Carrot Market employees are introducing the Carrot Market app to local residents in front of a large supermarket in London, UK on March 18. More than 1,000 people joined the carrot market through three days of marketing activities. /Carrot Market Provided
“I’m here to see what crazy people they are.”
In 2015, a Microsoft (MS) bulletin board was opened in Blind, an office worker community, and when an MS employee wrote this for the first time, team Blind employees cheered. Meanwhile, Team Blind advertised the company by distributing flyers in the parking lot of Microsoft’s headquarters. The ’90s-style’ analog marketing conducted by Microsoft, the heart of digital, stimulated the curiosity of MS employees. As the MS strategy that started like this paid off, now 60% of all employees have joined the blind.
Since Blind and Carrot Market, a local second-hand trading platform, are recognized as a business model with a relatively strong Korean sentiment, there were many voices saying that it would not be easy to apply in foreign countries. However, it is now regarded as a representative success story of startups entering overseas markets. It is leading the local market by breaking through major developed countries such as the US and UK with the unique marketing of startups.
◆ ‘Moms’ became the advance troops to attack the region
Carrot Market took its first steps in the UK market under the name of ‘KARROT’ in November 2019. At that time, the number of monthly users (MAU) in Korea was about 5 million. It was a difficult time to see that it was outpacing domestic competitors such as Jungjung Nara.
The carrot market’s overseas expansion strategy is a rare method in Korea. After failing to dominate the domestic market, they attacked four countries simultaneously: Canada (September 2020), the United States (October 2020), and Japan (February 2021) following the UK. Usually, overseas companies choose to expand their business to other regions when they achieve results in the first region.
Carrot Market explained that it entered various regions quickly due to the characteristics of its hyper-local service. In order for a hyperlocal service to be successful, it must fully reflect the cultural characteristics and national sentiments of the region. It requires more time and effort than domestically. Therefore, the company explained that the overseas service launch time was early. The fact that live ammunition was abundant due to the booming investment market at the same time is also the background to which the carrot market took this strategy.
There are other reasons. An official from Carrot Market explained, “I thought that the time to take off as a global company could be further shortened by entering multiple countries at the same time and finding various success methods.” For example, users in the United States often omit essential elements in posts for second-hand sales. Carrot Market has changed the format of the basic post to make it easier to write essential information. This method was also applied to domestic services.
The characteristics of users by country were also taken into account. Many Japanese are reluctant to disclose personal information. Therefore, I prefer to trade in public places such as subway stations and convenience stores rather than in front of my house. For this reason, Carrot Market has added a function to indicate the desired trading area in Japan. Considering the preferences of consumers in North America, the app user environment (UI) was implemented in a very simple form in the form of a basic bulletin board.
Members of the ‘Mom (child-rearing woman) community’ were the leading forces for overseas expansion of the carrot market. We started by targeting childcare products with the highest demand for second-hand transactions. ‘Mom Experience Group’ was initially recruited in major markets such as Bristol, UK and Toronto, Canada, and word of mouth spread around the SNS of housewives saying, “There are many good childcare products on the Korean carrot trading site.”
The emphasis on environmental and social responsibility was also a point of differentiation from local companies. He launched a recycling campaign that said, “Each year, British households produce 16 million tons of garbage,” and recently moved the hearts of the residents with a donation event for childcare products for Ukrainian refugees.
Established the head office in the United States and actively entered the market
Team Blind, which operates blinds, an anonymous community service for office workers, was active in advancing into the global market from the beginning to the point of establishing a headquarters in San Francisco, USA. If it succeeds in Silicon Valley and Seattle, where the headquarters of global information technology (IT) companies are concentrated, it will be advantageous to expand services to other regions where the companies have branches.
First, it was important to secure key users who would attract other users. Once it is properly ‘word of mouth’, the number of subscribers is expected to increase rapidly. Team Blind took a very Korean method while attacking the two tech dinosaurs in Seattle, Amazon and Microsoft. Director Kim Seong-gyeom, co-founder of Team Blind, frequently held a pork kimchi steamed party in June 2015, when it was in the early stages of advancing into the United States. For the location, we chose an apartment where many Amazon employees live. He announced the blinds while eating and talking with a Korean employee at Amazon. An official from Team Blind explained, “In the United States, if a service is rumored to be used by Amazon employees, it spreads quickly in the IT industry.”
The next target was MS. Again, she chose the Korean way. In the MS parking lot, ‘flyers’ with service descriptions were circulated to the employees and posted here and there. The number of subscribers began to increase as flyers, which are rarely seen in IT companies, appeared. On the MS employee bulletin board, the first post was ‘Some crazy Xs sprayed this in the company parking lot and came to see it’.
It also helped that it was possible to communicate casually with other employees. Amazon and Microsoft also had anonymous bulletin boards. However, as the US has a strong culture of tabooing public information communication among IT company employees, the blinds became a differentiating point. Employees of Seattle’s leading IT companies, Amazon and Microsoft, were curious about the other companies’ treatment and internal circumstances. MS employees who have used blinds posted on the ‘Forum’, an anonymous bulletin board, “You can even talk to Amazon employees in the blinds.”
Currently, Blind has the second largest number of white-collar workers in the United States after LinkedIn, a work-based social media service. Apple’s employee subscription rate is over 70%. The strategy of making inroads into other countries was also successful if successful in the United States. After the US, India, Canada, the UK, and Singapore have the most users in that order. It has maintained high growth in recent years. The average number of blind subscribers per day in the US this year has increased by more than 200% compared to last year.
By Kim Joo-wan, staff reporter kjwan@hankyung.com
