Helping SaaS Companies Grow Through Revenue Sharing: Avangate CEO Carl Theobald (Part 2)

Sramana: This is a very crowded space. How do you differentiate yourselves from others?

Carl Theobald: There are a lot of different companies in our space. There are billing companies that solve part of the problem by assisting with subscription management and billing. We provide a complete solution that goes beyond subscription management and billing. We also provide payment processing, refunds, and chargebacks. We provide 24/7 support as well as marketing tools.

We also provide distribution through our affiliate network which has 40,000 sites such as CNet and Downloads.com. They have their own readership which brings good traffic to our customers and helps sell their product. That distribution helps them grow their revenues. In addition to that, we have a channel management solution which helps our customers on-board true resellers and automate the revenue through those channels. We also provide visibility into those channels so that they can maximize their channel partner relationships and to manage channel conflicts. When you are selling online direct and you have resellers, that becomes an issue.

Our position is that true commerce is more than e-commerce and billing. It is e-commerce, billing, subscription management, and distribution combined. We do all of that for our customers. We have a complete solution that is easy to use. We are the easy button. We can get folks up and running in a matter of days. One of the biggest technology companies in the world, a Fortune 50 company, went down the path of getting a billing tool and connecting it to a payment processor to build their e-commerce customer experience around. It took them nine months and they got one product live, which was available only in the US.

They had 20 other product lines they wanted to get live, each with different business models and pricing models, and they wanted to launch them globally. The project manager had no idea when or how they were going to get that done because what they had done was not a scalable solution. They could not move quickly enough. We are all about time to market and speed. We came in and offered to get their next product live in 100 countries in less than 30 days. They told us if we could do that we would be their heroes. We came in and did it, and they signed us to be a global strategic partner for all of their new SaaS offerings globally.

Our key differentiators are straightforward. First, we are a complete solution. Second, we are all about speed and time to market. You can look at us compared to Digital River like you would look at Salesforce.com compared to Siebel. Digital River is a very high-end solution that is highly customized. It takes a long time to implement, and when you want to make changes it can require a lot of special services. We empower our customers to be independent. We have easy-to-use self-service interfaces.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Helping SaaS Companies Grow Through Revenue Sharing: Avangate CEO Carl Theobald
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