Anyyogi, kawaloo and LogCorp: launching platform start-ups
Three German start-ups show three ways to solve a platform’s chicken-and-egg problem.
- Sector
- Digital platforms (fitness, storage, courier logistics)
- Source
- Digital Entrepreneurship case collection, chapter by Göcke and Meier (2021)
The case in brief
Anyyogi connects yoga teachers, students and spaces where classes can take place. Its founder, Natalie Pompe, a yoga teacher, saw that independent teachers struggle to find rooms and students, while studios take a large share of revenue. Anyyogi started from an existing community of selected teachers to guarantee quality. In mid-2019 the founder was still managing many classes herself, and she turned what she learned into an automated platform.
kawaloo, founded in 2019 as an “Airbnb for storage space”, lets people rent out garage or basement space to others nearby who need storage. The bootstrapped founders surveyed both landlords and tenants, tested mock-ups, and assembled their first platform from ready-made components such as a website builder and a payment solution. They then contacted users of competing platforms to convert them into early evangelists.
LogCorp (the case’s name for the start-up), founded in 2019 and mainly active in Berlin, is an “Uber for courier services” focused on business customers. After finding that pure peer-to-peer models had failed, it first secured supply through professional driver agencies. It validated demand through interviews and Google AdWords landing-page tests, and digitised drivers’ navigation, invoicing and paperwork.
Key facts
- Anyyogi opportunity spotted
- 2018
- kawaloo founded
- 2019 (bootstrapped)
- LogCorp founded
- 2019, mainly active in Berlin
- Launch approaches named by the authors
- Immersion (Anyyogi), piggybacking (kawaloo), anticipation (LogCorp)
Analysis through module theory
Platform business model characteristics (Göcke and Meier, 2021)
Each start-up has to win at least two sides (multi-sidedness) and reach a critical mass before network effects help it (chicken-and-egg). Each picked a different side to secure first: Anyyogi the teachers, kawaloo the storage suppliers, LogCorp the drivers.
Feasibility analysis (Week 5)
All three tested their riskiest assumptions cheaply (interviews, surveys, mock-ups, landing pages) before building full software. This is feasibility analysis in small, repeated steps, and it avoids premature scaling, which the case collection names as a major cause of start-up failure.
Business model innovation (Week 1)
kawaloo and LogCorp copy a proven platform logic (Airbnb, Uber) into a new niche, and Anyyogi applies platform logic to yoga classes. That is business model innovation applied to a new market, which you would usually justify as incremental rather than radical.
Discussion questions
- 1.Which side of the platform did each founder secure first, and why?
- 2.What are the risks of immersion, anticipation and piggybacking?
- 3.If one of these start-ups expanded to a new country, which PESTEL factor would most affect its supply side?
Takeaways
- Start with one core transaction and make it work before adding features.
- Validate demand on both sides, not only the customer side.
- Manual work early on (“doing things that don’t scale”) buys learning.