Successful Pivots: Anthony Ferry, CEO of PriceSpider (Part 5)

Anthony Ferry: The veer off to the B2C was because we saw an opportunity where there were a lot of solutions, and we thought that we had better data. It also was a much larger market if we were to succeed. You’re talking about your customers being monetized in a grander scale having millions of users. We were very enamored by that grandiose potential of a B2C solution.

We pursued that for a few years but we became aware of how daunting and challenging that really can be to tackle and to compete in that space unless you’re very well-funded. We were organically funded. We had not taken outside money. It was proving difficult to compete with some of the players. When we got little disillusioned and looked back at our B2B customers, we’d still got them. The light went on and we decided to stick with the B2B side.

Sramana Mitra: Where are you in this part of the business? What revenue level? What level of development?

Anthony Ferry: Once we uncovered the opportunity to build the Where To Buy solution for our consumer electronics customers, that took off very fast. We had some partnership relationships in the e-commerce space. We sold to a couple of dozen consumer electronics customers very quickly. Then we started to branch out from there. Our revenues had gone from a million or so to tripling and doubling our revenue.

We went from $6 million, to $8 million, then $12 million to $17 million last year. We’re on a trajectory to do about $25 million this year. That was all built off of a continually innovating Where To Buy solution and a broadening suite of data reports that we offer to our customers. We have introduced a series of new products as well. Where to Buy is still our champ. It’s our largest deployed solution.

We have nearly 500 deployments worldwide. That’s 500 separate and unique brands. You probably recognize every single one of them. We’ve introduced a minimum advertise price product, which is now a solid structure project to help customers manage their pricing presence on the web and enforce their pricing policies.

We are currently launching a brand of monitoring solutions underneath our brand integrity suite of products that will further help our manufacturing customers to monitor just about anything they want to know about how their products are being represented in the space, whether they are concerned about the images that are being used, the content that’s being displayed, or the text that’s being used. We are monitoring it and are able to report, track, and trend on almost all elements for any manufacturer across any online seller.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Successful Pivots: Anthony Ferry, CEO of PriceSpider
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