Bootstrapping From Germany: Cleverbridge CEO Christian Blume (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Now that we’ve gone through the background analysis, position the product for me. Which customers are you going after? Specifically, what was the value proposition that you were going to deliver?

Christian Blume: We didn’t want to deliver a me-too product because there had been so many go’s at this already over the years. All of the companies that started out in this area, what they offered was a website that was password-secured. When you entered the password, you’d get into an administration site. You have the opportunity to update basic information. You can change the color, upload the logo, and create products. Some of those services offered limited promotion capabilities.

When we went in to the market in 2005, we figured that it was really time to change the approach of how we would like to tackle this market from a variety of different angles. The first one was that we didn’t want to focus on companies that were selling maybe one license on a monthly basis. We really wanted to target those companies that have experience in e-commerce and selling their software products into the international market. We were looking at high-volume software publishers who wanted to get into the next generation of selling in e-commerce solutions. That was our target group. We didn’t want to work with a one-man-and-a-cat show because we wanted to give a powerful solution to very experienced companies that had already conducted e-commerce selling for quite some time.

The second thing that we then decided was we wanted to try out new technology as opposed to taking the me-too approach and saying, “Let’s build another one of those password-secured websites with all the limitations that HTML 1 would actually offer you.” We said, “We want to create something different.” We actually created an application that resides within the infrastructure of a respective company where you’d install this application and have all the functionality that an application will offer you, and thus eliminate all of the limitations of a password-secure website.

Obviously, you don’t win clients if you’re having a good administration interface. The more important part of it was we created a front-end that was extremely flexible. We allowed our service to be administrated on the front-end side for independent work on the work flow, layout, and design. We split the front-end part to three different pieces that could be administrated separately from each other. The first one was the work flow, layout, and the design of how you would actually be presenting your e-commerce functionality to the end consumer. What that entailed was it would allow us to offer our prospects and clients to say, “What kind of a checkout process would you like to present to the consumer? What is the best way to sell your product?” As long as they were able to draw the checkout process onto a piece of paper, it would be something that would be natively supported by our system.

That offered a huge amount of flexibility, as you can imagine, if you can administrate those three pieces independently. What we combined this with was right off the bat with an engine which allowed us to test against different setups. For example, I could configure a two-page checkout process, combine that with another checkout process, and then run through a GYP engine. That would have traffic coming from different angles onto these checkout processes in order to understand which one had the highest impact on the conversion rate. It’s not as simple as saying, “Every locale is the same. Every buyer is the same. You can have a single checkout process.” It’s hugely different as to how an individual interacts with the commerce engine. This was a success point for us.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Bootstrapping From Germany: Cleverbridge CEO Christian Blume
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