Building a Global Software Company From Australia: Bigcommerce Co-Founder Mitch Harper (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Do your merchants have $100,000 in revenue or are they $2 million in revenue? Is there any kind of cut-off there?

Mitch Harper: Our customers’ revenue typically ranges from $1 million to $30 million of revenue per year.

Sramana Mitra: Your customer base is more in the $1 million to $30 million range. Then, the customer base with revenue of $30 million and above goes to Magento and below $1 million is with Shopify and GoDaddy.

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Student Entrepreneurs Bootstrapping a Zero-Logistics E-Commerce Company to $19 Million: Wrist-Band.com CEO Azim Makanojiya (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: The competition for keywords has gone up in the course of this, right?

Azim Makanojiya: Significantly. What we used to pay 20 cents for, we now pay $6 to $7.

Sramana Mitra: How has that impacted the business?

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Building a Global Software Company From Australia: Bigcommerce Co-Founder Mitch Harper (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Was there any geographical bias in the 2,000-customer base?

Mitch Harper: They were mainly from North America and Australia.

Sramana Mitra: Why were they pre-ordering? Why were they interested in your product? This is a segue into the discussion about your competitive landscape. There are a few players in that space. There is Volution, Magento, and Shopify. When you were starting out in 2008, what exactly was the competitive landscape? How were you positioning, and what is it that these 2,000 customers, who pre-ordered, found attractive? >>>

Student Entrepreneurs Bootstrapping a Zero-Logistics E-Commerce Company to $19 Million: Wrist-Band.com CEO Azim Makanojiya (Part 6)

Azim Makanojiya: The other company then told them that they can still service us. They got their orders for three weeks but didn’t pay the factory. In the meantime, they built their own factory in China and started doing orders. They left the factory with unpaid bill of about $175,000.

We’re now basically the sole company that sources from them. We started with one factory over there and he [Chandler] has built up to 20 factories that he sources our orders from. He personally owns about five factories and he sources the surplus orders from about 15 other factories.

Sramana Mitra: So you have a good supply chain established at China at this point.

Azim Makanojiya: Sourcing was probably one of the biggest hurdles that we came across. Then, there was shipping. >>>

Building a Global Software Company From Australia: Bigcommerce Co-Founder Mitch Harper (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Is it the same team that you had in Sydney that got Bigcommerce off the ground?

Mitch Harper: Not really. As I had mentioned, I used to be an engineer and built the first version along with Chris who was one of our early employees from that initial team. He’s still with us today leading a team here in Sydney.

Sramana Mitra: Was Eddie also involved in Bigcommerce? What was his progression in this story?

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Student Entrepreneurs Bootstrapping a Zero-Logistics E-Commerce Company to $19 Million: Wrist-Band.com CEO Azim Makanojiya (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: $110,000 to $6.9 million! Explain to me how that happened? What were the strategic levers?

Azim Makanojiya: We were all new to this industry. We didn’t know what was going on. The only reason that this could happen at a very fast pace, from my point of view, was because we had the drive. We were working full-time at this business. The second and probably the most important thing is, if you really understand the AdWords engine, it translates into instant traffic. We were going really aggressive at this and probably marketing at the first to second spot constantly in a majority of the keywords.

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Building a Global Software Company From Australia: Bigcommerce Co-Founder Mitch Harper (Part 1)

We seldom see global software companies emerge out of Australia. Bigcommerce is a rare exception.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with the beginning of your personal story. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What’s the back story of BigCommerce?

Mitch Harper: I was born and raised in Sydney in Australia. Bigcommerce was also born in Sydney five years back in 2009 when I was about 27 years old.

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Student Entrepreneurs Bootstrapping a Zero-Logistics E-Commerce Company to $19 Million: Wrist-Band.com CEO Azim Makanojiya (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: For the keyword search traffic that you were getting from Google, to convert that into an order, were you taking orders and then ordering the products from the Chinese factory?

Azim Makanojiya: At that point, order volume wasn’t high. We didn’t have a platform for them to order online at that point in 2010. We were taking orders over the phone, jotting it down on an order sheet that we created, and submit that every night. That’s how the process initially worked.

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