CHRIS: You really need to have a real view of where your business is and what level of maturity it is to be able to automate and scale things. But foundationally, this can be compressed within whatever timeline is reasonable. We just recommend prioritizing based on accomplishing and delivering working software that is validated by your users.
With that said, though, as you scale up—just like that particular client saw—automating things, making it so that steps that were manual and made sense to be manual as they had less revenue, those need to be consistently prioritized so that we can automate things to enable the business to scale without scaling up its costs in a linear fashion. You can exponentially decrease the cost per amount of revenue and exponentially increase your revenue, therefore, in your margin. And this is a requirement to scale the marketplace software; it just has to be that way.
In order to do that, it's all about as you scale up looking at the areas that need to be automated and being able to deal with that in an optimal way. So typically, that's going to be ERP systems that you're going to be integrating with. It may be other types of reporting tools. This could be sales tax calculation, looping back in shipping costs, what were the estimates versus the actuals, possibly dealing with different payment processors and gateways and chargebacks, dealing with any of the—a lot of the marketplaces we deal with, the sellers are going to be handling a lot of the logistics or they may be dealing with dropshipping. And we need to make sure that there is a process to be able to have a feedback loop and get it all. That data, the real actual data and feedback into all of our reporting and all of the commissions, all of the taxes. And ultimately it has to reconcile.
As you scale up, this needs to be automated, it needs to be heavily automated. And then ultimately, in a similar fashion—and this ties into the next section—the users need to get the appropriate reporting and they need to get the data so that they appropriately measure their success. They can reconcile their numbers. Do we want to give them the opportunity to leverage our APIs and integrate with our marketplace platform? And what security are we going to put in place so that that doesn't open us up to a potential security breach?
There are a lot of different vectors of attack here. But foundationally, I think it does just boil down to having an understanding of how you project you're going to be scaling and then having a feedback loop around what the biggest areas are that are consuming time with manual processes. Try to keep things as low capital cost upfront as possible as you scale your marketplace. But as you identify areas that are bottlenecks, those then need to be automated. And that's the foundation of all of this.