Carousell’s next big goal: to help you sell a product in 3 seconds

Photo credit: Tech in Asia.

Singapore-headquartered startup Carousell became one of Asia’s leading mobile marketplaces with a simple premise: what if you reinvent Craigslist for smartphones?

That thought resulted in an app that lets users sell items by simply snapping a photo and filling out several fields.

Now, Carousell thinks it can become the world’s largest classifieds company in a decade. But it’ll need a quantum leap to do that.

“Can we, now having five years of experience, data, and learnings, create the next evolution of classifieds? Can we make selling a three-second process – snap a photo and that’s it?” ponders Quek Siu Rui, Carousell’s CEO and co-founder, at Tech in Asia Singapore 2017.

With the help of AI

While Carousell has just started pursuing this vision, Quek sketches out how he hopes to get there.

Machine vision – the ability for computers to see and recognize objects like humans do – will give Carousell the ability to match a photo uploaded by a user to its database of items.

Combine this with its pricing data from tens of millions of transactions, and the app could recommend to users what price to set for a product.

Photo credit: Carousell.

“Most people tend to be very optimistic, they believe their item has sentimental value and they price it too high, and they don’t get a good experience,” says Quek.

With the seller’s experience the primary focus of Carousell, making them happy is the priority. And that means helping them sell faster.

Fast growth

The scrappy three-person team launched Carousell in 2012 and has since grown to 140 employees. It listed 57 million products and expanded to seven countries in 2016.

It also hired so-called “grown-ups” – senior executives with deep operational experience – to run various internal functions.