Competition is for losers!

Glamsquad's CEO is Alexandra Wilkis Wilson, co-founder of daily deals site Gilt Groupe. She left the billion-dollar e-commerce company after seven years to lead Glamsquad, wooed by her Harvard undergrad classmate Jason Perri, who is the site's co-founder and chairman.

Wilson saw the moneymaking potential of applying an Uber model to another massive, disparate market: U.S. spas and salons, which will do $40 billion in sales this year on the backs of a workforce that is 65% freelance.

Mobile beauty isn't a new concept: Hairdressers, manicurists, and masseuses have long made house calls. What Glamsquad offers women is instant gratification. A stylist can be at a client's home or office within the hour but what about the weight loss industry.

Enter " C'MERE. The Worlds First Fat Loss On-demand service!" a company that learned a lot of its philosophies from Peter Theil who wrote "Zero To One" an inside look at Peter Thiel’s philosophy and strategy for making your startup a success by looking at the lessons he learned from founding and selling PayPal, investing in Facebook and becoming a billionaire in the process.

Here are the 3 lessons from the book C'MERE uses:

1. The biggest leaps in progress are vertical, not horizontal.
2. Monopolies are good, for both business and society.
3. Founders need a vision to take their business from zero to one.

Peter Thiel says that a monopoly simply means one company is doing something so much better than everyone else, that simply no one else can survive.

This is actually good for everyone. Think about Google.

You love to use Google, because you know it’s the best search engine out there. Google loves setting its own prices and reaping 25% of their revenue as profit, so it can make its service even better.

And society should love it, because if ever someone came along and did beat Google, it would mean their search engine would probably have to be pretty spankin’ fantastic!

Monopolies are nothing to scoff at – they’re actually what any business or startup should shoot for.

C'mere is the first fat loss on demand but what does that mean and why is this so different to every other startup.

One word: vision.

When you look at founders of successful companies, you’ll find 90% of them are, in a way eccentric. Steve Jobs is only the most prominent example, but actually, plenty of entrepreneurs have a few quirks – and that’s good we are told.

Being a little weird is what lets leaders develop a grand, if slightly delusional, vision for the future, which is exactly what companies need to go from zero to one.

Way back in 1999 Thiel said: “PayPal will give citizens worldwide more direct control over their currencies than they ever had before.”

He was right. His vision of the future showed an entirely different reality than the one he lived in, and the drive it instilled in himself and his team is exactly what led them to create the very future they imagined.

Jason Allan Scott is Co-Founder of C'MERE and he is a little eccentric too, someone who has built and sold businesses in several different sectors on three different continents.

His vision is to create an on-demand service that brings noninvasive fat loss technologies to your home through the website and app, it's taken a relatively measured approach to expansion starting testing in just one area in the UK. The start-up, which lets users book qualified aesthetic practitioners through its app and site and then sends the practitioner to their chosen venue, like their home or office, is only available in London at present.  

But how is this a monopoly?

There is no other company in the world doing this and unlike other tech startups, C'MERE is not following the Gig economy.

DID YOU KNOW?

Source : RSA/IPSOS MORI SURVEY

Let me explain.

Jason Allan Scott the chief executive of this tech company is defying the tech industry’s conventional wisdom about how to grow.

Instead of hiring independent contractors, he is bringing in full-time employees and putting them on the payroll — with benefits. That decision and his company, iconoclasts in the technology world.

Many tech start-ups lean on the idea of the “gig economy.” They staff up rapidly with freelancers, who are both cheaper to hire (none of the pension or retirement packages and other expenses) and more flexible (they can work as much or as little as needed). It’s the model Uber has used to upend the taxi business.

That model is also fueling a global debate over worker protections.

In a fairy-tale version of the C'MERE story, the company’s bet on employees should have resulted in industry-rattling success. The truth is more complicated.

“What we are doing with employees has pressured the business but scared off investors,” Jason Allan Scott said.

C'MERE is still in its early days, but prospective venture fund investors keep walking away, saying that betting on full-time employees is a deal killer for them. Its hiring strategy will slow the company’s growth. Problems like this illustrate why tech companies prefer to use contractors if they can.

“I think Silicon Valley is still a pioneer of workforce models — but the model we are following is for all who participate in the wealth creation to be rewarded for it.”

Scotts bet is that full-time employees will allow him to offer better customer service.

C'MERE is the exception. The idea of building a large workforce of full-time employees, outside of core disciplines like engineering, is not part of the ethos of most companies in today’s tech industry, observers who have studied the industry say.

In a recent article, I read that the new generation does not see job security and workplace benefits as something that is valuable. What’s valuable is doing cool stuff and scaling up and making a better tomorrow the article said.

C'MERE goes further.

C'MERE sees itself in equal parts a technology and Medi-Clinic. Its headquarters in London is packed with engineers working on algorithms intended to match customers automatically with the best practitioner for them.

It would have been a cinch for C'MERE to hire its aesthetic practitioners as contractors. After all, that’s how beauty on demand companies and most tech companies work.

Most practitioners start with a room or a salon, clinic or slimming center paying their own way and finding health insurance, saving for retirement, and buying aesthetic equipment and cell phones etc as they go.

For C'MERE, a salary and benefits are catalysts for changing how Practitioners like Samantha Sinclair usually operate.

"I did not have any of the problems of starting my own company and C'MERE allows me to go where the clients are and not expect the clients to come to me" says Samantha Sinclair a practitioner for C'MERE.

A single hour-long service ranges in price from ￡200 to ￡895, while this same service at a clinic would ￡250 - ￡1850 —competitive prices with brick-and-mortar, but with the convenience of having a quickly-scheduled appointment done at home.

Using the C'MERE app or website, customers can request fat loss on thighs, belly, bingo wings etc from a menu of common stubborn areas. C'MERE's experienced aesthetic team can provide more customized fat loss upon request.

This immense flexibility and the unwavering pursuit of body contouring make C'MERE a force to watch.

“We’re focused on people who really love what they do,” says co-founder and COO Rupert Barksfield. They bring more than a scientific fat loss but someone to talk to about how they got there and what can be done going forward.”

Not done yet, instead of constantly hustling to find clients, C’MERE's practitioners have leads funneled to them through the company’s website. C'MERE has sophisticated algorithms that figure out the routes the practitioners can use to save time and uses electric vehicles to help the environment and cut costs further.

The vehicles work in a way that’s reminiscent of old-fashioned milkmen: they follow set routes and deliver fat loss solutions at set times, so costumers always know when to expect their fat loss practitioner. That’s not only more efficient than how most beauty on demand companies go about it now – crisscrossing town to operate at requested times, sometimes coming back to the same street after doing a session across town – but also allows C'MERE to deliver its service for free.

Talk about putting the SMART, in SMART CAR.