Bootstrapping Using Services and Piggybacking from Australia: StoreConnect CEO Mikel Lindsaar (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Even though you had co-founders, there was no outside money.

Mikel Lindsaar: Yes, everything was bootstrapped.

Sramana Mitra: You talked about four SaaS apps now. Three of them you exited, and one is still running.

Mikel Lindsaar: Right. There are two more. One was a learning management system. I built that one as a training management system. It’s instructor-led training. Most learning management systems have multiple choice or Yes or No options. This system allows an instructor to communicate and work directly with the student and evaluate their answers, and only advance them if they demonstrate application and understanding of the step.

It’s a way to do self-paced training with verification of application during the process. We built this and we launched it. Most learning management systems have a completion rate between 4% and 6% of everyone who signs up. Our system has a completion rate of 67%.

Sramana Mitra: You system required instructors who were buying the system to offer their courses on?

Mikel Lindsaar: Yes. You would come in and you would create a course to teach people how to bootstrap a business. On top of that, you would have your staff check the students’ answers as they go through. We still have all the standard stuff, but, at certain points, we might ask the students to write an essay answer or upload a file, or demonstrate that they can do what they said they’d do. A human can look at that and grade it.

I sold that about a year and a half ago. That was more a labor of love. I didn’t try to go for a big exit on that. I’m still involved in it, but I’m no longer running it day-to-day. Then four years ago, I started StoreConnect. I started that at the end of 2017. I just realized that there’s this behemoth in the room called Salesforce which has 200,000 customers worldwide. All of these companies have their product data, pricing information, accounts, and contacts. They run their orders and sales through this.

I thought, “What if we built a layer on top of Salesforce that took all of that data and turned it into an e-commerce platform?” Instead of having to re-enter your product data and try to synchronize it, why don’t we just build it on top of Salesforce and you have a website that has commerce.

Salesforce is already doing this for enterprise customers. They have their CommerceCloud solution, but that’s mid-market to enterprise. I wanted to make something for the small to medium players so they could compete against Amazon for their products. We built StoreConnect. I started building that four years ago.

I realized that StoreConnect could actually bring in E-Commerce 3.0 for small businesses. E-Commerce 3.0 is the idea that you should be on one platform to know everything about your data. You should have this single source of truth about your customers. You don’t want to be logging into 10 systems to find out if that customer has delivered their product or if their case has been resolved.

Secondly, you should own your own data. You shouldn’t be dependent on Google or Facebook telling you that the ads you’re paying for are doing very well. You should be able to verify that yourself. With those two things in place, a small to medium business owner can compete against large players. They can see the data and they only have to enter it once. This was a really novel idea.

Sramana Mitra: Help me with the positioning. It sits on top of Salesforce. Are you competing with Shopify?

Mikel Lindsaar: Yes. Almost all of our customers that signed up are ex-Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, or Magento. We do offer the multi-store capability. One of our customers has 73 commerce stores in four currencies in four countries. They’ve got multiple of everything. They’ve got 25 Shopify stores and 10 BigCommerce stores. They have two full-time staff that do nothing but manage spreadsheets to try to keep that all up to date. We replace all of that with five Salesforce licenses and one StoreConnect license.

Sramana Mitra: You would have it all on StoreConnect and Salesforce.

Mikel Lindsaar: Correct. It avoids things like getting a voucher from a company the day after you bought something for 20% off of that. It truly is an amazing product. I incubated that from 2017 to 2021 inside of my other bootstrapped business.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Bootstrapping Using Services and Piggybacking from Australia: StoreConnect CEO Mikel Lindsaar
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