TrovaPage Seeks To Make Yoga Teachers, Musicians, Math Tutors Ecommerce Entrepreneurs

Yoga teacher Apsara Vydyula said she has been able to offer her classes to customers around the … [+] world using the online marketplace TrovaPage.

TrovaPage, an online marketplace that announced its public launch last week, wants to make it easier for yoga instructors, piano teachers, math tutors, and other creators and service providers to be ecommerce entrepreneurs.

Jingming Li, a former Alibaba

BABA
employee and former chief technology officer of Alipay, co-founded TrovaPage with Ann Sun, former head of Alipay merchant technology and international product.

TrovaPage is aiming to do for the experience economy what Shopify did for sellers of physical goods like sneakers or skateboards, by giving artists and teachers the tools needed to connect with customers online.

Li also sees the potential for TrovaPage to help small businesses such as auto repair shops or restaurants to reach customers through video presentations, live-streaming, and online appointment booking.

TrovaPage faces big competition in the space. Social media giants Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok are adding new ways for small businesses to sell on their platforms; marketplaces like eBay

EBAY
and Etsy are ramping up their outreach to small businesses; and Amazon

AMZN
has launched livestream selling with AmazonLive. While those platforms primarily serve sellers of physical goods, it is inevitable that they also will try to corner the market for service providers.

But TrovaPage is launching at a time of big opportunity. Freelancer and remote work platforms Fivver and Upwork

UPWK
saw record growth in 2020. Fiver is projecting 46-50% revenue growth in 2021, and Upwork reported revenue growth of 24% in 2020. Those platforms are heavily focused on tech workers and software engineers, and freelancers with skills like editing or design typically needed by business clients. Their fortunes soared during the pandemic as more companies, and workers, shifted to remote, online work.

TrovaPage is tapping into that trend, as yoga teachers, piano teachers, dance instructors, and tutors around the world have replaced in-person teaching with online sessions.

TrovaPage, Li said, is different from the competition because it gives teachers, artists, and other small businesses all of the tech tools needed to run an ecommerce business, including letting them collect data they can use to market to customers and expand their businesses.

His goal in founding TrovaPage, Li said, was to create a platform that creative entrepreneurs could use to build careers.

“We want to simplify the experience and make it so simple on both sides – you don’t have to build your own website – so that that creators can concentrate on their talent,” he said.

TrovaPage co-founder JingMing Li says his goal is to give creative entrepreneurs and small … [+] businesses a way to control their digital destiny.

Li said he developed the concept for TrovaPage after seeing seeing how a technology platform like Alibaba was able to help people grow their small businesses and control their own lives. TrovaPage has been operating in test mode for the past year. The platform currently has about 6,000 users, Li said. It has received pre-seed funding from an undisclosed corporate backer.

TrovaPage says it offers the following advantages to creative entrepreneurs:

TrovaPage charges sellers a 10% commission, and a 59 cent processing fee per transaction. It waives the commission, and lowers the processing fee to 29 cents for the first six months a seller is on the platform, to allow them to grow their business, Li said.

Apsara Vydyula, a yoga teacher in Chennai, India, said her TrovaPage over the past year has enabled her to stay in business as the pandemic made it impossible to offer in-person classes.

Vydyula said she spread the word about her TrovaPage classes through social media. She typically draws at least a dozen customers for each of her twice-weekly yoga sessions. She has connected with new students from all over the world, with most of the customers coming from the United States and India.

“It definitely has worked for me, especially with Covid and the current situation, so I’m really glad I got on it,” she said.

The name, TrovaPage, Li said, comes from the Italian word for find, trova. It has two meanings on the platform, Li said.

“For creators this is a platform for them to seek their own passion, to be able to make their own living,” he said. “For the consumer side, it means that I can actually find all kinds of services and authentic experiences wherever I am.”