Author | Yang Dian
Edit | Yang Yafei
36Kr learned that the North American local life service platform "SwingBy" received millions of dollars in angel round financing, and the investment institution was a fund from Hong Kong, China. In 2022, the fund team established a fund division in North America, and SwingBy is also their first early-stage consumer track project in Canada.
According to the SwingBy team, the financing will be used primarily to enhance SwingBy's position in the Canadian market by expanding its service offerings, optimizing its business model, and achieving customer success.
Founded at the end of 2021 in Toronto, Canada, SwingBy provides online exposure services for small and medium-sized enterprises in North America and new brands in 0-1 building.
According to the founding team, up to now, SwingBy has established cooperation with more than 1,200 bloggers and served more than 400 merchants.
Courtesy of the company
In the view of founder Bao Peng, Internet entrepreneurship in the post-epidemic era is very different from the market before 2019, and investors and entrepreneurs in the past were very aggressive, pursuing model innovation, market expansion, user data and growth data, which is no problem in the external environment where the Internet still has dividends.
However, the background of the entrepreneurial era in which SwingBy is located, the market is approaching saturation, and the development technology is quite mature. The essence of business is to make a profit. A project that is not profitable and cannot be self-sufficient is not a good project. Bao Peng said.
As a company closely connected to the offline industry, SwingBy strongly feels the temperature of the changes in the Canadian offline catering market. In the first half of 2023, the life cycle of catering enterprises will be sharply shortened, the replacement will be frequent, and the market hotspots will emerge in an endless stream.
Bao Peng said: "In this era, the three things of catering are the core of market hotspots, brand topics, catering quality and service. This change is a logical thing for us to serve local businesses with marketing entry points. "That's why SwingBy is targeting merchant marketing.
In the face of high unemployment and interest rate hikes, Canadian consumers have also had to tighten their belts, especially the younger generation of consumers who are highly price-sensitive. On the consumer side, the group purchase coupons and coupons provided by SwingBy are also quite cost-effective, which is in line with the consumption sentiment of North American consumers.
Courtesy of the company
The founding team members of SwingBy have backgrounds in the Internet, 4A advertising companies, and consulting companies, and some of them are food bloggers who like to run their own social accounts. At the beginning of the business, inspired by the team members, the SwingBy team thought that the resources of merchants and users could be leveraged through bloggers, and a simple and effective logic was "merchants provide meals, we provide channels, merchants earn revenue and customers, and we earn traffic and channel resources".
In the era of fragmented and decentralized self-media, start-ups and small businesses need high-quality channels, and SwingBy provides them with a frugal choice. From one merchant to 10 merchants, from one blogger to 100 bloggers, from a simple delivery channel to multi-channel marketing services, Swingby's channel network continues to roll and attract more merchants and small and medium-sized bloggers.
Courtesy of the company
Regarding in-store and takeaway, SwingBy's current core goal is still to "bring users back to offline". Jessica said: "For merchants and users, food delivery must be a use case, but it is only a small part of the user's eating habits and the revenue of the business.
The North American market is different from the domestic situation, the density of business districts and residential circles is large, the labor cost is too high, and the high cost of the food delivery industry has always been a pain point. Some of these costs translate into merchant commissions, and some of them translate into high service fees for users, as well as consumption in North American culture, "If you want to use takeout orders, the price of the same dish is 30% higher than in-store dine-in." Jessica, head of SwingBy KA, introduced to 36Kr.
There are also many differences in the habits of consumers at home and abroad, such as the fact that people in most parts of North America value work life balance more, and offline gatherings and social networking are still an important part of North American consumers' lives.
The SwingBy team introduced to 36Kr that in the next year, the target sales can reach 10 times that of 2022 and 4-5 times that of 2023, and will focus on the Toronto market to increase the proportion of paying merchants in the number of existing merchants.