A Naval Battle from 256 BC Changed Our Business Model

The Greatest Naval Battle in History

In 256 BC, off Cape Ecnomus on the southern coast of Sicily, what many historians consider the greatest naval battle in history took place.

On one side: Carthage. The greatest maritime power in the Mediterranean, with 350 ships and 150,000 men. Carthage had dominated the seas for decades. They knew how to maneuver, how to attack from the side, how to shatter the enemy’s oars before ramming and sinking them.

On the other: Rome. Despite an impressive fleet of 330 ships and 140,000 men, Rome was a land power. Every battle it had ever won was fought on land.

In terms of numbers, the two armies were similar. In terms of experience at sea, they were worlds apart.

The Romans knew they couldn’t win the game the Carthaginians were playing. So they didn’t try.

They changed the game.

The Corvus

Four years earlier, at the Battle of Mylae, the Romans had invented a device called the Corvus: an articulated wooden bridge, just over 1.2 meters wide and 11 meters long, mounted on the bow of each ship. The bridge would drop onto an enemy vessel, an iron spike would lock it in place, and Roman troops would cross onto the enemy ship.

The idea was simple: if they could get their soldiers on board an enemy ship, they could turn a naval battle into a land battle.

And in a land battle, Rome always won.

At Cape Ecnomus, the Romans used the Corvus in full force. Half the Carthaginian fleet attacked from the rear, but the Romans pulled back, formed a side-by-side line with their backs to the coast, and left the Carthaginians trapped: they couldn’t break through, couldn’t ram from the side, and didn’t dare attack head-on because of the Corvus.

Half the Carthaginian fleet was blocked, unable to do anything.

The other half was boarded by Roman soldiers, one ship at a time.

In the end, Rome lost 24 ships and around 10,000 men. Carthage lost 94 ships and between 30,000 and 40,000 men. The greatest naval power in the Mediterranean had been beaten by an army that knew almost nothing about naval warfare.

Playing to our strengths is the intelligent way to overcome obstacles. It’s not cheating. It’s rewriting the rules in our favor.

Entering the Field With the Wrong Strategy

In 2018, KuantoKusta — a Portuguese price comparison site — began its transformation into a marketplace.

KuantoKusta was good at what it did: comparing prices. Content was the differentiator. Users found the product they were looking for, saw all the prices from all the stores side by side, and chose. The business model was simple: Pay-Per-Click (PPC). A store appeared on the product page, the user clicked, and the store paid. Like Google Ads, but for shopping.

It worked because the traffic was excellent and users were in purchase-decision mode.

Then we decided to become a marketplace. Because that’s where the market was heading. Because that’s how it was done.

The problem with playing a game you’re not good at is that the odds of losing are high.

And we lost.

Marketplace stores paid a commission on each sale, which forced them to charge higher prices to compensate. So they almost never had the lowest price. But we, in our drive to become a marketplace, started featuring them at the top of the product page, even when they weren’t the best option for the customer.

Users didn’t get it. PPC stores got buried on the page. We stopped making money and started losing it.

A triple loss: unhappy users, unhappy partner stores, and a company bleeding money.

I Don’t Take Headphones on My Runs

I was out running one day, like on so many runs, thinking about this problem. The story of Carthage and Rome was in my head. And echoing through my mind:

“How do we change the game? How do we change the game? How do we change the game?

By playing our rules. Not the marketplace’s.”

KuantoKusta was good at comparing prices. Users came to us for that. Stores valued that traffic. What made us different was transparency and content. We weren’t going to throw that away.

But we also wanted to offer the security a marketplace provides: transaction guarantees, the ability to buy from multiple stores in a single cart, money back if something went wrong.

The two models seemed incompatible. A PPC store has to show the same price on its own site and on KuantoKusta. A Marketplace store pays commission and so charges more on KuantoKusta than on its own site. It seemed like you couldn’t be both at the same time.

Or could you?

The DUO

The new strategy was to flip the game and play where we were strong. We created a new business model: the DUO.

Two buttons on the product page. One to buy directly on the store’s website: the user was redirected, paid there, with no transaction guarantee. Another to buy inside KuantoKusta, with Marketplace security and a commission low enough for stores to offer competitive prices.

The user chose. Want the lowest price and willing to accept the risk? First button. Want security and don’t mind paying a little more? Second button.

Stores now had two fronts where they could make money. KuantoKusta kept doing what it was good at: showing all prices, from all stores, transparently. The transaction guarantee became an additional layer of value, not a replacement for the previous model.

I also built a new ranking algorithm. The previous one was simple: stores that paid more per click ranked higher. The new one had more than 20 parameters. CPC still counted, but with a much smaller weight. Stores with the biggest budgets no longer had an automatic advantage over those that simply had the best product at the best price.

The results were immediate. 2019 was a successful year. 2020, with further product improvements, was historic. The DUO model was later expanded to other European comparison sites.

The Romans didn’t try to beat the Carthaginians at their own game. They created a new game, on a field where they had the advantage.

We didn’t try to be a marketplace like all the others. We built a hybrid model, on a field where we were already strong.

The Corvus wasn’t a weapon. It was a question: what if we can turn this problem into one we already know how to solve?

As Bill Bernbach once said: “Creativity is the last unfair advantage we’re legally allowed to take over our competitors.”