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$325,000 in seed funding, access to industry talent from local universities and a wealth of knowledge from mentor Bill Gross. What else does an early stage e-commerce company in LA need?
Not much else in Sellbrite’s case: “There’s really nothing keeping us from being successful here in LA,” CEO and co-founder Brian Nolan said.
Thanks to a few early factors going their way (like meeting Idealab last year), the multi-channel e-commerce company has met some success points already: their web-based platform just launched commercially having already reached some year one numbers three months ahead of schedule.
“Demand has been much bigger; we’ve already reached year one goals in terms of number of users,” Nolan said.
So many users (aka small to medium-sized retailers with a couple million in revenue) have jumped on board to get access to Sellbrite because it is solving a much-needed problem in the commerce space. With the increase of online retailers using a multi-channel sales strategy (eBay, Amazon, Etsy), they need a way to simplify their product distribution across them.
The struggle was all too real for Nolan and CMO Michael Ugino, who both were previously at Pasedena-based CPO Commerce: the online tool retailer was processing about $20 million on various channels, a load increasingly difficult to manage with old, siloed products.
So the pair launched Sellbrite to give retailers a way to list and sell products, manage orders and inventory and get some deep analytics from a single platform.
Other players in the space provide similar solutions but are coming at it from different angles like ChannelAdvisor who focuses on enterprise clients with a client services component and StitchLabs who is solving problems more on the backend (orders, inventory) for retailers.
“We are for the power seller,” Nolan said.
With the help of Idealab, Sellbrite is focusing on “building a community, building a lot of content and a good, simple product.” Also on the team’s plate is a Series A raise of about $2 million to $3.5 million.
“It’s important to remember that not all companies are the sexy Snapchats, but we’re solving a good problem with cutting edge technology and looking to grow big pretty quickly,” Nolan said.
