Hit by Covid in New York: Pulsd CEO Mareza Larizadeh (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me more about the genesis of the new company. 

Mareza Larizadeh: I’ve been coming to New York for a couple of decades now. When I graduated school, I spent a lot of time here for my job in early 2000’s. I was here a lot in the late 2000’s for my old company. I love the city and I wanted to do something that was based here. It was closer to London as well.

What I realized was that the city was getting less and less accessible to more and more people. What we wanted to create was some place where cool free stuff would be easily accessible, and if you want to have some paid experiences, they would be available for less than retail pricing. We call it the democratization of fun – making the city more accessible to people. 

Sramana Mitra: It was a consumer B2C play. 

Mareza Larizadeh: It evolved into a marketplace where the businesses on one side were looking for alternate revenue streams and on the other side, we had consumers – the great majority of whom are New Yorkers. 

Sramana Mitra: In any marketplace business model, you have to seed the marketplace for it to start rolling. Talk to me about how you seeded this marketplace.

Mareza Larizadeh: On the consumer side, the strategy was putting out great content, great free stuff, celebrity citing, and sample sales. Someone would be opening an ice cream shop, for example, and we would post about that because they were giving free ice cream for the weekend.

We got a lot of buzz early in 2013 which enabled us to start approaching merchants. It wasn’t like the merchants we work with now are the likes of Tao hospitality or the Bowery Hotel. We literally were selling two bagels and two coffees for $6 at the local roasting company.

It was proving the business model with the lower ticket price items but still in desirable neighborhoods and brands. It was seeing the traction and monetizing early. The goal of that was to see if we could bootstrap this into a business. The business just took a life of its own and it continued to grow.

My business partner, Vick and I, started to recruit. It’s a very simple business. It’s an old school internet newsletter-based business. We send one or two newsletters a day. It’s very local. The great majority of our growth is organic. We have over 300,000 New York City members. As you’re growing your user base, more businesses become interested.

A lot of the sales happened through word of mouth with the merchants we worked with before and people who we associated with moving from company to company. We have a sales team as well.

The business has gone to where it is about 40% dine restaurants, 40% is event-based, 10% stars, and 10% fitness. There are other verticals and delivery, but the great majority of what we do is getting people out there socializing and experiencing the city for less than what they would pay if they were to do it on their own. 

This segment is part 4 in the series : Hit by Covid in New York: Pulsd CEO Mareza Larizadeh
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