Building a Capital-Efficient Niche SaaS Startup from The Netherlands: Hatch CEO Joris Kroese (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: How long did you do the IT services work?

Joris Kroese: For a year and a half, after which, I sold the company. I actually had a new business idea in my mind while I was still running the e-commerce business. We did a lot of turnovers. We were a much-appreciated business partner for business brands. All those brands, back then, had a dealer locator.

If you go to Philips, you’d find our company with our address. We didn’t have a retail store but, rather, an office from which we ran our e-commerce operations. That would send a lot of consumers to our office address.

We would ask those brands whether they wanted to make an integration between their website and our website. They would just complete the purchase with their credit card in our store. That was the idea. We felt it was crazy that brands allowed this to exist. It was bad for the consumer experience. The brands spent a lot of money and effort on making a nice product catalog. They were just lacking e-commerce options.

When we reached out to the brands, they said, “It’s a global website. We can’t decide locally. We’ve got thousands of retailers. If you are to do this, we want to make it a level playing field.” This is where the idea for Hatch was born. We planned to offer this as a service for brands.

Sramana Mitra: Explain to me what, specifically, the value proposition that Hatch provides.

Joris Kroese: We basically inject commerce technology onto the brand’s product page. We would include retail purchase options including a link. Imagine you’re looking for a new television. You go to Samsung. Now you’re lacking purchase options. We would just add an option to buy it from BestBuy or Amazon. We would have integration with the inventory of these retailers.

Sramana Mitra: How did you launch this? Was there one brand that said they were going to do this with you?

Joris Kroese: I did a pitch at a venture forum in Belgium. I presented the idea to venture capitalists. I won the best startup presentation award. We sought a business partner. In this case, it was a company in content syndication. They distribute digital content. They already had those brand relations and they also had integrations with the retail inventory systems. They will use the existing data feeds.

Sramana Mitra: How did you find this company?

Joris Kroese: We were using them. You only have the SKU number. Based on that SKU number, they can provide the full data feed, product images, and marketing text on a subscription basis. They had similar subscriptions with thousands of retailers. I pitched the idea to them and made it a partnership where they would become a shareholder in this venture in exchange for having access to the data and brands that they work with. I tagged along with their sales teams visiting brands.

Sramana Mitra: European brands?

Joris Kroese: Global brands. One of our first clients was Intel.

Sramana Mitra: Intel is not a consumer product company.

Joris Kroese: That’s true. I’m proud of the fact that we’re still working globally with Intel. They’re an ingredient brand where they make computer chips that are embedded in laptops. They mainly sell to OEM partners like HP and Asus. We disclose all of those laptops and purchase options on the Intel website. It allows Intel to market the latest generation of CPUs. We tell them which laptops have that CPU integrated, where you can buy them, and what are the specifications. It allows Intel to close the marketing loop.

Sramana Mitra: It’s B2B commerce.

Joris Kroese: B2B2C. We have smaller brands as well that are direct to consumer.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Building a Capital-Efficient Niche SaaS Startup from The Netherlands: Hatch CEO Joris Kroese
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