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Building a Fashion Accessories Marketplace from London: Kiyan Foroughi, CEO of Boticca (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What were good sources of emails for you?

Kiyan Foroughi: Our on-site campaigns are usually the most successful ones. But we had fine-tuned a way with Facebook ads to really get some good subscribers that would activate into good customers. The other thing was partnerships.

Sramana Mitra: You were doing Facebook advertising. Is that what you’re saying?

Kiyan Foroughi: We did Facebook advertising. The other thing was partnerships with some of our affiliates. We were looking inside our affiliates where the best customers were coming from. Those were sites like ShopStyle and all these shopping searching engines. We built >>>

Achieving Product-Market Fit That Allows You to Build Billion Dollar Unicorns: Gaurav Dhillon, Founder of Informatica and SnapLogic (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: The story is very different for a Dave Duffield starting Workday or a Gaurav Dhillon starting SnapLogic, because most of the people who are starting companies without that kind of track record do not have the options that you have. They have to figure out some way to navigate that early cash issue.

Gaurav Dhillon: You’re very kind to include me in the same breath as Dave. Dave is on his third company. I’m only on my second. You’ll recall he did this in the mainframe with Tesseract. Every two years, there’s a change in the compute platform.

But you’re right. I do have the advantage of having had a phenomenal outcome for my employees and investors at Informatica. Conversely, there’s also the install base of integration, some of which are products that were built by yours truly in 1992 that are still up and running. For example, at SnapLogic, we have to do a much better job in terms of product attributes for the cloud to win over the very same customers. In a sense, to upgrade them to the new logo. >>>

Building a Fashion Accessories Marketplace from London: Kiyan Foroughi, CEO of Boticca (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How did you meet these two funds?

Kiyan Foruoghi: I knew one of the founders of the first fund. I didn’t know that he had founded this fund because he was the CEO of France’s biggest e-commerce company called PriceMinister. I just reached out to him as an angel investor. He loved the project. He said, “Actually, for the amount that you’re looking for, I’m the founder of this new fund called ISAI. We’re 60 entrepreneurs who put our money into this fund. We invest in Internet businesses founded by French entrepreneurs across the world.” That’s how we met them.

As for the Japanese fund, our launch was covered in Nikkei Business. One of the guys read the article and cold-emailed me. He said, “I really like what you’re doing.” I said, “We’re actually in the middle of closing a round. We have some room left.” They came to London. We met. >>>

Building a Fashion Accessories Marketplace from London: Kiyan Foroughi, CEO of Boticca (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What levels were you able to get to before you raised the convertible notes? There were actually transactions happening on your site?

Kiyan Foroughi: There were transactions happening but we’re talking about single digits daily before the convertible notes. It was still very early. We started seeing more traction, and I can talk about it later as we get to it, down the line.

Sramana Mitra: £250,000 in convertible debt from whom?

Kiyan Foroughi: These were mostly business friends and mentors. I don’t want to say they were friends and family because we didn’t really have any friends and family in there. They were mostly people we knew from the industry. To give you an example, my old bosses at TA invested in the business. Some people were introduced to us like the Head of Digital at Burberry at that time. It was all business angels. These were industry people who we either knew or were introduced to us. >>>

Achieving Product-Market Fit That Allows You to Build Billion Dollar Unicorns: Gaurav Dhillon, Founder of Informatica and SnapLogic (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: 156 customer calls that you made gave you real conversations about real customer problems. Even though you didn’t sell what you went out to sell, this was a great opportunity to immerse yourself in customers and learn what they were really looking for.

Gaurav Dhillon: This is AB testing to the power of a million.

Sramana Mitra: By the way, this is a process that we use for all our customer validation work. Many of our entrepreneurs who have been part of the Entrepreneur Journeys case study series have shared this process of immersion.

Gaurav Dhillon: In the complex software, hardware, and networking business, this is a tried and tested method. I was a graduate student in Computer Science. If I’d done an MBA, I would have learned this. It’s a great lesson because that is what we then refined and built. We said, “Everybody’s going to need to move the data. Everybody’s going to need to connect the mainframe to the client server. Then they’re going to want to >>>

Building a Fashion Accessories Marketplace from London: Kiyan Foroughi, CEO of Boticca (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to 2010 when you were launching Boticca. Tell me more about how you got this off the ground. What did you launch with? What was the financing around it?

Kiyan Foroughi: I actually launched an alpha version of the website on my own. I’m not a technical guy so I had to work with an agency to develop a very basic alpha version of the website. We got it out there. There was about 30 designers on the platform at launch. Now we have close to 350 brands and designers. That was all out of my own funding. Once I got it out there and saw that it was starting to demonstrate some traction, albeit at a small scale, I recruited a co-founder. We both put money into the business to fund some early hires. The first outside investment that we did was a convertible note round. It was a fairly small round. It was around £250,000.

Sramana Mitra: The £250,000 was aside from you and your co-founder?
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Achieving Product-Market Fit That Allows You to Build Billion Dollar Unicorns: Gaurav Dhillon, Founder of Informatica and SnapLogic (Part 3)

Gaurav Dhillon: Let me take you through that journey. I still remember how excited we were. Once we got the grant, we built the research into the object databases. The truth is they never got anywhere. Then we thought, “Why don’t we build technology to help people downsize?” This is 1995 and you’re running a COBOL program on a mainframe. It’s pretty clear that the 2000 bug is coming. Wouldn’t you want to get this COBOL program off the mainframe into Oracle and Sun?

By the way, we would consult by day and work by night. When you’re in your 20s, you’re just unbreakable. The energy and enthusiasm in doing these things was pretty epic. We were seven to eight people at this point. We actually went out and built a product that would take your COBOL >>>

Building a Fashion Accessories Marketplace from London: Kiyan Foroughi, CEO of Boticca (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What did you do to address that issue?

Kiyan Foroughi: Before I jump into that, there’s one thing I want to add. I told you about my professional background. In terms of my family heritage, I come from a background of jewelry. I’m the fourth generation in the luxury industry on my mother’s side. I’m the third generation when it comes to jewelry. My grandfather was a gemologist. He was an agent for a bunch of luxury brands in Iran before the revolution. I grew up around jewelry specifically. It’s an area I know really well. I spent summers in my grandfather’s workshop learning about the different properties of stones and stone-setting techniques. When I came across this designer, it was very much a perfect marriage between my professional background and my personal heritage.

To answer your question, I went back immediately after this encounter and started doing research. I said to myself, “Surely, there has to be a destination in the web that allows upcoming designers and brands of fashion accessories to sell their products to customers all over the >>>