Bootstrapping by Piggybacking: Evenica CEO Sadek Ali (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You had a diverse set of e-commerce platforms that were in that portfolio.

Sadek Ali: That’s correct. We didn’t really know what the platform was. I picked up technologies my entire life. If you understand how e-commerce works, then you know the operational side of it that they’re looking for. We did that and we said, “Let’s make sure our contracts are easy. Let’s make sure we have happy customers and let’s make sure we have a happy culture in this little group of three.”

They liked our hands-on approach and they liked being able to have an open and honest conversation about e-commerce. We got our three customers monetized right away. For two customers, it took us two years. We still had the contract for them, but they wouldn’t pay us a penny. We had to be persistent because we wanted that conversation with them.

Sramana Mitra: What was the nugget that came out of those conversations?

Sadek Ali: The nugget was why they would not move to the cloud. They were being forced to move to the cloud.

Sramana Mitra: Magento and Shopify were cloud software.

Sadek Ali: Magento was only recently cloud-based. That’s when Adobe had bought them. Shopify is cloud-based. We’re talking eight years ago. Shopify was seen as a simple storefront. No one understood their message. They had all these new technologies, but no one had any idea how to use those technologies. In big corporates, they have huge budgets. They can compete just by throwing money at it. Small players have agility.

The mid-market is fighting the little guys with agility. They’re fighting region by region. With the big guys, they are fighting on price points and on channels. This is where that huge part of that mid-market cannot afford to lose all the customizations that they put in because that is the secret sauce. That is what their e-commerce systems have to reflect. They were looking for those players that would help them transform their business.

Someone else might say, “That looks like a defect.” That is not a defect; that is our competitive advantage. We have a totally different ground game from these big guys.

Sramana Mitra: We have all these disparate platforms that you are supporting in that service business. Did you zero in on Shopify to focus all your energy on?

Sadek Ali: Eight years later, we have dedicated resources who are trained and certified on those particular platforms. However, once we were able to get a story together, we were then able to go to our customers and say, “In 2017, we built our first e-commerce platform.”

Sramana Mitra: Own e-commerce platform?

Sadek Ali: Yes, our own separate e-commerce platform in a very crowded market. We were going to talk to them and tell them, “We have the skeleton of our own e-commerce system. You know what we are capable of. We’d like to build on our new platform. We’d like you to be our first customer.” In three of six asks, they said yes. That began our journey into becoming a software company as opposed to a services company.

Sramana Mitra: How did you get to the customers with whom you didn’t have years of experience?

Sadek Ali: This is where it became a product journey. We have to find the right channel. We have traditionally been inside the Microsoft channel. We looked at Shopify, Salesforce, and Magento. It turns out that Microsoft had this vision of where enterprise computing was going to go.

At that time, I didn’t realize that this was Nadela’s opus and grand vision. It was an omnichannel vision where a company touches a customer and becomes part of digital commerce. As you go from ERP to the supply chain, inventory, and warehousing, cloud computing allows you to connect and engage with customers. They called it Microsoft360 at that time.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Bootstrapping by Piggybacking: Evenica CEO Sadek Ali
1 2 3 4 5 6