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Update on Community Changes

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Kavik

5531

Aug 30, 2019

This is much more appreciated than the previous announcement, and flubs on the lack of announcements.... But, i guess this confirms that the polls have never had any purpose, and explains why things voted on in them never seemed to drop? Gave the illusion that the members had some input on what could be made available....but in reality, not so much. Don't get me wrong, it'd be great to have a subject matter expert at the head of every community. But really, someone with very little product knowledge could still source and negotiate if the polls were actually used as signs of what people want to buy, don't you think? Is what it is, it just strikes me as a bit funny....especially when you consider the people who have recently been running certain communities who didn't seem capable of understanding specifics about the products they were in charge of Hopefully at some point you'll find some way of managing this....or find some people who know about pens and pencils and pots and pans

Will

8470

Chief Product Officer

Aug 30, 2019

KavikHey Kavik, Thanks for caring about our platform and sharing your thoughts. We appreciate your previous post. I used to post about this a lot, but the translation from polls to runs has always been a challenge. The community votes for a product, the manufacturer doesn't want to sell the product, so we would source a similar product. This is how it would go in most situations. Why wouldn't they want to sell the product? They have an exclusive distribution agreement, or they don't want to provide a discount to the community, or they don't have stock, or they... etc. Whatever the reason, we would list a different product, and people would assume that we're not listening to the polls. Polls also provided a great way to understand the macro level desires of the community, informing our merchandising and Studio strategies. I hope we can find a way to make it operationally feasible to list more products in writing, but it's challenging to create and maintain these partnerships and source desirable product. I wish it was just about product knowledge, but success in this role is more about building partnerships than product knowledge (especially with polls to say where to focus). Hopefully this is helpful context. Your point about the people who have been running certain communities... These people work all the time to produce experiences that you hopefully enjoy. It's useful for us to hear what you do and don't like about the experiences but it's unproductive to associate those feelings with our team members. Thanks again for your thoughtful post earlier, hope to see more of that in this discussion.

Kavik

5531

Aug 30, 2019

WillHi Will, Some of that is helpful context to explain the difference, but some seems to support what I was saying; you need good buyers/negotiators, not necessarily product experts for each community. (though it sure would be nice to have that, to be honest, the community has always offered more product support than any associate in the time I've been here) Now it's always been my understanding, from the cryptic comments and questionable ability to claim a manufacturers warranty (on certain things), that the majority of the products are sourced from retailers, not manufacturers. In fact, there have been a few times when this has been talked about not so secretively, and we've been told items being sold were from an authorized retailer, but because of the pricing the retailer couldn't be listed, and any warranty issues would have to go through you instead of the manufacturer. So I would've thought that meant the trick was in having someone hunt down a place that would make a deal on a specific item, not just trying the manufacturer then moving on to a different item. Are we sourcing only from manufacturers now? And if so, can we assume direct support and warrantees on all products going forward? Or am I reading too much into this? I know in certain categories the warranty question can be a big deciding factor on whether or not to make a purchase. It's certainly kept me from a few fairly expensive items I've wanted here. As far as associating experiences with particular team members.... First, here's my biggest ongoing issue related to communicating with Drop associates: when a user has a question to post in a product discussion, we never know what Drop associate to tag to get an answer. Maybe some communities have that one go-to person who's on the ball and provides answers for all product questions, but knives certainly hasn't for a long time. So if a question doesn't get answered you have to repost and tag like 6 people and just hope at least one bothers to answer. Recently the knives community has been a bit of a mess, with multiple drops in the last couple of months advertising incorrect specs (and in one case changing the specs mid-drop, after purchases were made, without contacting buyers to alert them of the change so they could decide if they wanted to cancel their order). Take a look through the Copper Kershaw Natrix discussion, if you aren't already familiar with what happened there. Once we FINALLY got the buyer for that community to respond, it was handled horribly, and was still only partially corrected. The person who got involved didn't seem to comprehend the full scope of both what was wrong in the ad and what was wrong with how they went about "fixing" it. Any further posts to get the rest of the false advertising corrected were met with silence again. Likewise, they ignored all comments pointing them to other current (at the time) drops with similar false advertising issues (there were 3 others, if memory serves) That was a very specifically one on one interaction with a specific associate. There's no way to NOT associate that experience with them. Plenty of other people were tagged in on that too, if it were a group effort any one of them could've chimed in and helped resolve the issue. The thing is, and I don't mean this offensively, but you're waffling here, and have been for a long time now. ("you" collectively, Drop) On one hand you want someone passionate and knowledgeable to negotiate for, and communicate with, the community, as one of the criteria to keep it viable. But then that person isn't supposed to be personally responsible for the experiences we have in that community. You still present yourself as a group buy discount site, but we no longer get tiered discounts and, more and more lately, many of the items listed are just average retail pricing. You have this great little niche, combining a forum-like community within a retail site, but you don't want to put the time and effort into participating in it anymore (it was great for a while, when there were MD associates who were just active in chats...whether fielding customer questions, or just shooting the shit and drumming up interest. Don't discount the actual value there was in that.) It all comes across as a very unfocused mess sometimes. I hope that's something that will be resolved a bit as you scale back here, but there's more that needs attention than just the scale. Be a sort of concierge product sourcing service. Be a group buy site with real discounts (and know when to walk away from a deal if you can't offer better than average retail...it makes you look weak as a bulk buyer). Be a funky retailer with a good community forum. Be...whatever you call what you do with the collaborations. But for Pete's sake, pick one or two of those things and do them right! With focus, with purpose, with a clear mission statement and a clear direction that your members can follow.

Will

8470

Chief Product Officer

Aug 30, 2019

KavikThanks for your patience, many meetings today. There's a lot to say about this situation, years of context, but for the sake of brevity I’m going to focus on the most critical points. I’m not trying to be disingenuous or hand wavey about the details, but the logistics of running community based group buy ecommerce is a rabbit hole and I want to avoid getting distracted from your main concerns. The bulk of these issues stemmed from our need to grow as a group buying site, even when it wasn’t working as intended. We had a model that was proven in a few communities and it stood to reason that we could apply this model to additional communities in a fairly straightforward way. The whole idea was built around having a strong community and a buyer who had the knowledge and ability to directly communicate with that community. This created two primary challenges: First, a lot of people are really great buyers, a lot of people are really great communicators, particularly in the context of online text based communication like this, and a lot of people have an amazing depth of knowledge in a given community. But very few people are really good at two of the three, and finding someone who is three for three was incredibly rare. We wanted to grow our communities and so we got the best people we could find to accomplish that growth, but this meant possibly sacrificing some of that ability to communicate well in an online environment or having the depth of knowledge required to answer some of the questions the community would ask. The second problem was on the sourcing side. When we were first starting, we basically forced the manufacturers to recognize us in any way necessary and then we could start negotiating. I made 5000+ cold calls in the first year of Massdrop, got told to "climb a tree" ~4900 times. Once we got bigger and more recognized, it was less an issue of getting a call as it was convincing them about the benefits of doing these group buys. This is where some issues with polls originate as every poll would be dominated by a singular most popular and wanted product. Often from that manufacturer’s point of view, they had no interest in securing a few hundred extra sales at the risk of being exposed to a hyper critical community such as ours. The solution at that point was to start developing our collaborations with these highly sought after manufacturers, but that required us to prove we had something to offer them and for a manufacturer to take that risk with us. Through analysis of the community, we were able to determine how existing products could become more desirable. And now we’re here. Retail products that are highly demanded by the largest communities will still be available, but we will be focusing on Drop Studio and it’s collaborations. By doubling down on the communities we understand, we can focus on improved execution. Hopefully that helps. Going forward I think you’ll find fewer issues regarding the communication on product pages and a much more focused strategy in general.

(Edited)

Kavik

5531

Aug 30, 2019

WillNo need, I understand what busy work days are like lol I know you weren't trying to be wishy washy, i was saying that's the way Drop as a whole has felt for a while now, not your root specifically.
It's just sort of been all over the place... Looking like you're focusing on collabs, but saying you're mission as a group buy site hasn't changed (per Steve, in a discussion after the rebranding); up and down with discounts vs retail pricing; still having the community discussion boards, but having next to no 'official' Drop participation in them. It's been a confusing few months as a member. I'm sure it's a difficult business model to maintain (and even more difficult to have gotten started in the first place). The explanations do help highlight those facts, but I have to say I'm concerned about where this will end up if collabs are the main focus. Don't get me wrong, I've bought a few, and they've been great...but as time goes on, they aren't the real value bargains they were at the start. I have to use knives again as an example, because that's the majority of my interest here. We used to get killer deals on the FFxWE Ti/S35vn knives, really incredible bargains...and you sold them by the thousands. More recently we're seeing knives that use less expensive materials at twice the cost, and as such you're showing only a fraction of the sales. You can do super good bargain on an unknown knife, or you can do super high quality at a reasonable price....but trying for high end of the market, for the given materials, on an untested knife....you just can't get the same sales out of that. Especially after having a couple that had issues. Given the last couple I looked at, I'm not sure you can even do enough to stay afloat at the current trend. On a related note, and I know I've said this before, but it's insane that you can't get lower than average retail pricing deals on WE/Civivi knives, given the amount of business you've done with them. That alone speaks volumes to what I was saying about looking weak as a buyer when you can't negotiate an actual deal. And i don't want to rehash this whole issue, but while I have an ear that's listening, I hope you'll also be paying closer attention to the accuracy of the product descriptions going forward as well. You opened yourselves up to a lot of lawsuits recently, something like that happening certainly wouldn't improve things around here. I do hope you're right though, overall. I've heard there's a lot of *ahem* "restructuring" going on there since the, let's just say, no so he's heartily accepted rebranding. Here's hoping the replacements are given a clear directive and the changes result in a more organized structure, with better accuracy and improved communication 👍

Misfit1876

Sep 10, 2019

WillPity the way of business is not to hire 3 people for 3 jobs, but to try and make one person do it all.

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