Last week, Amazon bought iRobot, the company that makes Roomba, the robot vacuum cleaner, for $1.7b. Why? Yes, their 'Rosie from the Jetsons' has AI and is in your home (which is where Amazon wants to be), but the reason Amazon wants it is because customers want it. Which leads us to ask: Why do customers want Roomba? Because it does something that humans find annoying and hate doing: cleaning. Roomba has spotted the value that robots bring to the world and it's not simply being cool, shiny, and futuristic. Successful robots do what humans don’t want to do. Roomba’s next product, called Tertill, is a weeding robot for your backyard. Want to know what its third product will do? Just imagine what chores you task your kids with.
How much do humans hate doing annoying things like cleaning? iRobot has sold more than 40 million units, and last year had revenue of $1.5b. Ben Cohen, in his The Wall St. Journal article covering the Amazon acquisition, states:
“Robots provide the most value to people by doing things that we don’t want to do. Like tidying up."
I’d like to adapt this insight and apply it to our industry: Websites provide the most value to businesses by doing things that staff doesn’t want to do. Like updating products.
Why does this matter? Because e-commerce sales—and e-commerce costs—are growing. Each day, more and more people shop online. Yes, we saw a slight downturn in total online sales since the peak of the pandemic, but we saw a forecast of what is to come. Shoppers expect more and more items to be available on your website. This requires more and more cleaning and tidying up of websites. Stores are buried under an avalanche of Excel files with products to import. They are stuck with expensive labor, higher rents, and increasing health care costs. What is a way out from these costs? Answer: robots. They need robots, aka software, to update their website. They need: a Roomba for their website.
Bridge has created the 'Roomba of websites.' Our Product Syncing software cleans up our clients' websites and makes them tidy. Our Product Syncing service updates 64,000 products across 1,000 retailers' sites. That’s 1,000 stores that don’t have to update 64,000 product prices, pictures, and dimensions. Updating this information sucks. It’s annoying, time-consuming, and costly. People hate spending any more time in front of their computers than they have to.
Just how much time do we save people in front of a computer? We have 6,571 syncs between retailers and brands. If the average brand has 500 products, that’s 3,285,000 products we’re updating each day (6,571 x 500) . If a store were to just update a product twice a year, and it took them just 15 minutes each time, we're saving our industry 1,642,500 hours 'cleaning their website.' That’s 68,437 days or 187 years! In addition to our Product Syncing service, we also keep our clients' sites clean by offering regular feature updates, security updates, and design improvements. One doesn’t have to update their Bridge software, or pay for the next version. It’s all included instantly. Bridge is always on, up-to-date, and ready for our 1,060 retailers and 111 brands.
How can we tell that this helps? Stores that use our service report selling 18% more, 99.3% of businesses that use our service continue to use it the following month, and customers have given our stores 24,300 reviews with 5 stars. A normal business doubles in size every 7 years. Bridge is doubling its client base every three years.
There is no other software that does what we do with such ease. Do other software companies sell ‘vacuums' that help you get ‘clean data'? Sure. But no other company does it instantly with no costly technical setup. It's as if other companies ask you to buy a cleaning company truck and hire people to work it— and Bridge just drops off a Roomba. Which would you choose? Anyone that is not using our software is simply paying too much and spending too much time.
Often, a big idea percolates for years before becoming, well, big. It’s not an overnight success. Joe Jones, the founder of iRobot, invented the Roomba 10 years before it launched because he hated cleaning his MIT dorm. Then, it took 10 years to come to fruition. I created Bridge’s Product Syncing Service because I hated updating products for my clients. It then took us years to have the solution take shape. As a general rule, a founder often has two pieces of ammunition: time or money. One can invent something way before someone else does, tweak it over time, get it right. Or, in the absence of time, one can throw money at the idea and skip the years of trial and error. (This is much riskier.) Joe and I did the former route.
Bridge, like Roomba, does the work that others don’t want to do. We do the annoying work of price and product updates. Bridge doesn’t call in sick or take a long lunch break.
iRobot is using robots to tackle dull and dirty jobs. Bridge will do the same. We’ll create software (aka robots) to do what retailers, brands, and reps do not want to do, and make them happier. Store owners hate dealing with many different systems, including a POS system, a website, and various marketplaces. What if a company offers of all those in one service?
Thank you for helping us save our industry 1,642,500 hours of painful website upkeep. We’re keeping our members' sites clean and our industry healthy. We suck—the dull and boring out of website maintenance. That feels good and doesn’t suck.