Growing Organically: Sebastian Kanovich, CEO of dLocal (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: In the 1M/1M program, bootstrapping is a huge part of our philosophy. We know this from statistics that over 99% of the business that try to raise venture capital actually get rejected because they don’t fit into the venture capital model necessarily. We are huge supporters of the bootstrapping model. What you’re saying is completely in line with our philosophy. We are huge believers in the laser sharp focus of bootstrapping.

Why are you in Israel? You said your market is largely in Latin America. Did I get that right?

Sebastian Kanovich: Yes, I’m in Israel. There is a slight confusion. Our end users are in Latin America and emerging markets as a whole, but our merchants are either in Europe or US. >>>

Growing Organically: Sebastian Kanovich, CEO of dLocal (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You inherited 40 customers from AstroPay. Were you doing prepaid private label cards for these 40 merchants and then you switched that to something else? What was the case for the spin off?

Sebastian Kanovich: First of all, we didn’t want to have a company which was both B2B and B2C. We wanted to have one company serving the end users. That was AstroPay. Then we wanted to have B2B.

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Growing Organically: Sebastian Kanovich, CEO of dLocal (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What was the structure? Did AstroPay put in money into dLocal? How did you financially engineer this?

Sebastian Kanovich: We share most of the shareholders. dLocal shares existing customers from AstroPay. We lost money for one month but after that, we managed to break even. We’ve been profitable since then. We didn’t have to raise any money.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about the business of dLocal. How do you go to market?

Sebastian Kanovich: There are two ways for us to expand. We don’t have end users. We’re a 100% B2B company. One thing we need to do is bring as many merchants as possible to our technology. That’s one part. The other part is to have those same merchants go into as many geographies as possible. We >>>

Growing Organically: Sebastian Kanovich, CEO of dLocal (Part 1)

dLocal was spun off from its parent company with 40 customers. It never took any outside funding and has grown to 350 customers within a year. Read on for more.

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?

Sebastian Kanovich: I was born in Uruguay and that’s where I grew up. I lived there all of my life. I went out to study and then came back. Now, I am currently living in Tel Aviv. >>>

Competing with Giants: Colin Earl, CEO of Agiloft (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me similarly about how you position against ServiceNow and Apttus in contract management.

Colin Earl: It’s essentially the same positioning. The Agiloft platform allows us to do two things. It allows us to configure the product to meet the needs of an individual customer in a period of weeks and it allows us to guarantee success – to provide an unconditional satisfaction guarantee that covers both the software as well as the consulting services.

If the customer isn’t happy for any reason within the first three months, they can just call and say, “I’m cancelling the order. Everything works perfectly, but the CIO has decided that post-it notes is the way of the future. That’s where we’re going.” The reason we can do that is, first off, the product itself and implementation >>>

Competing with Giants: Colin Earl, CEO of Agiloft (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to specifics. What was your customer acquisition strategy? Was it direct sales? You had a set of customers who were on your previous product and were switching or upgrading to this one. Was that the first set of customers that you got?

Colin Earl: Yes, that was the first set of customers. The strategy was basically direct sales.

Sramana Mitra: You had a sales force selling this, right?

Colin Earl: Exactly.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of customers did you go after? Were they Fortune 500, Global 2000, or small businesses? >>>

Building a New Niche Brand from New Hampshire: Yogibo CEO Eyal Levy (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: By the end of 2014, what was your level of e-commerce business?

Eyal Levy: Because we grew the business through other options, the percentage of the online business remained within the 15% to 20% range. Domestically, it grew. It went up to 25%.

Sramana Mitra: I have one question which I can’t help asking. This is one of the reasons why so many e-commerce brands have done so well. It’s because of not having to invest capital in opening stores, which as you state, is very capital-intensive and hard to finance in the growth phase.

How does the revenue that you generate through e-commerce compare with the revenue that you generate through these capital-intensive stores. Can you build this brand largely through e-commerce and not through all this retail expansion? >>>

Competing with Giants: Colin Earl, CEO of Agiloft (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: All these years, it’s a progression and evolution of the same company that you’re still running today?

Colin Earl: That’s right.

Sramana Mitra: This previous product that you’re comparing your current contract management software with, what year was that?

Colin Earl: The first product was roughly in 1996 to 2002. We ran with that product. We used the revenue from it to fund development of, what is today, Agiloft. >>>