Wish you were here? Warsaw man’s Wish most downloaded shopping app in 2019
Wish app, which was co-founded by Polish IT expert Piotr Szulczewski, was the most downloaded shopping app of 2019.
The 39-year-old from Warsaw created the app with Danny Zhang in 2011, offering shoppers heavily discounted products as they connect producers directly with customers.
Currently the app is valued at about $11.2 billion. Szulczewski has turned down an offer from Amazon to buy the company in the past and expects to float the company in the next few years.
Last year, the application was downloaded 168.8 million times worldwide in 2019 making it the most downloaded shopping app for the second year in a row.
Currently the app is valued at about $11.2 billion. Szulczewski has turned down an offer from Amazon to buy the company in the past and expects to float the company in the next few years.
Szulczewski moved to Canada with his parents when he was 11 and started Wish in 2011 with Danny Zhang who he’d met at university.
He said: “We wanted to build the perfect shopping mall. What would that look like on a mobile device? It would have infinite selection but it also needs to be personalised. The majority of things I see in a shopping mall aren’t of interest to me and we want to only show you what we think you’ll like. Wish is about bringing accessible, quality goods to the masses.”
The company is still trailing Chinese giant Alibaba and American Amazon but they have over a million merchants who sell through the app and are selling more than 3 million products daily.
The app offers shoppers heavily discounted products by connecting shoppers with producers.
Szulczewski moved to Canada with his parents when he was 11 and he met Zhang while attending the University of Waterloo in Ontario. After university he started his first and only other job working for Google on AdWords, first in San Francisco and then in South Korea before starting his own firm.
It was during his time at Google that he learnt about targeting the user with what worked. He has acknowledged that Wish targets a different type of consumer to Amazon. While Amazon places an emphasis on quality and delivery time, Wish is targeted at consumers who are more focused on a products price.
The company has over a million merchants who sell through the app and are selling more than 3 million products daily.
Szulczewski reeled off a list of statistics when presenting Wish to industry figures including that ‘41 percent of US households don’t have $400 worth of liquidity’, ‘the median income per household in the EU is just above 16,000 EUR’ and ‘Worldwide average income per capita is less than $3,000’.
