Thad Beversdorf is taking on Wall Street.
The former investment banker launched a new startup called Spendindie at SXSW this week. It aims to be a platform for tens of thousands of independent businesses to sell goods in an easy-to-use way that rewards fans of local businesses for recommending their favorite shops to be featured on Spendindie.
It's not ETSY, which features largely independent artisans. Instead, it's only for U.S. businesses with a tax ID number that are not publicly-traded. It's also not Amazon, which provides tons of products from the world's biggest businesses. It's also not about buying products from your hometown.
Instead, Beversdorf describes Spendindie as a tech approach to solving the problem of people spending so much of their income on heavily marketed goods from publicly-traded companies that are less likely to return much of their profits to their hometowns.
“The idea is that consumer spending makes up 70 percent of the economy," he said. "If we all sit around and complain about the economy… not realizing that we are 70 percent of the economy and that if we don’t like the way the economy is going what we really need to do is change how we spend.”
Beversdorf, who wrote about economics after years at investment banks, started the project as the nonprofit Institute for Sensible Economics, which studied how businesses return profits to local economies. He learned that consumers need more ways to decide whether to spend with a corporate entity or independent business.
Spendindie has about 50 merchants currently, but that's before it has started any significant marketing. The company has a staff of about 15 people. It has raised some money, but Beversdorf declined to share numbers or names of investors.
By creating a common platform that's easy to use, he believes more people will buy from independent businesses that spend more of their profits in local markets. When people find goods at local businesses, Spendindie will encourage them to take a photo and upload it to the app or site. Things that get a lot of likes will move to the marketplace. Then, each time that item sells, the person who suggested it and uploaded the image gets a cut of the sale. It's a twist on affiliate marketing, essentially.
“We’re asking people to create value to us and when they do we want to give some of that back," he said. “We believe this is really going to shake things up."
Spendindie is at the SXSW Marketplace all week. No badge required.
