Ecommerce platform BigCommerce recently reported its fourth-quarter results that outpaced market expectations. The company is looking to tap into the growing social commerce market to help its customers expand their market reach.
>>>Sramana Mitra: What was the new idea?
Kashyap Deorah: On-demand commerce was called hyperlocal. I was fascinated with the Stripe and Twilio API businesses. In retail and e-commerce, what shovels can I build? What became clear was on-demand commerce is about the ability to fulfill things right here right now. The proposition is ingrained in logistics.
The logistics model relies on some heavy location and mapping infrastructure that only a few companies have. Backed with a theme of democratizing disaggregated markets, how about democratizing this location and mapping infrastructure for all the e-commerce players in the world. It became the logistics API for on-demand commerce.
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Dean Guida, CEO of Infragistics, has a real passion for the elegance, simplicity, and beauty of software development. He has built a company celebrating these values.
Sramana Mitra: We will start at the beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised?
Dean Guida: When I was six years old, my mom and dad got divorced. I moved to Miami, Florida. I saw how much my mom struggled to make money for us, When I was eight years old, I just wanted to work. I convinced the maintenance man in the apartment that I was living in to let me do his work. He would pay me off the books.
Sramana Mitra: Did you have the same marketing strategy?
Jonathan Foltz: Yes. Our expertise was definitely Facebook and Instagram. You can do this with influencer marketing. We can go from $10,000 a day to over $300,000 in less than a week. The scalability is unparalleled with Facebook and Instagram.
Sramana Mitra: I guess there are two questions that come from that. Did you have to do buy-one-get-two-free with this new product?
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Today’s 566th FREE online 1Mby1M Roundtable For Entrepreneurs is starting in 30 minutes, on Thursday, March 3, at 8 a.m. PST/11 a.m. EST/5 p.m. CET/9:30 p.m. India IST. CLICK HERE to join. PASSWORD: startup All are welcome!
The global pandemic accelerated the growth of the Unified Communication-as-a-Service (UCaaS) market with vendors like Microsoft and Zoom seeing improvement in their market share. In 2020, the UCaaS subscriber base of both Microsoft and Zoom grew to over 1 million users each. But RingCentral (NYSE:RNG) remained the market leader with a 20% market share.
>>>Sramana Mitra: What was the name of this project?
Kashyap Deorah: Chalo.
Sramana Mitra: How long was that?
Kashyap Deorah: We sold the company in less than a year. After the acquisition, some of us stayed at OpenTable. I left after two years. One important moment there was that OpenTable was a public company. That’s what made it attractive for us to sell that soon.
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