Keith Rabois

OpenStore: instant offers to buy your Shopify store, the Opendoor model for e-commerce

Shaan pitches OpenStore (Keith Rabois and Jack Abraham) as Opendoor for e-commerce: plug into a Shopify store's data and give the owner an instant buyout offer with no banker, deck, or process — rolling up Shopify stores the way Thrasio rolled up Amazon FBA businesses.

“OpenStore is the same thing for e-commerce. They're saying, you want to sell your e-commerce company? I'll buy your Shopify store right now. You don't have to go through the whole banker process, make a deck, do, do all this stuff. I'll just plug into your data and I'll just give you an offer right now. And so what they're trying to do is roll up Shopify stores.”

Steal thisApply the instant-liquidity model to any market of small sellers: plug into their data, skip the broker process, and make an instant cash offer to roll them up.

Keith Rabois's Open Store: 'Opendoor for buying businesses'

Shaan explains that Keith Rabois (Opendoor founder) and Jack Abraham are starting Open Store, which Shaan believes is Opendoor for businesses (likely online ones): tell them about your business, get an instant offer, and they buy it from you.

“his new company he's starting, uh, with, with Jake, Jack Abraham is, uh, called Open Store.. And so you have Opendoor and now you have Open Store. I know they haven't released a bunch of details, but I think I know what it is, which is it is Opendoor for buying businesses. So it's the same idea for buying. I think it's going to be specialized in online businesses, but maybe not. Where basically you just say, here's my business, and then they say, here's your offer, we'll buy it off you.”

Want 50% to not get it, 25% to hate it, 25% to love it

Bakke cites a Keith Rabois-style rule for a good startup idea: aim for 50% of people to not understand it, 25% to hate it, and 25% to love it, polarization signals a non-obvious, defensible idea.

“I think it's like a Keith Rabois quote. You always want, you know, like 50% of people to not understand the idea. You want like 25% of people to hate it and you want 25% to love it. And I think we're like pretty equal on that ratio.”

Steal thisTreat polarized reactions to your idea as a feature: seek the 50/25/25 split, not consensus.

License powerful brands to win downloads without paid acquisition

Facing brutal ad costs, TinyCo's play was to license huge media brands (Family Guy, like the existing Simpsons game) so the brand itself drove tens of millions of downloads in the App Store — a console-game playbook nobody had brought to mobile.

“So we make a list of brands where we think this brand is so powerful, we're going to be able to get 40 million people to download the game just based on the fact that I have this brand in the App Store. One of the brands that we come up with is Family Guy. So there'd been a Simpsons game launched, and the Simpsons game was beginning to do well. And we said, okay, what's like The Simpsons? Family Guy. Let's go try to get the Family Guy license.”

Steal thisWhen paid acquisition breaks, license a brand whose built-in fanbase does the customer acquisition for you.

List every way you'll fail before writing a line of code

A Keith Rabois heuristic Ali adopted: before starting, write a prioritized list of every reason your company could fail and try to disprove each one up front — not after you've built and launched the product.

“One thing I heard Keith Rabois say once is when you start a company, you should think about all of the reasons that it's not going to work and all of the reasons that it's going to fail. And you should start with that list, make a prioritized list, and try to prove that these aren't things that are going to make your company fail. And you want to do that as the first thing.”

Steal thisWrite a pre-mortem memo listing every reason your idea could fail, then try to disprove each one before you build anything.