In today’s installment of “the future is 100% subscription-based,” Toronto-based startup Rover is testing out subscriptions for its parking marketplace. Rover lets users list their unused parking spots for on-demand rental by others on the service, giving them a passive way to earn some income while hopefully increasing the utilization rate of parking spaces at the same time.

Rover has offered the spots on their platform on a per-use, on-demand basis before now, but it’s going to pilot a monthly subscription starting this summer, with a planned test phase extending into early fall. The company says it’s going to try out a few different versions of a monthly sub, including potential perks like a percentage discount versus individual on-demand parking charges, advanced booking and premium customer service.

Pricing should be in the ballpark of between $5 and $15 Canadian depending on the features you’re willing to pay for, and this should inform eventual subscription price points for the startup’s services should they move beyond this pilot phase. Rover currently offers spots in Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa, with plans to expand to Canada’s west coast and eventually California in the future.

Uber recently debuted a subscription pilot that rolls in its ride-hailing, Eats, bikes and scooter rental services, and Rover cites this move as an example of the move to subscriptions generally in the on-demand space. Subscriptions are a great way for consumers to easily take care of known recurring costs, but the rise of this business model across a range of industries will definitely test the limits of consumer willingness to trade cost for convenience.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Peer-to-peer parking marketplace Rover tests monthly subscriptions

There’s a gap forming in Latin America between the growing digital food delivery market and the number of businesses in the region that are actually online. 

Food delivery startups continue to replicate and expand throughout the region, and VCs are channeling mega rounds into them with the hope of capitalizing on consumer online buying trends within growing digital populations.

VCs from all over the world have collectively invested billions into food delivery in the Latin American region. One of the largest rounds to date in Latin American startup history is Movile’s $400 million raise for Brazilian delivery business iFood. SoftBank recently confirmed a $1 billion investment into Colombia’s Rappi in March. 

As big checks, new business models and consolidation mold a new on-demand landscape in Latin America, smaller players are coming in to supplement existing marketplaces like Rappi and iFood.

Dataplor founder and CEO Geoffrey Michener saw an opportunity to bring more vendors online. That’s why he invented Dataplor, a platform that indexes micro businesses in emerging markets. Now, Dataplor has raised a third round of seed capital, bringing the company’s total raised to $2 million. Quest Venture Partners led the company’s most recent funding, along with participation from ffVC, Magma Partners, Sidekick Fund and the Blue Startups accelerator. 

What does Dataplor actually do? The 13-person company created a platform that recruits, trains and manages what has grown to more than 100,000 independent contractors — or what Dataplor calls Explorers.

Explorers are tasked with feet-on-the-street visits to businesses to capture information like latitude and longitude points, photos, hours of operation, owners’ names and contact info, and whether or not a business accepts credit cards. Dataplor then licenses that data to companies like American Express, iZettle and PayPal. Dataplor also works within a joint partnership to digitize Mexico with Google and Virket. 

Michener says that 80% of Mexican businesses don’t have any digital footprint, and less than 5% of businesses have a website. This impacts the reach of what Google can index, as well as from where companies like iFood subsidiaries or Rappi can deliver.

Dataplor, founded in 2016, says it’s responsible for getting 150,000 businesses onto Google in its three years of operation. Michener says Dataplor pays Explorers above-market wages, and is careful about “not using the Uber model to drive down the cost of paying contractors.”

Michener likes to think of his business model as a trifecta of helping small businesses get onto Google for free, creating part-time opportunities for a growing workforce in LatAm and using its tech to help Google and Uber become better populated with accurate info in geos that might be more difficult for a foreign company to access.

Take Mexico for example. Michener says that 80% of Mexican businesses don’t have any digital footprint, and less than 5% of businesses have a website. This impacts the reach of what Google can index, as well as from where companies like iFood or Rappi can deliver. Basically, offline businesses are missing out on new digital distribution opportunities and, therefore, big cash.

In the United States and Europe, companies like Google and Uber scrape data from online directories in order to power their platforms. But this process works differently in Latin America. A small business’ chance of showing up in Google’s index is a lot slimmer, because most businesses are still offline in growing economies. Dataplor first launched in Mexico and bootstrapped its way into Brazil — an aggressive move for a young company due to Brazil’s competitive startup scene and Spanish-Portuguese language barriers. Dataplor says it will expand to Chile, Peru and Colombia in 2019.

Michener tested the minimum viable product by literally going on Craigslist Mexico City and sending money over PayPal to people willing to go out and gather data about small businesses. Turns out there was some traction.

What happens when all the businesses in Latin America are online? Dataplor plans to make money by licensing its data; but there’s another component to the equation. Dataplor is building a relationship with these businesses. Google will pay to know when a menu changes, hours of operation shift or a restaurant goes out of business. 

Dataplor’s tech stack could pique interest for any company that wants a hand in the digitization of growing markets. Now that they’ve built a playbook for Explorer logistics, that operational piece of their business may be interesting to companies like Google, Apple and Uber too. 

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Dataplor raises M to digitize small businesses in Latin America

DoorDash CEO Tony Xu announced via Twitter that the company will be changing its model for compensating Dashers (a.k.a. DoorDash drivers and other delivery people).

The company faced criticism this year for its payment policies. Under the current system, a Dasher’s payment consists of a $1 base from DoorDash, the customer’s tip and — when the first two items fall below the guaranteed minimum — an additional payment boost from DoorDash.

In other words, although DoorDash insists that Dashers get to keep 100% of their tips, it starts to look like those tips are being used to subsidize payments that would otherwise come from DoorDash. (Instacart has been criticized and sued for similar practices, leading to a CEO apology and policy changes.)

Xu has defended this approach in the past. For example, when the company announced raising a $400 million round shortly after the controversy broke, he said the system was tested “not in a quarter, not in a month, but tested for months” before being implemented in 2017.

However, the issue didn’t go away. Last month, DoorDash tried to address it — not by changing the system, but by offering more transparency.

In his recent tweets, Xu insisted that the company designed the system “to prioritize transparency, consistency of earnings, and to ensure all customers get their food as fast as possible.” However, he acknowledged that DoorDash “didn’t strike the right balance.”

“We thought we were doing the right thing by making Dashers whole when a customer left no tip,” he said. “What we missed was that some customers who did tip would feel like their tip did not matter.”

So Xu said DoorDash will be changing that model. The company isn’t releasing all the details yet, but the key change is that “Dashers’ earnings will increase by the exact amount a customer tips on every order.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | DoorDash will change controversial tipping model

Fintech startup Revolut announced changes to its business accounts this week. The good news is that if you were thinking about trying Revolut for your business needs, it’s now cheaper to get started. But there are some limits.

While Revolut is better known for its regular consumer accounts that let you receive, send and spend money all around the world, the company has been offering launched business accounts for a couple of years.

The main advantage of Revolut for Business is that you can hold multiple currencies. If you work with clients or suppliers in other countries, you can exchange money and send it to your partners directly from Revolut’s interface.

The company also lets you issue prepaid corporate cards and track expenses. Revolut for Business also has an API so you can automate payments and connect with third-party services, such as Xero, Slack and Zapier.

None of this is changing today. Revolut is mostly tweaking the pricing structure.

Previously, you had to pay £25 per month to access the service with a £100,000 top-up limit per month. Bigger companies had to pay more to raise that ceiling.

Now, Revolut is moving a bit more toward a software-as-a-service approach. Instead of making you pay more to receive and hold more money, you pay more as your team gets bigger and you use Revolut for Business more intensively.

The basic plan is free with two team members, five free local transfers per month and 0.4% in foreign exchange fees. If you want to add more team members or initiate more transfers, you pay some small fees.

If you were paying £25 before, you can now top up as much money as you want in your Revolut account, but there are some limits when it comes to team members (10), local transfers (100 per month) and international transfers (10 per month, interbank exchange rate up to £10,000).

Once again, going over the limits doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to change to a new plan. You’ll pay £0.20 per extra local transfer, £3 per extra international transfer, etc.

Here’s a full breakdown of the new plans:

If you’re a freelancer, there’s now a free plan. You’ll pay 0.4% on foreign exchange and £3 per international transfer, but there’s no top-up limit anymore.

Similarly, the old £7 plan for freelancers has been replaced by a new £7 plan that removes the limit on inbound transfers but adds some limits on transfers.

It’s good news if you’re a small customer. But if you vastly exceed the transfer limit in one of the categories, you might pay more than before. With this change, the company wanted to make Revolut for Business more accessible instead of making small customers subsidize bigger customers with high entry pricing.

Existing customers can switch to a new plan starting today. Revolut plans to switch everyone to the new plans on October 1st, 2019.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Revolut tweaks business accounts with new pricing structure