The Road to $1 Billion: CTXMarket.com's Plan to Multiply the Value of Your Investment

As you consider whether or not to take an ownership stake in CTXMarket.com, it’s important for us to share how the business works, from a financial standpoint, and how we plan to multiply the value of your investment. 

The Goal: a $1,000,000,000 Initial Public Offering (IPO) 

Our ultimate goal is to create a billion-dollar Internet company that serves Central Texas. We believe this is a reasonable and achievable goal. 

 

Before you read any further though, we need to remind you that:

• We can’t guarantee success
• Investing in startups is risky
• It’s possible that your investment loses money
  

Having said that, our founders, early investors, and staff have put time and money into CTXMarket.com and we’re going to do everything in our power to make CTXMarket.com a thriving and valuable business.

One of the most important figures for you to know is $16.1 billion every year--the size of the opportunity (in terms of money) that’s here in Central Texas for a company like ours that’s in the E-commerce business.[1] The online economy is massive and growing very quickly, and every year, Central Texans will spend tens of billions of dollars online.

 

Simply, the CTXMarket.com goal is to facilitate about 2.2% of those transactions (roughly $365 million dollars worth of transactions) every year. When we achieve that, we believe that CTXMarket.com will be worth a billion dollars or more and that the early investors in the platform may be able to receive many times their original investment in return.

Here’s a hypothetical example of how this may work for an early CTXMarket.com investor:

1. You invest $10,000 in CTXMarket.com when CTXMarket.com is valued at $10 million. This gives you a .1% ownership stake in CTXMarket.com.
2. CTXMarket.com grows over the next 5 years and conducts an IPO at a $1 billion valuation.
3. Your .1% ownership in CTXMarket.com would now be worth $1 million, a profit of $990,000

How CTXMarket.com Generates Revenue 

We have a simple revenue model and multiple revenue streams we’re looking to grow.

5% Fee on Sales We Generate  

CTXMarket.com neither charges sellers a monthly fee nor any setup fees. We only make money when we send sellers customers. 

 

There are two types of sales on CTXMarket.com:

• Sales generated directly by sellers (for example, when a seller sends a customer a link to one of their listings)
• General sales  

Any time a seller makes their own sale, they keep 100% of the money from the transaction. However, the majority of sales made on CTXMarket.com are made as “general sales,” which means that CTXMarket.com takes a 5% commission[2]. Here’s an example:

1. Someone finds out about CTXMarket.com and creates an account
2. When browsing the marketplace, they discover a local seller and follow them
3. Next time they visit CTXMarket.com, our algorithm shows them a new listing from the seller they follow, and they buy it (let’s say it costs $50)
4. CTXMarket.com helped generate the sale, so we take a 5% commission ($2.50)
   

This is how our projections indicate that CTXMarket.com’s platform fees will grow:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Promising Growth Areas for CTXMarket.com 

In addition to the 5% commission we make on sales that we help sellers generate, there are a number of promising areas of growth for CTXMarket.com. They include:

• Franchising: We’ve had businesses in other regions (for example, in London) who are interested in replicating what we’re doing here in Central Texas in their region. We’d like to enable them to use the technology we’ve built to run their own regional e-commerce platform. This would be a major source of revenue for CTXMarket.com.
• On-Platform Advertising: Other e-commerce platforms have seen explosive growth in their on-platform advertising businesses. In the future, we may allow businesses to advertise on CTXMarket.com, which would be a major source of revenue for us.
• Distribution: Many small-batch producers can’t distribute what they make to stores, because it often takes special production facilities and trucks to do that. We have already begun piloting programs aimed at helping small-batch producers in Central Texas with their logistics and distribution efforts.
  

Notes:

[1] - This figure can be calculated by dividing the total amount spent online in the US in 2020 by the population of the United States--which yields the online spend per capita in the US--and multiplying it by the projected population of Central Texas (7 million) in the coming years.

[2] - It’s important to note that CTXMarket.com’s 5% fee is a great deal for small businesses, considering that Amazon takes between 7 - 22% in fees, and Etsy takes up to 22% in fees for some sellers.