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Comment by dgritsko | Hacker News Reader

> "the opportunity to build a business that could compete with Big Pizza by uniting tens of thousands of mom-and-pop shops"

This summary of Slice's business feels like it ought to be generalizable to other industries. Anyone have other examples of companies trying to do something similar in different verticals? (s/Big Pizza/Big Floral, or something?)

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Why would a small business want to be part of some marketplace that just reduces their margins, commoditizes their business and and forces them into a race to the bottom?

Marketplaces are often a terrible deal for small businesses and small business owners know it, so there has to be some incredibly compelling benefit to being part of it for them to want to do it.

I've been exploring this for close to 10 years now and the biggest barrier is not lack of companies that can provide platforms to "unite" other verticals but rather an outright resistance to make what seems like big changes to those moms and pops businesses. It's quite difficult to find the right balance between the bare minimum each of these businesses needs to change/update to make it viable to create the platform and what seems like too tall of an order for them - instead they will just print more flyers, work double shifts, come up with nearly "at cost promos", etc.

Big Floral does this, for many years already: https://www.ftd.com/

For over 100 years apparently https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interflora

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