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Building a Subscription E-Commerce Business from Switzerland: Samy Liechti, CEO of Blacksocks (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How did you get to these articles? Were you doing PR outreach to the press?

Samy Liechti: We did a press release. At that time, we did that by fax. Then we put together a list of potential journalists. Then we had a little luck. By the time we launched, the Internet hype had arrived here in Europe. It was always the same examples of eBay, Amazon, and some others. People suddenly started wondering if there’s something going on in our country. There was not much going on, so the socks guys got quite some coverage. >>>

Aiming to Disrupt Consumer Credit: Al Goldstein, CEO of AvantCredit (Part 2)

Al Goldstein: The real estate business was a lot more competitive and a lot more difficult. What we saw was a huge opportunity in providing credit alternatives to near-prime or mid-prime borrowers. Half of the credit spectrum are all customers making about $50,000 to $60,000 a year and with credit scores between 600 and 700. However, they are not provided with access to credit by companies that are taking advantage of technology and analytics at the forefront. Our vision for the company is that we want to build an online capital line. We started this business about two years ago and it has worked out great because my two co-founders were my former interns in my first company. One is from a technology background and one from a data and analytics background. I’ve spent four years or so in my first business and then went out to the Valley and participated in Y Combinator. We’ve had a great run so far. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Rick Wilson, President of Miva Merchant (Part 4)

Rick Wilson: On one hand, you have this free-wheeling, open source world where as long as someone knows what they’re doing, they can literally do anything. On the other hand, you have what I call apple-ification where all of the hard choices have been made for you. There’s some brilliance to that for sure. The successes of Shopify, Bigcommerce, and Volution have shown that there’s a demand for that. I would say that’s the biggest change in the last seven years. Today, to be an e-commerce owner, you don’t have to be a particularly technical person whereas in 2007, you needed to be somewhat technical. If you go back farther than that, you absolutely had to be technical to have an advantage.

Sramana Mitra: That’s correct. Shopify and Volution are catering to the more starting merchants. Bigcommerce is catering to the slightly larger sweet spot of $1 million to $30 million revenue. Magento is the larger player. Where do you fit into that picture? >>>

Building a Subscription E-Commerce Business from Switzerland: Samy Liechti, CEO of Blacksocks (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: How did you do it? How did you launch? What did you do specifically?

Samy Liechti: We knew that marketing will be very hard. We knew that a subscription business will only work if people like the quality of goods they receive. We knew that we wanted to build a brand, and we knew that we don’t have time to solve all the problems. We did a couple of things. One thing was we spent a lot of time discussing which problems we wanted to address. We selected only one or two and then we solved them.

Sramana Mitra: Which ones were those? >>>

Aiming to Disrupt Consumer Credit: Al Goldstein, CEO of AvantCredit (Part 1)

Consumer Credit is a $10 trillion dollar industry that Al and his team are trying to turn on its head. Aided by Big Data and machine learning, they are creating a direct to consumer lending model that may have far reaching impact on the financial services industry.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the beginning of your journey. We can talk about your co-founders, but let’s start with your background a bit and share with the audience where you’re from and where your personal journey started.

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Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Rick Wilson, President of Miva Merchant (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: In 2007, what was the landscape in the e-commerce shopping cart or the e-commerce platform world? What was going on around you? What was the competitive landscape? Whom did you compete with directly and indirectly?

Rick Wilson: Yahoo stores was still a popular platform. I wouldn’t say that it had momentum, but it was certainly popular. The osCommerce software, which had been very popular, had faltered. I was never a big osCommerce guy, so I can’t remember if they released version three or four. They were in between major versions and it just died on the vine. They never got the major version out. I think Magento’s alpha was announced during that time. Shopify was just starting to arrive on the scene. I heard about them in 2008. Volution was probably the earliest success story as a pure play Software as a Service platform provider in our space. >>>

Building a Subscription E-Commerce Business from Switzerland: Samy Liechti, CEO of Blacksocks (Part 1)

Samy Liechti has built up a very nice subscription e-commerce business from Switzerland selling socks, underwear, and shorts. The company is 100% bootstrapped.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Samy Liechti: I’m Swiss and grew up in Switzerland. I went to one of the finest European business schools. I studied Business and Economics in Switzerland, Paris, and Toronto. After graduating, I worked in marketing and communications before I opened up my own company. >>>

Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Rick Wilson, President of Miva Merchant (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You were working as Head of North America Sales and the game plan was to orient the product to be sold by the hosting providers.

Rick Wilson: That is correct. We were very successful with that. Between 1998 and 2004, which was when we stopped that process, we signed up 3,500 hosting providers. During that window, we sold about 300,000 active licenses. We were very dominant from a market share standpoint. There was one fundamental problem during that whole time. >>>