A couple of years ago, in November 2012, I was in São Paulo. I was trying a last shot at getting my startup of the ground.

I mostly networked and tried to connect with the local scene. One of the networking events I attended was the launch of a new startup accelerator, Acceleratech. I don’t remember much about the event but what I remember stuck because it felt really important. Advice to remember in the next endeavours.

At the event spoke one of the advisors that would work with the accelerator, Mr Malte Huffman, Co-Founder and CEO of Dafiti an e-commerce site for fashion.

Mr Malte spoke about the astonishing growth of Dafiti, they went from 4 guys in an hotel room to a hundreds of employes company in less than a year (something not that surprising knowing they came from the realms of Rocket Internet) but it wasn’t the growth that caught my atention was the next part of his presentation:

In a set of slides with really convincing graphs and numbers Dafiti’s CEO made his point clear: We are moving fast from the age of price to the age of convenience.

And what he meant by that was that the trend in consumption would place the big bucks not in the deals, discounts and group buying space but in the convenience experiences, seamless, no effort, right to your door space.

(I don’t recall his message word by word but I think I remember the main theme as he meant to communicate it, I’m sorry in advance if I missed the point)

For me it made sense, I always thought that people extremely undervalued their own time and that perception was shifting.

Costs are not only about price, unidimensional, there are a lot of other characteristics that convey cost such as time consumption, physical effort, mental effort … and altough we are in the midst of a financial crisis we see this perception sinking in into lot’s of people.

From that 2012 presentation up to now we saw the decline of brands like Groupon and Living Social and the emergence of Uber, food delivery services like foodpanda, on demand service providers like thumbtack, the awesome same day groceries delivery service instacart…

This move into the convenience space isn’t slowing and that’s one of the reasons why I think we are in such an exciting moment to work in technology related fields. There is still so much we can do by leveraging the technology we have today at our disposal.

Just as a finishing touch let me give you a couple more exemples of startups working in the convenience space that I think are just awesome:

Shyp — within the mobile app take a foto of what you want to ship, drop a pin where you want it to be delivered and that’s it, they pick it up, package it and deliver it. (awesome isn’t it?)

Luxe — using their mobile app drop a pin where you want to pass them your car and at what time. They will have a valet waiting for you, they will take the car, park it and when you want it back just say where and when.

Exciting times ☺