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Web solutions are now delivering Fortune 500 efficiency to small businesses. Apps like Square have simplified point-of-sale; Twitter, Facebook and Google+ now deliver a media channel, without an expensive PR department; Magento and Shopify can quickly turn a brick-and-mortar shop into a thriving Internet business; and Docstoc offers 20 million crowdsourced business documents, without expensive lawyers.
From this new small business movement comes Lettuce. Lettuce is a “really simple and intuitive order management and inventory system for small and mid-sized business,” said CEO Raad Mobrem. “Basically it’s like using the back-end system Walmart would have and democratizing it.”
Like all inventions, Lettuce was born out of necessity. Mobrem’s previous startup, Durable Ideas, a dog toy company, grew its retail presence to over 2,000 location and was losing too much time manually syncing data between vendor, accounting and inventory systems. Unfortunately, standard enterprise resource planning systems, which integrate such software for larger companies, were overkill and too expensive for their small business, so they decided to build a custom software integration solution for themselves.
Unwittingly, by trying to integrate Durable Idea’s backend systems, Lettuce took a crack at a problem that few had dared to solve - syncing small business back-end systems, a decision that, in hindsight, Mobrem said was “the craziest thing in the world.”
Even “integrating into Quickbooks was difficult,” said Mobrem. Lettuce was “developed by trial and error and iteration.” The process was unbelievably trying.
But when they succeeded, people started to take notice. Fellow small businesses started asking to buy their software. At first they refused because “we built Lettuce for ourselves originally,” said Mobrem. However, when the requests persisted the team thought maybe they were onto something. Not long later, Durable Ideas was sold and Lettuce became the sole focus.
And Lettuce’s timing was ideal. “If you were trying to do this three years ago the economics did not make any sense,” said Mobrem. But now because “all businesses have an online presence” managing back-end systems has become increasingly complicated. “For small businesses to think about back-end is crazy because its so much extra work and to do it profitably takes an enormous effort.”
For many small businesses it takes “30-60 minutes to process a wholesales order,” said Mobrem, however, “it takes two seconds with Lettuce.”
The system is mostly sold to small and medium size wholesale and e-commerce companies. It most commonly integrates into shipping applications from UPS, USPS, and FedEx, accounting software QuickBooks, and turnkey ecommerce site Shopify. According to Mobrem, initial integration of these systems takes no more than two hours.
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Lettuce Wholesale Point of Sales App
Delivered with a SaaS model, Lettuce varies in price from $39 to $179 per month. Funded in October 2012, with $2.1 million in seed funding from Crosscut Ventures, 500 Startups, Baroda Ventures, Zelkova Ventures, Double M Partners, and Launchpad LA Lettuce is steadily growing with over 400 customers and 2,000 users.
Lettuce’s growth strategy is mostly marketing based, “because we are going after small businesses we have to make customer acquisition economical” said Mobrem. New marketing efforts are netting around 500-600 leads per month, with customer acquisition cost across Lettuce’s various marketing and sales channels amounting to between $170 - $1200.
When describing his goals in the next six months, Mobrem said, “I think in terms of stages.” The company is focused on increasing distribution, adding more integration and “fine tuning the current product, making it faster and a little more slick.”
By thinking incrementally and by “breaking goals down into pieces” said Mobrem, he believes this small business-focused company can “add up to something bigger.”
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