Kyle
Two weeks ago we brought you an interview with Toronto startup ShopLocket. This innovative new startup has developed a simple selling platform, where selling anything online, in a one off sale, is as easy as embedding a YouTube video. From ShopLocket’s platform you can sell your digital camera, pair of shoes, dress, car or whatever else you want to unload on any social media channel, your personal blog, website or anywhere that you can embed anything.
There are three easy steps to listing an item on ShopLocket, just create your sale, share it and sell it. You can sell whatever you want. Got some old baseball cards? Sell them. Have an old cell phone? Sell it! Want to teach guitar lessons, no problem. Best of all there is no coding required. They also offer two payment options PayPal and Stripe.
ShopLocket was born after co-founder Katherine Hague had needed to sell some shirts for a consulting job she was working on. Setting up a traditional e-commerce site would have been too costly and too time consuming. Using an existing market place like e-Bay or Craigslist was too unprofessional. So ShopLocket was born.
We love the concept and it seems easy enough to quickly ramp up their user base. Rho Canada Ventures, Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures, BDC Venture Capital, Relay Ventures and Extreme Venture Partners obviously see the vision as well as they all came together last week to fund ShopLocket’s seed round to the beat of $1 million dollars.
“The main use of the funds will be to grow the team, both for marketing and development,” ShopLocket co-founder Katherine Hague said in an interview with BetaKit. “Up until now we were a team of three; Andrew Louis my co-founder, Dan Kalmar our Community Manager, and myself. Already we’ve added two team members, Jaclyn Konzelmann for business development and Sumanth Ravipati as our second developer. We expect to be adding a full-time designer and a third developer later in the year.”
Hague reports that a lot of this round came from their participation in Extreme Startups accelerator program. That program gives startups a $50,000 seed in the beginning of the program and an additional $150,000 investment at the end of the program. Many of the other institutional investors that participated in the round, did so because of their relationship with Extreme Startups. Hague said the round took under two months from pitching to money in the bank.
Obviously for a round to come together that quick it’s more than just their participation in an accelerator. Hague says:
“I think what separates us from a lot of different ways of selling online is how easy and social it is to sell. In minutes, someone can have a professional way to sell online. In addition to that, if someone likes the product that you’re selling, they’re able to either share a link to that product with their friends, or even embed it right in their own site.” she told nibletz.com
When a product is easy to understand, easy to use and looks great, like ShopLocket, it doesn’t matter where you’re located, you have a better chance of winning.
Linkage:
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