rid of a pair of snowboard boots he had. He couldn’t get rid of them on Craigslist. He couldn’t get rid of them on eBay and he thought, you know, there’s going to be a better way to simply give away something you don’t need any more and we kind of talked about it at lunch late in 2008 and that really sparked almost immediately this new business idea of building a fun, safe and easy marketplace for, you know, trading things you don’t need anymore.

 

                        So then, soon after that, you know, we spent the next couple days chatting about it. We had already started dreaming up, you know, how we were going to build it as a mobile app or a website and so late that year we took the idea and it was getting close to the deadline for YC applications. So we turned it into an application. We submitted it, kind of didn’t think about it for a little bit as we started working on it and when we got the email that said we’re invited to an interview, that really helped spark things and it just kind of took off from there. So we were fortunate enough to be selected. In the summer of 2009, we basically formally created the company. We went through Y Combinator and yes, so that was the summer of 2009 and then we launched in the fall of that year.

 

Kevin:            And so in terms of Listia today, how many employees and users do you have?

 

Gee:                So we have a little over 40 employees. We have just under 30 in Downtown Mountain View and another dozen or so kind of spread out throughout the US. The most of the remote employees are moderators and some engineers as well. Yeah, so we have just over 7 million registered users right now.

 

Kevin:            Wow.

 

Gee:                Yup.

 

Kevin:            And how many of those would you say are active users?

 

Gee:                So in a given month, we have anywhere between 10 and 15 percent of those actively listing and bidding on items.

 

Kevin:            Very cool. So what is the long-term vision of Listia? I mean you’re obviously pretty far along in the collaborative economy and the sharing economy. What is your goal in terms of total user base over the next couple years?

 

Gee:                We want to create a marketplace where you can easily get rid of anything you don’t need any more. We want to change the way people think about used stuff and stuff they don’t use anymore. You should easily be able to list that stuff into this pool of items and anyone should be able tap into that pool of items as well to get something they need. So really changing the way people think about consuming new goods and really giving a second life to a lot of the stuff that people are buying today. So creating a global marketplace where you can easily get in and out of at any point.

 

Kevin:            So you went through a couple of different rounds of funding. What was it like going through that as an entrepreneur?

 

Gee:                Yeah, it was actually different at every stage. So in the beginning we had never kind of gone out and raised any money before. So it was this really new and exciting and even terrifying world that we’re entering. Luckily, we had a lot of good advice and friendships through Y Combinator that we’re able to tap into and ask about how you do this or how you do that. And really, YC was the first money we took as a company and they also helped us directly with our first seed round which came out of the demo day that we had a couple of months into that program. Then the second time we kind of raised a much larger seed round from a lot of I guess firms and angels in the Valley like SV Angel, Andreessen Horowitz’s seed fund, Max Levchin and many others.

 

                        And that was, you know, we were doing really well at that time. So we kind of wanted to accelerate the growth and that was a great time for us to kind of meet a lot of people who’ve been there and done that and learn from their experiences. It was great to round up a whole bunch of investors with all that experience that we could tap into. Then the last time we did it was I think 2 years ago. We raised our Series A from General Catalyst and at that point we had done the whole fund raising thing many times with foreigners. It was really about finding a partner, a long term partner that we could work with, that we trusted and that we kind of enjoyed working with.

 

Kevin:            Wonderful. How do you acquire customers for your business?

 

Gee:                So a lot of our, I guess user acquisition is organic. People kind of try out Listia, enjoy it, and invite their friends. We actually also incentivize that behavior through our invite and referral programs. So you can earn Listia credits which you can use within the marketplace whenever you do invite your friends or family. So, most of our growth is through there. In addition we also run paid marketing campaigns on like Goggle and Facebook to acquire users both on the web and on our mobile apps.

 

Kevin:            What are some of the challenges that you are currently facing as an organization?

 

Gee:                Yes, so I think one of the things that we’ve always faced is kind of changing the way people think about their stuff. So before Listia came along, we figured people do only one of a few things with their old stuff.  You either throw it away or you try to donate or give it to friends or you sell it on one of the large market places like in eBay or Craigslist. And we really wanted to step in to fill a void that we saw which was, despite eBay and Craigslist being out there, people still have all the stuff at home that they don’t use and they don’t know what to do with.

 

So we, by building up funds sort of really easy way for people to list those items, we thought we could really tackle this problem and create a huge marketplace based off that stuff. But the hard part is really changing people’s behavior, right? Because right now, no one is doing much of anything with that stuff. They let it pile up probably eventually throw it away or donate it all at once. But to change people’s perception and to really get people to list more of those items and see the value and being able to trade it with others, that’s always has been sort of one of the larger challenges that we’ve had.

 

But luckily over time, it’s gotten a lot better simply because there’s more liquidity in our marketplace, there’s more items. So today, if you were to go to Listia to see what you could get, it’s ten times better than what you saw a year ago and then it’s ten times better than two years ago. And so as we grow it just gets a little bit easier in each year.

 

Kevin:            Very cool. What do you have on the horizon for 2015 and beyond?

 

Gee:                So the – a huge focus of ours since last year and really going through into 2015 is just to make sure we’re accessible on all platforms. Mobile of course is huge but the idea that people have screens everywhere and are able to access these services on demand just makes it really, really important for us to fully complete the transition from sort of a website into a mobile app. So we spent a ton of time in resources, rebuilding our apps from scratch and we’ve launched our new iPhone app for example at the end of last year and already it’s doing much better than the previous app with people sticking around and engaging for two times as long.

 

So mobile and sort of being on every device is a big focus of ours. And later this year, I think we are also going to focus more on local marketplaces. Getting people to exchange items more locally as opposed to shipping them to each other is also a big goal of ours. Mostly because it will open up the marketplace to a lot more types of items such as big bulky couches or tables, furniture, that sort of thing which often times are the things that people really want to get rid of the most. So kind of focusing on local is also a big thing for us this year.

 

Kevin:            Are you going to roll out the local data in the San Francisco Silicon Valley area or you’re going to roll it out in another market to test?

Gee:                So we’ve isolated a few markets in the past as good testing grounds just because we have tons of users in these markets. SF is definitely one of those but also cities like LA and New York and Chicago as well.

 

Kevin:            Very cool. Well Gee, how can people learn more about Listia? Where can they sign up? Where can they find more information? Please tell our listeners.

 

Gee:                Sure, yes. So the easiest place to go is just to listia.com. There you can watch the video about the service. You can start browsing around to see what we have in the marketplace right away. And at any point you can also sign up to become a member. At the same time, you can also just search for Listia in the Goggle Play Store or the Apple App Store as well. So we have dedicated mobile apps on both of those platforms.

 

Kevin:            Well, thank you. We’ll have all of those links below in the show notes so people can find out where to go there but this has been great.

 

Gee:                Yeah. Thank so much, Kevin.

 

Kevin:            Yeah. Thank you very much and we’ll continue to look out for Listia and watch you grow. It will be fun to see you guys get bigger and bigger. Thank you very much.

 

Gee:                Definitely. Thanks.

 

Kevin:            So that’s it for today’s show everybody. I’d like to thank Gee from Listia for joining us here today. They’re doing great stuff, so check them out. If you want to learn more about Listia, we’ve got all the information about Listia in our show notes. Go to www.near-me.com, click on the blog and then go to the podcast listing. Also if you like today’s show, we’d really appreciate it if you could go to iTunes and leave us a five-star review. That’s it. Have a great day everybody.