Website www.massdrop.com Founded 2012 | Launched July 2012 (2012-07) | |
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Created by Steve El-Hage
Nelson Wu | ||
Massdrop is an electronic commerce company and website established in 2012.
Contents
History
Founder Steve El-Hage had the idea for the website whilst studying bulk buying at the University of Toronto, leaving university to pursue it, with co-founder Nelson Wu joining before they launched the site in July 2012. In September 2014, by which time the company had grown to 20 employees, they raised $6.5 million in funding, bringing their total to $8 million. The site now has over 1 million monthly active users. In August 2015, the company raised an additional $40 million in Series B funding.
Services
Massdrop runs on what the owners call "community-driven commerce," where users discuss products they are interested in buying and the site's owners then negotiate and organise ordering the products, often obtaining group discounts in the process. Users typically create polls on the website's forums and once a few hundred people have expressed interest in the product, the company organises the order, sale, and distribution of it. The price of the item gets cheaper as more people commit to buying it.
In June 2014 the company had made successful deals for roughly one third of the requested products they attempted to acquire, and by August 2015 had over one million monthly users.