Woman Entrepreneur Building a Successful, VC Funded Business: Olivia Skuza, CEO of NuORDER (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What’s the next major inflection point in your business?

Olivia Skuza: So far, we’ve raised $25 million. We did a $3.6 million seed in 2012. Then we did Series A in 2013 for $7.5 million. New partners joined that one. Then we did an interim round in 2015 and a Series B in late 2016. We did that with Argentum, we were excited about them.

In terms of the inflection point, early on it was about proving that product market fit and trying to get that traction in the market. The most recent round of funding has been very critical for us in terms of focusing on people and leadership. If I look at lessons learned, that was something that I would probably have shifted earlier. We used that Series B to build an amazing leadership team so we can focus on scaling the company and not be so reliant on myself and Heath doing everything. That has been a huge focus for us in the last 12 to 18 months.

Sramana Mitra: At what point were you able to start closing the large wholesalers?

Olivia Skuza: We operate in a couple of segments. We have a lot of SMB but we also have enterprises. Two years ago was when we first landed our first whale. That’s really been the core over the last 18 months – focusing on the strategy and products that were required to support enterprises businesses.

Sramana Mitra: What percentage of the business now is enterprise?

Olivia Skuza: I would say a third.

Sramana Mitra: In an enterprise account, what is the average deal size?

Olivia Skuza: It’s in the hundreds of thousands.

Sramana Mitra: A year, right?

Olivia Skuza: Right.

Sramana Mitra: What do you have to do to close these enterprise customers? Do you have a field sales force that goes and meets the customers?

Olivia Skuza: Absolutely. We have a sales and marketing engine within the organization. We have staff of 80 now. I would say a good quarter of that is sales. That can often be touched by the marketing team or the sales rep. Enterprise deal is a very different process. It’s not a one touch point that we can get into. It’s bottom-up approach. It’s about networking and leveraging customer referrals. It’s the easiest opportunity for us to be focusing on because everyone knows everyone. You can usually get in and see who’s connected and start those conversations.

Sramana Mitra: How many total number of wholesalers are on the platform today?

Olivia Skuza: We have 850 brands that are on the platform today. To flip that on the other side, we have 375,000 retailers that now have access to the platform.

Sramana Mitra: Fantastic.

Olivia Skuza: A really cool thing about that is, in terms of the traction that the platform has been seeing, we’ve processed over $15 billion of retail GMV through the platform. The really cool part of that is that we did half of that last year. The growth is so quick. The retail adoption and the pace of the market is amazing. We see the tipping point, and we feel it. For a long time, it’s been a futuristic vision. Now, the tone of the conversation is very different.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Woman Entrepreneur Building a Successful, VC Funded Business: Olivia Skuza, CEO of NuORDER
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