When I was 24-years old, a market research company sent me to Philadelphia to survey potential users about a new offering from General Electric Finance. Your first question may be: "Wait, Jason was once 24?" Your second may be: "GE had a consumer finance arm?" Yes, and yes. GE was once a conglomerate with its hands in many industries, from television to nuclear reactors to jet engines. GE, like Toshiba and Johnson & Johnson, has since shrunk. But the era of the conglomerate is not over: it’s just been replaced by tech giants, suggests Christopher Simms in the past weekend’s WSJ. We now have Amazon, Facebook (…er, “Meta"), Microsoft, Alphabet, and Apple. They offer a mix of hardware, software, and services that come inextricably bundled together. Mr. Simms suggests the new titans will have a successful reign because of the network effect, which states that each additional customer adds greater value than the previous one. With this view, the value of a network increases exponentially with each additional user. To conceptualize this visually: think of a hockey stick graph. That’s great for a business. (…but may be dangerous for society? See: Facebook.)
Bridge is a network with nearly 1,500 active businesses sharing 60k products. A key strength under the hood is all the bindings between members. For example, between retailers and brands, there are: 6,288 product-syncing connections. Between reps and brands: 998. The more connections, the stickier our network gets and the more value we can derive. What value? When a member joins Bridge, much like when they get an Amazon account, we can offer a variety of services from Bridge Store to wholesale ordering to product syncing. Even if the store subscribes to a free plan, brands may pay us to advertise to the store via the product syncing service.
GE couldn’t easily sell television advertising to the same customer that was buying a nuclear power plant, and each additional advertiser didn’t boost its power division. Yet, with Bridge each customer often does increase the collaboration between members and potential customer base for most services.
In the future, we want to offer more services via our platform. Let’s get our platforms on and enjoy the walk.