What’s Pulpo?
Pulpo allows people to save money by sharing the costs of digital subscriptions. We make sharing your Netflix, Spotify or any other digital subscription easy, frictionless and automatic. We’ve helped over 150K people save money recurrently every month on their digital subscriptions.
My role
I initially put together the team & lead product. Then as the company scaled, I moved onto take on the role of CEO.
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Learnings
Pulpo was a great business (while the opportunity lasted) however, I feel like it should have been an optimal business for a bootstrapped solo-entrepreneur and not a VC backed business. . We found product market fit on the demand (user side), it generated over 1.5M€ in GMV and an ARR of 300K€ in the first 16 months, however it failed at maintaining & providing value to the supply side of the marketplace. I must admit that Pulpo was probably one of the reasons why as to why Netflix lost over 1M Subscribers in Spain.
- No real value for the supply side → Everyone shares their Netflix subscriptions, it’s a fact and the consumer behaviour will be very hard to change. We wanted to do what Spotify did to the music industry (regulating online music and abolishing music piracy) to the streaming industry (regulating sharing of subscriptions) and make it a win-win for the platforms as well as the users. However we failed as there was no real value for the supply side. → Lesson for future Carlos: Whatever you build make sure it’s a win win for everyone.
- Too much dependency on few giant players → Over 80% of our business came from 4 subscription providers → Lesson for future Carlos: Make sure that your business does not entirely depend on 1 companies services.
- Too Opportunistic. Uncertainty ≠ No Investment → Due to the high dependency of the giant players, as well as operating under a potentially grey area of the platform’s terms & conditions, the whole business could potentially disappear in a matter of weeks, this makes investment risky and very uncertain. → Lesson for future Carlos: if you want to build a long term sustainable business, be wary of opportunistic business models (milking the cow works short term only).
- We should not have raised money → We raised funding when we shouldn’t have. Pulpo should never have been a VC business as it’s business model could not scale to a 1B$ business. It would be ideal business for an indie maker or a solo-entrepreneur. → Lesson for future Carlos: small businesses that that can be managed by 1-2 people are highly lucrative businesses 🏝