Managing Multiple Pivots While Scaling to $50 Million: MotionPoint CEO Will Fleming (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What happens after that?

Will Fleming: In 1999, we hung up a shingle to be consultants. That was our way to be exposed to people and projects while we were trying to sort through what we were going to do next. We wanted to start another business. We didn’t have that business in mind yet. The Internet had sprung up. We knew that we knew a whole lot about retail operations working with large retailers from our experience in prepaid. We had also been exposed to changing demographics in the United States and also the impact of data and the ability to use data to drive really good decision-making.

Back in 2000, when we looked at the Internet through the lens of a retail operator, we thought, “This is really interesting. There’s a lot of channel shifting. People who used to call 1-800 are now buying their consumables at OfficeDepot.com. People were buying books, plane tickets, hotel rooms, and things like this. With all of those products, people already know what they are.” However, when we looked at a product like a camcorder, we thought, “Nobody’s going to buy this right now in 2000.”

It was almost impossible to buy a camcorder online. Not because camcorders weren’t online but because when a shopper went online to look at a camcorder, the product information was lacking. It would be a bullet point or a sentence or two. That was just nowhere near enough to help make a buying decision as a consumer. We crafted a solution to deal with that and that’s when we formed MotionPoint.

Sramana Mitra: It was basically a video camera and related products e-commerce venture.

Will Fleming: We referred to it as technology-driven merchandising service. The idea was to provide detailed, product-specific information for products where customers needed a reasonable amount of information to make a buying decision.

Sramana Mitra: What is the business model? Are you selling on your website?

Will Fleming: This is the prior version or the initial version of MotionPoint. The idea was that we provide a merchandising tool called a Virtual Brochure for online retailers. After about a year of trying to get that launched where we had only two customers, we learned that we were in the wrong business and threw away the original business plan. We completely pivoted into a different  business.

Sramana Mitra: What was that new business?

Will Fleming: The new business was website translation.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Managing Multiple Pivots While Scaling to $50 Million: MotionPoint CEO Will Fleming
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