The Problem
Prices are the most fundamental drivers in commerce. Yet Prices are usually ‘guessed’ by Sellers (for instance by adding a markup over cost), and therefore far from perfect, both for Buyers and for Sellers. Sometimes Prices are determined by Haggling or Auctions. In theory, those are very efficient methods for determining Prices. But in practice, they’re time-consuming, complex, and frustrating.
The Solution
In 1978, airlines invented new techniques for pricing their products, called ‘Revenue Management’. It changed their business forever. Consumers may probably dislike the plane tickets jumping by several hundred dollars overnight. However, they mostly enjoy being able to fly for much, much cheaper prices, a direct consequence of Revenue Management! As for the airlines, it increased their revenue very significantly...
Amazingly, a good Pricing is not a zero-sum game: it can benefit both Buyers and Sellers. Since then, this ‘science of Pricing’ has been adopted by hotels, car rentals, utility, toll roads, manufacturing, retail chains... Soon the price of Orange juices will be dynamic, as shown by supermarket moving to electronic price tags. But until now, Scientific Pricing was complex, costly, and reserved to Fortune 500 companies.
valu valu democratizes efficient and automatic pricing. From now on, everybody can benefit from dynamic pricing science as if they were multi-billion dollar corporations...
The Management & Advisors
ValuValu is the brainchild of French serial entrepreneurs Emmanuel Marot and Bruno Botvinik. A longtime working duo, both moved to Seattle after selling their last venture to Microsoft corp.
Emmanuel is the CEO. On top of the sales and company management, he is responsible for imagining the User Experience and designing the Pricing Engine.
Bruno is the CTO. He has the not-so-trivial task of making valu valu a reality, with a fast, secure, agreeable, scalable, and reliable website. Plus everything in-between.
Garrett van Ryzin is the 'Pricing' advisor. A leading authority on Revenue Management, Ph.D. MIT and chaired professor at Columbia University, he brings 20 years of experience as researcher, consultant and industry advisor to help ‘democratize’ the science of Pricing.
The Idea
In Europe, kids’ bikes have hand brakes. Not in the US, where back-pedaling is more popular. Emmanuel’s son discovered it the hard way, while crashing in a wall 50 yards after leaving the bicycle shop. While only his pride suffered, the bike remained unused ever since. So Emmanuel decided to sell it on Craigslist. First week, $79, not one call. Second week, $69, not one call. Several weeks later, he decided to put it down to $59. He got three calls within 15 minutes, and the bike was gone in the afternoon. From then, Emmanuel and Bruno looked for a better way to monitor, determine and forecast prices...
The Technology
Valu Valu Pricing Engine is based on a proprietary, sophisticated and patent pending Algorithm (yes, all this). Thanks to the use of Artificial Intelligence, the Engine continuously ‘learns’ what are the best Prices for given market conditions and can modify its own calculation methods. It can also self-correct its prediction methods.
Extensive usage of statistical methods and Bayesian calculations allows valu valu to automatically filter out irrelevant catalog entries and keep only reliable, pertinent Pricing information.