Hi there, my name is Alex. I was the CEO and co-founder of Requipper. We were an early-stage startup building a white-glove consignment service making it ridiculously easy for you to sell almost anything you own.
I started Requipper (FKA Switchbackr) in April 2020 with one of my closest friends from Stanford, Sasha Landauer. Over the past 2.5 years, we poured heart and soul into this company. We took it from an idea to MVP; led it through a pivot to an ‘on-the-ground’ consignment service, with warehouses and couriers. Ultimately, we raised over $600K, grew revenues to $200k, and hit operational profitability.
I shut down Requipper recently in October 2022 after failing to raise follow-on capital. While lack of cash was the most immediate reason we shut down, it wasn’t the root cause of our failure. My goal in this article is to provide a postmortem for Requipper, to dive into each of these root causes, explain what happened, and what we learned.
Three years ago, while I was working for Goldman Sachs, I was trying to buy a used road bike. It was a frustrating process, and I began thinking about building a P2P marketplace for outdoor gear (the “Reverb.com for outdoors”). I mentioned this to my good friend Sasha and she wrote me a sweet note saying, in so many words, “I’ll kill you if you start this without me.”
Over the next few months, Requipper (then called Switchbackr) was just an idea that Sasha and I spent a lot of time thinking about. Then two unexpected things happened:
a global pandemic, and
we got a term sheet for much more money than we thought we’d be receiving.
Facing the dual specter of online classes and turning down a lot of money, Sasha and I (virtually) looked at each other, nodded, and decided to drop out of Stanford to give this whole startup thing a go. Switchbackr Worldwide, Inc. was incorporated on 4/1/2020.
The Requipper founding team moving fast and breaking things (e.g., bones)
Our first year we focused on building out Requipper’s “V1” marketplace app. We released our first MVP, re-released it, built proprietary point-of-sale (”POS”) system integrations to quickly onboard store partners, and won dozens of outdoor gear shops to our platform.
But it wasn’t working—we weren’t seeing product market fit. This was for a couple of product-specific reasons:
By about 3Q2021, we recognized our business was not working. It probably took us too long to come to this conclusion. Retrospectively, I think we fell into a ‘weak signal’ trap, based on our modest growth with store partnerships + POS integrations. As Dalton Caldwell (YC) notes:
<aside> 📌 “A weak signal from the market is the most dangerous. If it was a strong signal, you’d know and have the makings of product-market fit. If it was no signal, you know your idea is a dud. But a weak signal gives you false hope that maybe there is something there with a few twists and tweaks. Founders can risk wasting years of their lives on this false hope”.
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Earlier in 2021, we began hypothesis testing consignment as a way to drive supply-side liquidity for our marketplace. The basic idea was “instead of trying to sell your own outdoor gear, let us do it for you.” All you would have to do to sell with Requipper was 1.) text us photos of your items and 2.) schedule a free at-home pickup. We’d then send a courier to your house, pick up your items, bring them back to a local warehouse where we would sell them on Requipper, as well as other marketplaces like Ebay and Mercari. We would pay you ~50% of the final sale price of any items that sold.
At first the courier was me in my Subaru Crosstrek and the warehouse was my parents’ garage.
But our ‘hypothesis test’ grew quickly. Within just three months, consignment accounted for more than 50% of our revenue and, like, 100% of our contribution profit. By 4Q2021, we moved to an actual warehouse and hired actual couriers and had a knock-out quarter: 3x’d revenue, 12x’d contribution profit.