Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Brian Dhatt, CTO of Borderfree (Part 3)

Brian Dhatt: From a personalization perspective, you can go down to the complex individualized personalization. In the first stage, a lot of times, we can do a lot of personalization as part of the site experience based on things like different seasons globally. For example, in Australia you might be looking for a bikini whereas in New York, you don’t have any desire to do that. We actually think that will play a big role for global merchants.

Sramana Mitra: WebLink has a lot of customers in the apparel space. Personalization based on size is one of the big drivers of lift in terms of financial metrics.

Brian Dhatt: Absolutely. You can only imagine that in the global space, it gets more complex. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Brian Dhatt, CTO of Borderfree (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Because you’re at Borderfree, your angle is on the international. We will explore that angle, but I just want to anchor this discussion by pointing out a few other things that I see in e-commerce. We started covering these quite extensively actually. Very recently, we have covered two companies that are each furthering the evolution of high-end e-commerce systems—0ne from the dimension of personalization and another from the dimension of content-driven commerce. Both are massive trends.

I don’t know if you’re familiar with this piece that I wrote in 2007 defining what I see as the formula for Web 3.0. The formula was Web 3.0 = 4C + P + VS. The four Cs are defined as context, community, commerce, and content. P is personalization and VS for vertical search. Now eight years later, we are starting to see systems that address not all of it but >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Brian Dhatt, CTO of Borderfree (Part 1)

Borderfree provides tools to help move e-commerce to its next phase: going global. Read on!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to you a little bit as well as all your different e-commerce-related experience so we can set the context for the conversation.

Brian Dhatt: I’m the CTO at Borderfree. That means I’m responsible for our product and product strategy. We are based in New York City and we have offices around the world in Dublin, Ireland as well as in Tel Aviv, Israel. From a path perspective, I came from Gilt Groupe. I led product, engineering, and creatives for Gilt City.

Prior to that, I co-founded POPSUGAR, which is a content commerce company based in San Francisco. We founded that back in 2006 and we were Sequoia-funded. >>>

Bootstrapping to $55 Million from Rural Minnesota: Tom Fallenstein, CEO of Fun.com (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: So far, what you’ve done is domain acquisitions. The three acquisitions you talked about are domain acquisitions. While they are high numbers for domains, relatively speaking, they are small numbers. You could also grow fast by acquiring a business, not just domains? Is that something that you would consider?

Tom Fallenstein: Yes, that’s one of the things that we’re looking at currently. >>>

Bootstrapping to $55 Million from Rural Minnesota: Tom Fallenstein, CEO of Fun.com (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Besides fun.com, have you done anything else in the last 18 months that is worth discussing?

Tom Fallenstein: We spend most of our time and money on our internal culture and infrastructure. We put in a million dollar automation system to help put out 35,000 orders in a single day. That’s where a lot of our money and time is going—making sure that we can fulfill all the customer orders that come through and that we have the fastest shipping and best customer experience. >>>

Bootstrapping to $55 Million from Rural Minnesota: Tom Fallenstein, CEO of Fun.com (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Wow! That’s 2010. What happens next? In 2011 to 2013, what are the next major moves?

Tom Fallenstein: An acquisition that I’ve been looking to try to get for the last five years just happened about 18 months ago. We acquired the domain name fun.com. That’s ultimately the domain I wanted to expand into every type of product. We’ve got a unique culture here. It’s fun. It’s like a small town Google. We’re all super nerdy and geeky. We love all the pop culture pieces. >>>

Bootstrapping to $55 Million from Rural Minnesota: Tom Fallenstein, CEO of Fun.com (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Wow! It must have been very scary. How long did it take you to recover that $1 million from that domain?

Tom Fallenstein: It paid for itself in nine months.

Sramana Mitra: Awesome.

Tom Fallenstein: We bought it in January. By the time we made it through October, about 30% to 40% of our sales came directly from that website became 30% to 40% of our sales. >>>

Bootstrapping to $55 Million from Rural Minnesota: Tom Fallenstein, CEO of Fun.com (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What next? What happened in 2006?

Tom Fallenstein: In 2006, we moved into a 10,000 sq. ft. facility and started the company. I hired my mom and two sisters to work full-time and started building out the websites.

Sramana Mitra: Were there other properties in 2006 or just those three?

Tom Fallenstein: No, we had more websites—superherocostumes.com, rennaisancecostumes.com and a few other exact match domains like that. >>>