We had many customers tell us, “I want to grow, but I am so buried in these daily tasks that I just don’t have the time to grow!”

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Bringing an idea from conceptualization to the drawing board, through product development and into the marketplace is a challenge every entrepreneur must face.  For Jagath Narayan, Sangram Kadam, Naruby Schlenker and Ben Weatherman, Co-founders of Ordoro, turning their vision into a reality, in seemingly large strides, has taken little more than a year’s time to accomplish.   From the initial goal of improving the logistics of order fulfillment for online businesses, they were lead to building an easy to use, web-based order management system for small and medium sized ecommerce retailers that is already experiencing good growth.

One of the keys for the Ordoro team was working closely with a small group of core customers early in the development cycle which enabled them to evolve their product quickly, increase sales and grow their business organically with no outside funding.  Here they share a little piece of the back story on where they began, discuss one of the challenges posed by their unique business model, and offer some thoughts on the advantage of SaaS (Software as a Service) for small businesses.

MO:
How did Ordoro germinate from the initial concept that you may have talked about or put down on paper, to the point where you actually made your first sale? Can you walk us briefly through the path you took in those early stages?

Ordoro:
When we first came together, we had the grand idea of building an inventory optimization tool for online retailers that would help them figure out the optimal quantities on hand, the re-order points, etc.  Then we started talking to many online retailers to validate the idea and quickly figured out that they could care less about optimal levels of inventory! They had even more basic problems to tackle.

As it stands today, many online retailers struggle to manage the process of printing shipping labels, dropshipping from their suppliers, and keeping track of what they have in stock. All these processes are extremely manual and these manual processes end up hurting the retailer’s operational efficiency. This lack of efficiency in turn prevents their growth. We had many customers tell us, “I want to grow, but I am so buried in these daily tasks that I just don’t have the time to grow!”

Once we realized that there were more immediate and basic needs to fulfill, we changed our plan and began asking different questions to customers.  Very early on, we signed up a few beta customers, and with their feedback we built an easy to use, web-based order management tool. Now, with just a login and a password, online retailers can use Ordoro to process orders, print shipping labels, drop ship orders and track their real time inventory at all times.

MO:
Has Ordoro had any funding, or has the business been entirely bootstrapped, or has it been some combination of the two?

Ordoro:
The company started out with an initial investment from the founders. We had already built good relationships with our first few customers and we were able to convert them into paying customers very early on in the product development cycle. That helped cover for our operational expenses thus eliminating the need to raise additional funding.

In the past year, we’ve been able to build a customer base, form successful partnerships, and prove that there is market need for the solution and that we have a viable operational model.  A year ago Ordoro was an idea, today it is a growing business.

MO:
Did Ordoro start out as a SaaS (Software as a Service) provider, or did it evolve out of the more traditional self-hosted software model?  What’s the value of SaaS for a small business?

Ordoro:
Ordoro did start out as a SaaS business. As a matter of fact, as we were going through our market validation, one of the things we realized is that small businesses were struggling and getting frustrated in maintaining and servicing desktop based software. SaaS takes away all of the pain involved in managing in-house systems, and for our target market that translates to huge cost savings. So from the very beginning we were sure that SaaS is the way to go in this market segment.

In addition to the IT maintenance savings, SaaS, with its pay-as-you-go subscription model, enables small businesses to get started at a low entry price point to start with and then scale as their business grows. This dramatically reduces the barrier to entry for small businesses.

MO:
Most e-commerce and shopping cart platforms come with built in order management features. What makes Ordoro better than using the native tools that come bundled with those applications?

Ordoro:
Most shopping carts focus on having the best in class store front, SEO, marketing and other buyer facing features and functions. Because that is the core feature they are bringing to the table. So their built-in order management features are very basic. As we have developed Ordoro, we have realized that understanding and developing solutions for the logistics on an online retailing business is not a trivial task.  Shopping carts offer the most value to their customers doing what they do best, and developing this whole new set of back office features would require new competencies and resources.  As of today, many of the carts do not offer features that most online retailers need to process orders such as drop shipping, creating/printing shipping labels, paying for postage, splitting up orders and such.

In addition, we are seeing a trend where online retailers are starting to follow a multi-channel strategy where they sell on multiple storefronts and marketplaces.  This helps them target specific customer segments more effectively.  If they relied on each platform’s basic back-office features, they would have to manage multiple sets of inventories, orders, etc.  Ordoro can help these merchants process all their orders from multiple channels in a consolidated way from one place and keep inventory in sync across all of these channels.

MO:
Ordoro integrates with e-commerce platforms like Shopsite and BigCommerce to improve their overall utility.  Are there specific challenges that come with developing a business model around being a value-add to other stand alone products?

Ordoro:
The primary challenge is that we are a downstream application to these e-commerce platforms. Therefore, customers perceive us as an add-on to the system which they are already using. We are dependent on integrations and partnerships with these platforms to grow our customer base. However, we took this challenge and turned it around to make it a benefit. Since we know that all our customers are also e-commerce platform customers, that makes it easier for us to identify our potential customer base. Also, if we can form mutually beneficial partnerships with e-commerce platforms, that would help us solve the sales lead generation problem.

MO:
If you were to engage in another start-up venture tomorrow, name one thing you would go about doing differently the next time around? What have you learned so far?

Ordoro:
Early on we did outbound sales for some time and it was a great way to further validate the idea and talk to potential customers.  However, it was time intensive and the return on investment was low. It took us a few months to switch over to an inbound marketing model, where customers come to us rather than us seeking them out. Inbound marketing models are hard to build and they take a long time to start showing results. Next time we would probably do outbound calls for validation only very early on, and then move quickly towards building an inbound marketing model.