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Building a Global Technology Company from Colombia: Ricardo Villadiego, CEO of Easy Solutions (Part 1)

We seldom see global technology companies being built out of Latin America, so what Ricardo and his team have been able to accomplish is very exciting. And to think that they are building a fraud prevention company out of Bogota, Colombia is truly impressive.

Sramana: Ricardo, let’s start at the very beginning of your story. Where were you born and raised?

Ricardo Villadiego: I was born in Cartagena, Colombia which is a small city in the north of the country. I was raised there until I was 15 and then I moved to Bogota to study to become an engineer. I moved there by myself. I finished my degree as an electrical engineer. Immediately after graduation, I went to work for Unisys Corporation. >>>

Disrupting the Floral E-Commerce Industry: Farbod Shoraka, CEO of BloomNation (Part 7)

Sramana: How do you validate and curate florists in a scalable manner?

Farbod Shoraka: We started to use some of our funds to hire a sales team that will help us decide on who to partner with. It is not an automated process. In the end, it creates a lot of value. For BloomNation’s marketplace, it is a comparative advantage. Our customers know they deal with the best florists in the country if they deal with BloomNation.

Sramana: What about customer acquisition? What are you primary paths?

Farbod Shoraka: We don’t have any paid acquisition channels. It is all about organic or low-cost acquisition channels. By partnering with florists, we are helping them gain customers through local channels. We help their local sites get to the top of organic search results as well. Our customer retention rate is also very high. >>>

Disrupting the Floral E-Commerce Industry: Farbod Shoraka, CEO of BloomNation (Part 6)

Sramana: What metrics did you use to solicit funding? Where were you in terms of revenue?

Farbod Shoraka: We used two key metrics. This was very early stage investment, so it was really about the idea and vision. We needed to demonstrate that there was a product market fit. We were able to show that we were doing transactional volume on the marketplace. We were able to show that florists were excited about our products by demonstrating how many of them were signing up every day as well as the amount of products being listed per day. We showed our general metrics to the investors. It was not about having a large or small revenue number but showing that there was something there worth exploring.

Sramana: How many florists were signing up at that point?

Farbod Shoraka: We had about 1,500 florists across the country. We had about $60,000 in revenue at the time. >>>

Bootstrapping a Bulk Book E-Commerce Business: BookPal CEO, Tony DiCostanzo (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What are some of the major trends that you are tracking and building your strategy around as you’re watching the book business?

Tony DiCostanzo: I think the one that’s most prevalent is the momentum that e-books are building in the market. That’s one of the reasons that we pursued and made the investment within the e-book platform. The challenge for us and distributors in general is the cross-platform compatibility of e-books. To take a step back on this, all the major publishers, for the most part, require digital rights management. What that means is that when we sell a book, it has to be locked down to a specific device. Because of that platform requirement, we’re able to provide an app and allow our customers to download the app onto any Android or iOS device. >>>

Disrupting the Floral E-Commerce Industry: Farbod Shoraka, CEO of BloomNation (Part 5)

Sramana: How long did it take you to launch the first version of the site?

Farbod Shoraka: Once we won the money, we hired a developer and spent a few months building the first version of BloomNation.com. It was an alpha platform to give florists an idea of where we were headed. It was enough for them to see the dream and see our vision. We used that prototype for another five months to acquire more florists.

Our primarily goal with the first project was to get florists to upload product and list designs. As a consumer when you go to a marketplace, the last thing you want is a zero result search. We wanted enough products on the platform so that we would not have zero result searches for consumers. We used that platform to acquire florists from across the country. >>>

Bootstrapping a Bulk Book E-Commerce Business: BookPal CEO Tony DiCostanzo (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: There are major trends in the space right now. For example, Amazon has made it very easy for independent or self-publishers to maintain a whole portfolio of books. A lot of major writers are moving to that mode of publishing. Especially in the business books genre, there’s a major shift. These are in your sweet spot. For example, in our organization we have a portfolio of eight books out. In the next 18 months, we’re going to be doing 12 more books all in the entrepreneurship genre. How would you work with publishers like that?

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Disrupting the Floral E-Commerce Industry: Farbod Shoraka, CEO of BloomNation (Part 4)

Sramana: Does this mean that you are hosting their websites and helping them move their presence to your hosted sites?

Farbod Shoraka: We want to partner with florists. We don’t just want to hand them a technology or a tool. We want to partner with them and help them grow their business. We give them tools that help them grow their revenue, not just through the marketplace where customers can discover these flower shops, but we are helping them optimize their own sites so they can convert more traffic and earn more revenue. We help them convert their email lists into new orders via customer retention. We are partnering with them and using that 10% to fuel the growth of the company, which means we have more resources to make these flower shops successful.

Sramana: Across the board, the business model is 10% of transactions?

Farbod Shoraka: Yes, exactly. >>>

Bootstrapping a Bulk Book E-Commerce Business: BookPal CEO Tony DiCostanzo (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How did you build the corporate business? What was the go-to market strategy and customer acquisition strategy on the corporate business?

Tony DiCostanzo: Going back to the epiphany moment, the other entrenched players in the book space weren’t adequately servicing the corporate buyers. At that point, I realized that the biggest opportunity is getting in targeting those disgruntled customers. These are the ones that go to Barnes & Noble with an order for hundred copies of a title and the response they get is, “We only have four in stock.” They call Amazon and Amazon is unable to tell them when the hundred copies will arrive, because they’re fragmented in 20 different warehouses. For us, it was important to be visible to that buyer in the decision making process.

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