JFDI Bootcamp Alumnus TradeGecko launches its service to the public this month. It’s a huge step for the team that came from New Zealand to build a cloud-based inventory and sales management SaaS application for small to medium-sized enterprises. Co-counder Carl Thompson shares the journey.
See the Young Woman Baking Pies.
See the Young Woman Start a Business Baking Pies.
See the Young Woman Become an Old Woman.
When Michael Gerber wrote those words in The E-Myth Revisited, he captured a truth about any small business. Many of us start companies because we love what we do … then find that success turns everything into a chore. Doing something and running a business that does the same thing are totally different.
TradeGecko pulls together the administration that goes with running a small-scale wholesale business to make managing team engagement, workflows and activity feeds fast, effective and social. It fills a gap in the market between enterprise solutions like SAP, Netsuite and SalesForce and the manual spreadsheets that SMEs typically use to manage what they do.
The idea came from co-founder Carl Thompson’s personal frustration creating designer T-shirts, where success overwhelmed the tools he had available to make delivering them to retailers efficient. Together with his friends, brothers Cameron and Bradley Priest, Carl has created an online application that helps businesses as diverse as designer-makers, specialist food and beverage suppliers, jewelry, toy and accessories companies move off spreadsheets and onto the cloud.
When the team showed investors their idea in May, they had about 100 businesses sign up to help test a private beta version. Those users have stuck with them though a journey to launch that Carl described to Hugh Mason:
“You end up geting very personal with your beta customers,” says Carl. “You have to be nice to them as issues pop up and you end up buying a lot of cakes and lunch to keep them engaged! We did lots of hand-holding and listening and ended up making some really good friends.”
Carl, Cameron and Bradley had sold a dream and built up a lot of enthusiasm and now they had to deliver on what they promised.
Carl says “It kind of developed along a steady path but our expectations of where we would be now were totally unrealistic. We expected to be much further: raising capital took longer, development resource restrictions held us back, as did finding good staff and distribution. Most of all we had a lot to learn about customer acquisition. But here we are.”
Carl’s advice to any other SME following a similar path is not to underestimate how much work is involved and to make sure you have a full team in place: “There were three of us – Bradley doing the product, me working on customer acquisition and branding and Cameron working on business development and capital raising. I honestly don’t see how if we lost any one of those people we could have done it.”