The SOURCEEASY vision has always been to digitize the Apparel Industry.
- The SaaS automates workflows and manages business data.
- The Marketplace controls Manufacturing transactions
- The network of Brands builds IP value in distribution.
We’ve just had a shit storm of a time explaining how it works to prospective Investors.
2016 was the worst of it.
After raising a bunch of Seed money, we felt we had enough traction to go out and raise a Series A, given all the future revenue we were holding.
In June 2016, We narrowly lost an investor for a $10M Series A because we could not articulate our vision appropriately. It was devastating.
We valiantly soldiered on and made the rounds of the Silicon Valley / New York VCs.
But the feedback kept coming in…
- The business was too complicated.
- It had too many moving parts.
- It was not “tech” enough.
- None of our customers used the software.
- None of our vendors use the software.
- Our revenue cycles were tough to understand.
In our heads, we could not understand what wasn’t working — The apparel market size was never in question. Neither was the need for automation, scalability and technology in the industry. The team was praised as was our ability to execute.
In hindsight, what was missing was the key narrative:
- How is this business scalable?
- Why is the software not public?
- Why focus on commerce and not SaaS?
- What is the ultimate goal? selling T-Shirts or scaling software?
- Why isn’t there scalable visibility into sales?
- How is this different from E-Commerce?
- Why get stuck in cashflow cycles and receivables?
Great Existential Questions.
In the meanwhile, we were running out of Cash. Rapidly.
September 30, 2016 should have been the day Sourceeasy technically DIED.
We should have just shut down, gone home and licked our wounds.
But the team didn’t give up. Customers kept writing orders. Product kept rolling.
We raised debt (almost every week!), came back to a financial even keel, worked around cashflow issues, micromanaged liquidity, chased collections aggressively, managed terms with Vendors and rolled over $4M in cashflow.
We’ve faced a number of financial, operational, and business challenges in the last few months. Operating without a safety net, on a thin margin of error has not been easy. We’ve had a few near-death experiences, a lot of pressure and pain.
Our Team, Our Board of Directors and Investors, Our Customers and our Vendors have been really patient, supportive and relatively calm through the entire Storm.
THEY BELIEVE.
2017 is when the Marketplace started working..
At Sourceeasy, We’ve always known that Apparel is a hard market.Building software for the Apparel Industry is a thankless job.
THATS BECAUSE CUSTOMERS DON’T REALLY CARE ABOUT SOFTWARE. THEY CARE ABOUT PRODUCT, COST AND SALES.
They care about manufacturing their garments — On time, at a great price, and at the right quality standards.They care about relationships they can trust — Around the clock.They care about consistency, clarity, and communication.They care about a seamless workflow that reduces their work.Most Important: They care about saving and making money.
So instead of thrusting software in their faces that faced significant adoption challenges on the vendor side, charging a pithy subscription fee that solved no problems, and throwing buyers over our shoulders to vendors who didnt own the experience, we chose to address the larger problems that the marketplace faced in the Trillion dollar B2B apparel market:
- We generated Customer Demand by offering Brands, Wholesalers, and Distributors a low-cost supply chain solution for basic products like Graphic T-Shirts with doorstep service, so they relied on us as a source and would monitor and communicate with us using the software.
- We created Vendor Liquidity by assuring Factories of large volume orders at very low margins that were repeatable and financed so they had economic incentive to produce smaller runs and adopt our software
- We built 2-sided Trust with compliant factories, open communication, transparent margins, guarantees on product, upfront dispute resolution, and ownership of the product.
- We operated this entire business using our Own Software Platform — dog-fooding our own SaaS tool helped us proxy Client and Factory workflows, address bugs and feature requests, make the apps Enterprise grade.
And so, In the past 12 months:
- Q4'16 — Q3'17 revenues were $4.78M. 250% up from Q4'15 — Q3'16 revenues were $1.92M.
- Q4'16 — Q3'17 volumes were 1,593,333 units., 1100% up fromQ4'15 –Q3'16 volumes were 146,340 units.
- Q4'16 — Q3'17 Operating Expenses were $2.82M, 30% down from Q4'15 — Q3'16 Operating Expenses of $4.02M
Our SaaS marketplace launches Next Month.
- We’ll be in Public Beta starting November 1.
- We’re going to charge a subscription fee to signups that we’ll WAIVE once our customers hit a certain transaction threshold.
- We’ll never hold back features and offer the ENTIRE suite to EVERYONE.
- We’ll make sure you get the PRODUCT you want. Not just SOFTWARE.
- We’ll make it super easy to manage inventory with LOW MINIMUMS.
- And we’ll do it at a price that’s industry competitive.