Episode 250: Connect the Dots

Yeah, I think in 2018, when the idea came about, It was such a new concept.

Even even today, when I talk about Faven, which is the name of the company, people say, oh, I've never heard of anyone doing that, which is wild to me because when I talk about it, they're like, that is such a great idea.

Right.

And then you get around to actually building out the business, which is a marketplace, meaning it's, you know, it's like Uber, Airbnb, Uber.

Um, there's one person who needs space, the other who has space and we match them.

Um, marketplaces are incredibly difficult to build.

And that's usually because one side gets it immediately while the other side takes a lot longer to catch on.

Um, and so for me, because I was a vendor, I knew how to speak the vendor language.

I knew how to connect with them and show them like, this is what we're doing.

They were so excited.

I never had to spend a single dollar on marketing because The concept just was so good that they would tell each other about what it was.

Oh, you need to sign up on Fabin because you're doing markets and blah, blah, blah.

And they have space.

They're helping us find space for doing pop-ups.

You know, on the other side, it's people who have space or, you know, whether it's retail space.

I work with a lot of hotels, cafes, really anybody who has this extra space that's not being used.

getting them to think about a term that I've coined as Rev Pass is difficult for them.

And Rev Pass just stands for revenue per available square foot.

The F is silent.

It's something that's a lot easier to say than trying to pronounce the F.

So revenue per available square footage is something that people aren't thinking about and which is part of the problem why the small businesses who are in these retail spaces end up having to shut down because they're looking at it as like, oh my God, it's such a dream to open a store.

Is it though, once they get in there, they're realizing, oh, this is a lot more work than I thought.

I'm not bringing in as many customers as I had hoped to.

The foot traffic isn't there.

What do we need to do to bring people into the space more frequently? And I think the thing is, is that shared space mentality has never really been a part of the equation until now, until we come in and we say, how do we, you know, By furcade, I don't know how to say that, but like chop up the space in a way that you're not just having one business owner run the whole thing, but there's multiple small business owners in different parts and pieces of the different space.