Jay: This week’s show guest is Anurag Avula, co-founder and CEO of Shopmatic. Shopmatic is a plug-and-play solution for bringing companies online. It’s an ecommerce platform that provides you all you need to sell online or on social media or in person. Anurag is the man behind Shopmatic. He’s previously worked in payments and banking. He’s held senior roles in Standard Chartered Bank, NCR, and MasterCard, and was most recently senior director for merchant, sales, strategy, and operations at PayPal Asia Pacific. This is where he met his co-founders of Shopmatic. Anurag, welcome to the show.

Anurag: Thanks, Jay. Good to be here.

Jay: I kind of glossed over your background. You obviously are well credentialed and have a lot of experience, but maybe, just for a little bit more color, for our audience, you could give us a little bit of your background, where you’re from, maybe what you studied, and what led you down this path of eventual entrepreneurship.

Anurag: That’s fine. I’ve cover a little bit of my background, as well both at work as well as the most behavioral elements that will probably give a better color about why Shopmatic came into being, in effect.

So, essentially, as you rightly pointed out, my last role was at PayPal, and I was tasked to look after the merchant services portfolio and building the PayPal franchise across the Asia Pacific region. And that was when things got very interesting for us as we were engaging with customers all across the different markets and emerging markets where we found them not having the entire tools and capability for them to be able to take their business online. So PayPal supported payments is one element of it, but then there was a whole other side of online ecommerce that it was not very easily accessible or, even if it was, it was at a much high cost that they were not willing to pay. So essentially, that was where the idea came about for us, from a Shopmatic standpoint.

But prior to that, essentially most of my roles and experience has been in the emerging market space, be it India, Asia, Africa, or the Middle East for that matter. That, along with the fact of the understanding of PayPal and the ecommerce space made it clear that there is a huge opportunity for us to be able to leverage some of those capabilities and provide solutions for customers in those geographies.

That’s the background in terms of how the whole idea of Shopmatic came about. We’ve found three areas — if I were to just touch upon three areas that we considered while building the platform.

One was the access or understanding of people on technology. And we removed that entirely from the ecosystem in terms of being able to support those capabilities that customers might want.

The second was transparency in terms of pricing. We just wanted to make it very, very clear that people got…what they see is what they got. And finally, the last bit was in terms of hand-holding and taking and supporting the customers through their life cycle. So we have a team of ecommerce consultants that essentially are tasked with building and making our customers become successful. And that’s the whole idea of where Shopmatic came about.

Jay: Got it. You obviously have vast experience across multiple countries and within ecommerce. I’m curious, and I like to ask all entrepreneurs this. From someone that has come from a more traditional, corporate background, I guess you can call PayPal more of a tech, but it’s a very well-established company at this point. So for you to break out from that and basically do, after many years, to basically take the leap and become an entrepreneur and do your own startup, what was that process like? Was there a catalyst or a certain pain point that made you take the leap?

Anurag: There’s always been that itch in me, to be able to look at making a difference or trying to make a difference in terms of… Not saying that PayPal didn’t make a difference. But you were making a difference under the cover and the umbrella of a larger enterprise. Essentially, PayPal was a great learning experience for us, for the three co-founders, in fact, for us to be able to understand and get deeper into the ecosystem of online commerce.

And essentially, again, if I go back to my primary, one of the previous points that I was suggesting, wherein the markets that we were operating in provided a wonderful ecosystem wherein there was such a huge phenomenon of people wanting to do something with their lives, become entrepreneurs, try and create something of their own and be able to take it and become successful at that. And there wasn’t a supporting ecosystem that was allowing that for, as I called them, emerging customers or new-to-ecommerce customers. And there wasn’t that ecosystem that was providing a platform for people to be able to do that, be it a homemaker who is making wonderful earrings sitting at her home in Singapore or someone designing fashion clothes in India or a lady or a crab sales guy, selling wonderful crab in Hong Kong.

So based on each of those guys, everyone wants the ability to be able to make that happen but not worry so much about technology. Technology becomes agnostic to people. So that was one of the big, big elements for us. But also, the fact that the three co-founders, all three of us, were very clear that if you had to do something, it would really happen together. And essentially, in terms of age, I have a lot of gray hair right now, and making that jump was absolutely thought through in many ways. It was not impulsive like we woke up one day in the morning and said, “Let’s go and do something.” The idea was that we knew that there was a significant opportunity. The fact that we wanted to build a sustainable business. And at the end of the day, we wanted to make a meaningful difference to a small business or an individual entrepreneur or an SME and really make it count.

So for us today, we have big partnerships with HDFC Bank or Singtel in Singapore. But the biggest thing for us that really, really warms our hearts is that one lady who was sitting in Hyderabad in India saying that I became successful because of you guys and that you made it happen for us. And to me, there is no better feeling than when a customer writes to you and tells you some things of that sort. So while it was thought through, I would say that you obviously don’t see all the elements that are going to come and hit you or make life interesting for you. But at the end of the day, the courage of our partners, the fact that we’re all working together for a common purpose, a brilliant team, allows us that ability to say I think we made the right call.

Jay: Absolutely. You raise a couple of very key points here that I think a lot of people that might have that entrepreneurial itch have considered in the past. But it’s very important to… Entrepreneurship is quite sought after and sort of glamorized and this sort of thing. But it is a very difficult decision. You have to be smart about it. You can’t just be like “I want to be a startup founder” one day and jump out of bed and do it. And I think the other important thing that you touched upon is that while money is important in this world and in our lives, there has to be a greater purpose to what you’re doing. And if there isn’t, I think you can’t get through those failures and those difficult, dark days, those pivots and all this sort of thing. Because if your only motivation is money and getting rich, then you’ll just give up and try something else, or you won’t be able to pull yourself through that. But when you actually have that big vision, North Star vision of help entrepreneurs or whatever it might be, I think that’s crucial to any startup success.

Did you guys launch in India first or was it Singapore?

Anurag: We actually launch in India first, and I think that stemmed from a lot of… Similar to the point that you just raised, I think, for us, we felt that the biggest purpose would get us in a market like India with the opportunities there and also the fact that India is not an easy market. I’m not saying any market is easy, but India is a lot harder than other markets that you would have, considering the access or the understanding of ecommerce, technology, data infrastructure, and things like that. It was a lot harder. Hence, we took the approach that if we were to get India right, then the rest of the markets become a lot easier for us to work with.

So we launched in India in January 2016 and then followed that up with Singapore and Hong Kong about six months after. And that, I think, played out well for us as well, because I think we really were able to nail down the simplicity and ease of use and some of the key value props that we were able to bring to our customers.

Jay: Yeah. Anurag, we’ll probably need a separate podcast episode to discuss India as a market because it is so nuanced. Anyone that’s been following the startup scene, we saw the Gold Rush of investors go in in 2014, 2015, and then most of them just pulled out or failed, or there were significant down rounds in their investments or closed, shut down investments. So it’s very nuanced. It’s very difficult. So I think you guys did the right thing — tackled, perhaps, the hardest market first and then rolled out subsequently.

I want to just dig in to the actual, the meat and bones of your company. Shopmatic, your aim is to basically facilitate small SMEs or small business owners to get online and basically get their shop running. That’s my understanding. How does Shopmatic differ from a Shopify or I don’t know if you’ve heard of Shopline?

Anurag: Yes, which is Hong Kong based.

Jay: Yeah, Hong Kong, Taiwan. How do you guys differentiate yourself from these other competitors?

Anurag: I think I’ll probably try and tackle that on two different angles. One is from an overall value proposition standpoint. Our essence was clear, that we want to provide the entire ecosystem for anyone wanting to sell online. So right from, obviously, creating storefronts to having a payment gateway or a logistics provider or shipping integrated within the platform, but also the ability to sell across multiple marketplaces, be it Amazon or EBay or Lazada or ZALORA or Rakuten or any of the other local marketplaces that you might have in different countries that we operate in.

So in effect, making sure that people have one single platform, to be able to sell on their own store as well as on multiple channels and also on social media channels as well. So you can create a Facebook store, Instagram and what have you. And you’re able to create the entire ecosystem for being able to sell online. That is at one level.

At the other level, the ability for us to provide, considering the target audience that we’re working with, the ability for us to provide education, hand-holding, and the ability to really build a business along with our customers is the key differentiations in terms of what we provide. At a technology level, things can always be equalized. But essentially, the way we approached it is to take the approach of making sure that we had the entire ecosystem and we were hand-holding our customer through the entire process.

For instance, if you were to sign up with Shopmatic and you’ll get assigned to Anurag, then Anurag is your guy to go to for just about everything — from building it, for you to be able to understand what SEO is and how to use Google Adwords or Facebook Pixel. And any of that stuff, your call will always return back to Anurag, for him to be able to understand you better, understand your planning, and then your business plan and then make you successful at that.

So in effect, that’s how we round it off and bring the holistic solution to our customer.

Jay: That’s pretty comprehensive. I want to talk about… I literally just pulled up your website. There’s a tagline that says “Set up your ecommerce store on your phone in two minutes,” which is pretty incredible. Let’s walk through the actual customer experience. Let’s say I’m Jay Kim. I want to start a shoe store online, and I come to Shopmatic because I heard about your solution, and I want to try it out versus somewhere else. So what is the actual user experience like?

Anurag: Before we get down that path, we have, actually, two products. One is Shopmatic Go, which is a mobile app where you can download it and set up your store in less than two minutes. That allows you to just build a storefront and has a payment gateway included within that package and is absolutely free for a customer to use. So you can come in. You can set it up. And you’re ready to start selling. That said, it doesn’t come with an entire full-stack solution, which is a solution that I’ll talk to you about for your shoe store, what is called Shopmatic Pro.

In effect, if you come, and you’ve heard about us from a friend, you come in, you say you want to get a free trial. You’re taken to a selection of 70-odd templates based on your category of business that you’re in. Because you’re selling shoes, let’s pick a template from fashion and accessories. You have five or six templates that you could select. You could preview it. You could determine which one appeals to you the best or reflects your brand or your product at the best.

That said, a template is a template. So you could change the images and every single merchant’s site looks different because it’s their picture, their content. And it is your picture, your content that would go on it. And it’s essentially your story. And that’s what we propagate, that it’s your story.

Once you select your template, you sign up — email, ID, and password — and then we collect some business information from you — your address and your telephone number, and that’s about it. Once you do that, then we’re walking you through an automated tutorial at that point. It’s a do-it-along-with-us model. So you’re actually, in effect, building your store with one product and one cover image, and that will take through the entire onboarding experience.

Once you key in your name and address and your telephone number, you will go in to set up a product. So when you go set up a product, you will just upload an image. You can actually do four images per product. You can them apply different SKUs to it like size, color, whichever model that you want to put, the description of your product — let’s call it Jay’s Blue Shoes — and a price for it. You can put a list selling price or a list price, both of which you could put. The discount comes into the display automatically. If your list price is higher than your selling price, it show you that you got a discount available on that.

And then you hit next. We provide you with a free Shopmatic domain, which is JaysShoes.myShopmatic.com. That’s a subdomain. You could choose to buy a domain from GoDaddy, which is whom we partner with. Or if you have your own domain, you can actually just key that number in and hit connect, and everything else sort of automatically happens in the back. Post which, you’ll be taken to a payments page. Since you’re from Hong Kong, you will have PayPal available for you. You’ll have PayPal. You’ll have cash on delivery, and you’ll have something which we call off-line payments, which you can put in your bank account details for a buyer, when he’s checking out, to be able to do the bank transfer or pay you with PayPal or use a credit card or a debit card. The moment you hit PayPal, at the backend, all your credentials that you’ve given us in terms of your name and address and email ID and password, is sent back to PayPal, and you’re asked to confirm whether you want to set up a PayPal account. The moment you hit that, the account is already set up at the back end. Your verification of the account will happen at a later point in time, but essentially, your payment gateway is then set up within two or three minutes.

And then you’re taken to a shipping page. You can set up your shipping. Just hit a button and the same credentials are transferred to Easyship, which is an aggregator that we work with in Hong Kong who has all the players, whether it’s DHL or FedEx and all the other players within Hong Kong are available on the platform. And then, essentially, you’ll be taken and said, okay, do you want to publish your site? You have a cover image, which you can change, and then your site is ready to get published. And then you have a 15-day free trial to really build out your store. You can spend time figuring it out, customizing it out.

But essentially, we’re walking you through the first steps of setting up a store so that you understand the ease and simplicity of how easy it is for you to do that, actually. So essentially, about 65, 70% of our customers will sign up, go through this “happy flow” for us, as we call it. And that gives people a lot of confidence.

In the interim, if you drop off, somebody will reach out to you and say, “Jay, do you want some help?” You have chat options, co-browsing options to help with building the store out.

Jay: Right. That sounds super hassle free as far as what you just described over the line basically. I’m not even looking at it visually. But from how you described it, it seems very, very easy for someone to get their store online and all the support that you guys provide is obviously invaluable.

Can you talk to us a little bit about — you mentioned it before — the social media selling and what features you have there?

Anurag: Yeah. What we do is when you get through this process, there will be a drop-down menu for you. You can actually do selling on multiple channels. That takes you to a tab which has the marketplaces in your country that is available, whether it be Lazada, Amazon, and EBay, and then you’re able to set up. Ideally, you should have an account with them. So the moment you hit the sell on Amazon, what we do is we optimize the entire catalog that you have on our platform for Amazon. We optimize the catalog for EBay, because each one of the marketplaces has a different requirement in terms of what are the sizes of the image, what are the different categorizations that you need to do. We actually automate that at the backend so that you don’t have to worry about going to different marketplaces and then relisting your product from that standpoint. Essentially, the same catalog that you’ve created on the Shopmatic platform is used to propagate itself to the other marketplaces, only on the grounds that, of course, you should have an account with the marketplaces. And all the commissions that go to the marketplaces are settled between the marketplace and you. But what we provide for is the capability that you don’t need to go and do this multiple times on multiple marketplaces. One catalog. Sell to as many other channels as you want.

On the Facebook side, we actually create a Facebook store for you as well. So the moment you go and hit sell on Facebook, it authenticates your Facebook credentials. Then, seamless, within the next moment, you work find that your store is actually created with all the product catalog that you actually have on the Shopmatic platform is now available for you to either sell it or market it on Facebook. And if anyone now comes to the Facebook side and hits the buy button, it takes you back to the cart for you to complete the transaction of the site. And you can put in your Twitter handle. You can put in all the Instagram, Pinterest pieces likewise.

Jay: That sounds incredible. Basically, literally, it’s automatic. Shop-matic.

Anurag: That’s the genius of the name though.

Jay: Exactly. It just makes it sound so easy.

A quick question on connecting with the payment processor. As someone that’s come from PayPal, you probably know the payments landscape very well. I know that there are some challenges, depending on what your business is, to finding a payment process. Let’s say you had to piecemeal whatever Shopmatic offers separately on your own. You could basically have to build your own website and then add a payment cart system, which might be a separate service that you have to pay for. And then you have to connect it to some sort of PayPal or Stripe type processor. And then there’s also a verification process because PayPal, I know, is a little bit more stringent, I believe… Well, according to Stripe, PayPal is a little bit more stringent with who they accept, and I’m sure it’s vice versa the other way. I guess that goes beyond the scope, basically, of Shopmatic, I’m assuming. Right?

Anurag: What we do, actually, is we… To state it simply, we actually pre-integrate the payments engine on our platform. So in effect, if you were a merchant doing things not with Shopmatic, you would, in effect, have to go to PayPal, get your credentials, API credentials, API key, bring it back onto the platform that you want to use and then put that or integrate that from that perspective. In our case, what we do is all of that we take care of it for you. What you need to do as a seller is to have an account with the payment platform. We are able to transfer all the information that we’ve collected to PayPal or Citrus in India, which we use. And we’re able to create an account on that front. Then you just follow the process.

Of course, you need to give certain information, but it’s all happening as you’re actually building it out. It doesn’t take you more than five minutes to actually do that.

One of the other things that we do, because we pre-integrate it, you’ll actually get a preferential rate if you were to sign up for PayPal on the Shopmatic platform in Singapore and in India. And you actually are able to get a better rate than what you would get if you were to do directly to PayPal. So that also gets transferred back to the customer who is setting up a store.

Jay: Got it. That sounds pretty straightforward. As far as the revenue model goes, I guess it’s a subscription-based model that you guys work off of there?

Anurag: Yes. For the Shopmatic Pro product, it’s subscription based. On the Go, it’s actually free for the customer. We monetize it with the revise share that we get from the payment platforms.  

Jay: I see. Interesting. Anurag, it’s a very, very comprehensive overview. We appreciate that. I think it’s a very cool company you’re building there. Obviously, if I were an entrepreneur or merchant myself, I would love to try your platform. I’m definitely going to check it out. I’m going to have one of my friends who is actually setting it up, I’ll probably ask them to go through it.

Looking forward as far as the company growth and this sort of thing goes, you mentioned you launched in India, and now you’re in a couple of other… Did you say Singapore and Hong Kong? Is that right?

Anurag: That’s right.

Jay: What are your 2018 goals, expansion plans, this sort of thing that you might want to share with the audience?

Anurag: We’re actually launching in UAE next month, and we’re launching in Indonesia and Philippines before the end of the year. I think that’s something we will be doing in this calendar year, and that’s something that we’re looking forward to, essentially after the fact that we’ve got some established growth numbers in the three markets that we operate. So I think we’re ready and primed for our next phase of growth. In effect, we want to be in 20 different countries in the next 24 months.

Jay: Got it. That’s pretty exciting. I think specifically Southeast Asia is ripe for this sort of solution because I think that there’s a lot of innovation and entrepreneurship happening, and there’s a lot of SMEs or even just small businesses that need this sort of solution. So I think that you’re targeting the right areas. UAE sounds exciting as well. I’m not familiar with that market at all, but there’s obviously a need for that.

I wanted to talk quickly about…I read and heard about a new entrepreneurship encouragement program in India that you guys are participating in. Maybe you could tell us a little bit about that and get our audience excited about what you’re doing there.

Anurag: So essentially, it’s an Inspiring Entrepreneurship Program, and our price in India is about $20 a month, typically. We have our packages are tenure based, so everyone gets the same package, but it is different tenure. So for your three-month tenure you pay $60, and for the six and the 12, you essentially pay six into 20, but you get extra months free thrown in for that time frame. So what we’ve kept is one product. There is one pricing with one package, respective of which… It’s just the tenure that’s different.

In India, for the Inspiring Entrepreneurship, just to get the word and moving the engine forward, last year we did a similar-ish program. This year we’re doing something different. So for one dollar, you’re able to get a three-month plan, completely the same package at just one dollar for three months. And that is just taken our acceptance and adoption through the roof. It’s open for two months, for May and June. And we have a similar program in Hong Kong as well. We’re actually doing that for $60 for a six month plan.

Jay: Oh, wow. That’s fantastic.

Anurag: —which would have been $228 otherwise.

Jay: Right. That’s really… Again, it’s almost giving back to the entrepreneurship community because you’re helping to encourage people to basically get moving with their business and just get online. So I think that a lot of times it’s that last mile. You could sit there and whiteboard out your business plan all you want, but to actually literally launch, ship the product, and get it out there, whatever it might be, I think that’s the biggest challenge for a lot of people.

Anurag: That’s what we want to push out and get people to get onto the platform and start selling and be successful at that.

Jay: Absolutely. Anurag, as we look to wrap up — and thanks again for sharing your story and the awesome things that guys are working on there at Shopmatic — a final couple of questions. And I like to ask all entrepreneurs this second to last question which is for aspiring entrepreneurs or maybe people that are in corporate and are working at a PayPal or a MasterCard and they’ve had that entrepreneurial itch. They’re just looking for the right time, the right place, maybe the right opportunity or the right problem to solve or challenge to take on, what piece of advice would you give them.

Anurag: Two things. It’s been, obviously, at the back of my mind a lot of these times in the last couple of years. But essentially, I think there’s never a right time. If we always right for the right time, there will never be a right time because something or other will happen in your life, and you’ll say, “Okay, maybe let this pass, and I will think about it then.” It’s too late, and it’s gone. And then you’re back to square one thinking about that. So if you believe in something — and you first and foremost have to believe in your own self and the confidence that you have in your own self that “yes, whatever it is, I’ll be able to see it through, and I’ll make it happen. And I believe and I have faith, and I have courage in being able to make that happen.” There is never going to be a right time. I think that is the number one underlying piece that I would certainly mandate.

For anyone who is out there thinking about it, if you have a reasonably decent idea, have faith in yourself and just go for it. I think that’s what I would recommend to anyone. Yes, in large corporates, you always worry about where’s my next paycheck going to come from, but if that’s the question in most people’s minds, then that’s where people will stay. So that is one big factor.

The second piece is grit and persistence and the belief that whatever comes your way will also pass. This too shall pass. No matter which way, and the best laid plans, you will get the curveballs, and you will get curveballs like I’ve never had coming at you from all sides.

I would say, the only one thing that I would say — and this more be a little off from what normal advisors… There is courage in numbers. If you have a partner or a couple of other partners, do it together, because you will never have a day where every single day that you’re going to be on top of the world. You will feel down. You will feel depressed. You will feel dejected. You will say, “What the hell did I do?” And you will need your business partners to say, for somebody to step in and say, “We’ll figure this out. We’ll take this forward.”

And the final thing I would say is if you don’t have a supporting family, then it’s never going to work. So I think, to me, those are the three big things. Ideas, money, all of that stuff — for anyone who has worked in corporate life — should not be such a big issue if you really put their mind to it.

Jay: Yeah. Those are awesome pieces of advice, Anurag. You kind of just left us with a cliffhanger because I think the last one, I think that is actually a large problem, especially for people from Asian backgrounds and I’m sure Indian as well. Entrepreneurship is still not mainstream. And there is still this parental stigma that your kid should go to a safe job and earn a nice paycheck. I think that’s definitely very, very important and sound advice.

Anurag, thanks so much for your time and for sharing your journey. Where is the best place that people can find you or follow you or maybe learn a little bit more about Shopmatic if they’re looking to set up a shop?

Anurag: We do have a Facebook. Search for Shopmatic on Facebook, and it will show up. But we actually do have a community blog, which is available on our site, and that gives people a lot of articles and stuff about how to become an entrepreneur and how do you start and where do you go and all the things that are not necessarily even connected to Shopmatic is something that you’ll find there and can follow and learn about the online space as well. Or give us a call. Just from the website, just pick up the numbers, depending on where you are. Give us a call, and our consultants will be very delighted to help you.

Jay: Fantastic. Thanks again, Anurag. And we’re definitely excited to track your progress, and we’re looking forward to see how you guys keep expanding and taking over the world with Shopmatic. So best of luck.

Anurag: Thanks, Jay. Thanks a ton. Thanks a ton for your time.

Jay: Take care.