This Revolutionary App Will Either Destroy Amazon or Make It Unstoppable
One app to rule them all and in the darkness bind them
One app to rule them all and in the darkness bind them
Marketers work hard to drive people to purchase their products and services. They create content, drive eyeballs, offer free incentives, get people into their funnel, build trust over weeks, months, or years, and then when they finally encourage a customer to buy something… sellers experience shopping cart abandonment at the excruciating average rate of 77.13%.
Why?
Because checking out is complicated. Too many clicks. Too much information. Too many shipping options. Too much unfamiliar design. Oh, and my credit card is in the other room.
Do you know where this isn’t a problem?
Amazon.
Buying time-released Vitamin C takes one click.
Sending your dad a sous-vide machine for Father’s Day is just two clicks.
Pranking your best friend with a cookbook of semen-based recipes is totally worth the three clicks.
This is part of the reason why Jeff Bezos is ridiculously wealthy and now has the ability to destroy democracy.
It’s pure science, actually.
“Newton’s First Law of Motion states that an object in motion tends to stay in motion unless an external force acts upon it. Similarly, if the object is at rest, it will remain at rest unless an unbalanced force acts upon it.”
Never underestimate human laziness and our adverse reaction to newness. We like things exactly the way they are.
That’s why many people who discover an amazing product or service on your website are just as willing to hop over to Amazon and buy an inferior version. Conversely, I’d rather pay more for a product at my preferred shops than try somewhere new.
It’s just that little bit easier.
Introducing FAST
A self-taught engineer and serial entrepreneur Domm Holland had an idea. What if he could create a frictionless experience, a democratized one-click checkout solution that works across the entire internet?
One-click, no passwords, no billing details, no shipping address to fill out every time — just the world’s fastest checkout on every e-commerce site on the internet. They raised $2.5 million in November 2019, then closed a $20 million Series A round seven months later, led by e-payments giant Stripe.
One year after opening its doors, FAST is on track for a billion-dollar valuation.
What Happens From Here?
FAST sales skyrocket to the moon. Millions of content marketers, brands, and influencers make FAST their payment plug-in of choice. Sellers see their cart abandonment rates plummet, their conversion rates increase, their sales and profits boost through the roof, and their customers are delighted to finally support local businesses without having to actually lift a finger.
Suddenly, the entire world is a real competitor with giant monopolists like Amazon and Walmart.
Imagine buying scotch directly from your favorite family-run distillery.
Imagine buying a new pair of jeans from your cousin’s fashion startup.
Imagine ordering sourdough pizza from the new cloud kitchen in town.
Prices go down. Quality goes up. Monopolies shrink. The selection goes way up. Shopping becomes more local. FAST could democratize the global retail industry.
Or Amazon could acquire FAST for several billion dollars.
Or Amazon could create their own version and murder it overnight.
Instead of democratizing the global retail industry, they could control it.
We Need To Talk About “The Lord of the Rings”
J.R.R. Tolkien was a man concerned with tyranny. At the risk of enraging millions of Tolkieners, I’d venture to say that The Lord of the Rings is essentially a metaphor for World War II. (Mordor is Nazi Germany, Sauron is Hitler, the Nazgul are the S.S., Rohan is the Soviet Union, Gondor is Britain, Aragorn is Churchill, etc.)
But the ring is the thing. Whoever controls it controls everything else.
“One Ring to rule them all,
One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all
and in the darkness bind them.”
FAST Is Half the Ring
A global checkout solution was inevitable in the same way that a global currency is inevitable. Whoever wins the global checkout game will then likely win the global crypto game, too. The question is: Who gets to control this powerful united technology?
The benefits of controlling the internet’s checkout app are massive:
The Total Addressable Market for global e-commerce is likely already over $10 trillion, and the TAM for a global currency is many multiples larger.
The controlling company will reap hundreds of billions in profits over the years, which they can use to subvert democracy like Amazon is now doing.
They could advantage their own shipping services the way Amazon does with KDP and its in-house brands.
They could withhold customer data the way Amazon does with publishers, authors, and third-party retailers.
Without transactional transparency and democratic oversight, they will avoid and evade taxation the way Amazon does with its offshore tax-havens.
In all likelihood, Amazon will destroy or replace FAST. Either that or a group of investors will use it to break Zon’s hefty lead in e-commerce. Neither are good options for long-term widest-spread wellbeing.
To be clear, such an important and potentially dangerous product should be owned by everyone — not one giant company like Amazon, or an upstart like FAST, or even a group of investor companies like Stripe. It shouldn’t even be owned by the millions of e-storefronts that could soon join the platform, nor the customers who could transact trillions in business on it.
No, it needs to be owned by all 7.7 billion of us. With one ring this powerful, we all need an equal share. If we want to truly democratize the global marketplace, our global checkout platform needs to be the world’s first international public utility. Otherwise, we’re back to square one.
Amazon/Mordor wins everything, and everyone else loses.
Read Jared’s newest story:
Uber and Lyft Are Dead (They Just Don’t Know It Yet)
$200 million + Dark Marketing can buy you a law, but it can’t bury corruption