Every month we feature members from the Everything Marketplaces community to help highlight their story, marketplace journey, and share more about what's ahead. In this member feature we highlight Chen Li, Founder & CEO of Palmstreet. Palmstreet is a live shopping app for plants, which recently crossed 500,000+ orders and is quickly scaling as a marketplace.
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So what’s your background briefly and what led to the idea for starting Palmstreet?

I was part of the first batch of iOS developers and created a few popular apps while working on my PhD. I dropped out and moved to the Bay Area, where I worked at Apple, Instagram, and  then Firework (a TikTok competitor in 2018). I found that I really loved building products that connect people. This and my plant hobby are what led me to starting Palmstreet (originally named Plant Story). The idea was originally a plant identification app, but we pivoted to a live shopping app. We realized there was a need for a new format with commerce and community engagement with not just identifying rare plants, but buying them.

What were some of the first steps you took to start Palmstreet? What were some of the biggest challenges you faced?‍‍‍

We first started by building a plant identification app. We had initial traction that was very promising, with around 5,000 organic downloads per day, with a ~5%+ subscription rate. We thought it would be a logical extension to become the social and e-commerce app for plants. We pivoted into a few different plant related directions with water reminders, built a social feed, and photo-based plant marketplace to start. This took us over two years, but unfortunately didn’t lead us anywhere. We were able to get a good amount of organic downloads, built initial ARR, and hired a small team, but we still struggled to find product-market fit (PMF), until we pivoted to live commerce as a new way for people to buy rare plants. 
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What’s the problem that you’re solving for and how has building Palmstreet as a marketplace proven to be a great solution?‍

The previous experience when buying rare plants online was a sub-par experience that often resulted in items being misrepresented, often scams, and was overall a bad experience. We’re building Palmstreet to help solve these problems for consumers. We also set out to create a shopping experience that’s secure, fun, and really resonates with the plant community. It turns out that live shopping is the best solution, since sellers can educate, inform, and even entertain buyers. This also results in buyers being able to see the exact item in a livestream, ask questions, and get immediate answers. We’ve built Palmstreet as a marketplace to help solve these problems, while also providing the best product experience for plant enthusiasts.
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How have you approached solving the cold start problem with Palmstreet as a marketplace? Are there any unique challenges or even insights you’ve learned from the initial stages?‍

We had a large user base from our original plant identification app, but when we relaunched with live selling (after the pivot) we started by being the first livestream seller on our platform. We had our head of social be the seller and she cold-started Palmstreet’s supply side by buying plants from her local nurseries, then reselling them on live streams. Jumping over to the demand side, we leveraged years of building up our social media, Facebook Group for our plant community, and users for the plant identification app to help jumpstart demand and bring over buyers. 
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What have been some of your biggest learnings so far?

There have been many learnings along the way, but the following immediately come to mind:

1. You need to build something that’s 10x better than any existing solution for your target market and audience. Users (in consumer) will not want to use anything that might be only marginally better.
2. You really have to be building, moving forward, and progressing to break through. I’ve also found that there’s a spirit that comes with doing this as a founder and learning that it’s a journey that doesn’t slow down or stop.
3. Related to the above, I’ve found that asking the right questions to the right people has been key. This has helped us avoid common mistakes, solve problems, and build a better business with Palmstreet. An example of this has been the Everything Marketplaces community, where we’ve been able to get support from the beginning, connect with experts on topics like risk, growth strategies, and more.
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Can you give us an idea of the scale you’re at today? Also, how big does Palmstreet become?

We just crossed 500,000 orders on Palmstreet. This didn’t happen overnight and took us almost four years, we pivoted multiple times (in the plant industry), and faced constant rejection from potential sellers. We also had many "no’s" from investors when fundraising along the way.

Our mission is to become the online main street of the world, where people both engage and have fun with the app daily, and shop for unique products from sellers who handmade them. It will be sharply different from most existing e-commerce platforms that focus on pricing. We will need to train a new generation of sellers who market through live streams instead of Instagram, who engage with customers in real-time instead of asynchronously. And we will need to streamline the whole logistical process around live shopping, to enable fast shipping on custom orders, and be efficient in processing batched live stream orders.
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What’s exciting and ahead for Palmstreet that you can share with us? ‍

We just launched Purge, which is another engagement shopping format we’re testing. This is less pressured, but also enables a strong communication between the sellers and the buyers. We are making bets on the future of commerce to be engaging, so Purge is a potential path for this. Our mission is to make commerce more engaging and connected through community, so you can expect us to be leading the way with Palmstreet innovating around this. We have a few other big announcements that we’ll be sharing soon, so follow along!

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Connect with Chen in the Everything Marketplaces community. ‍‍