752: They Think Retailers Want Their Own Version of Amazon

Adrien Nussenbaum. He's the co-founder and CEO of Mirakl which was founded back in 2012. He's currently based at the company's Boston office and is responsible for the business' growth in both the business to consumer and business to business sectors.

Famous Five: Favorite Book? – Hemingway What CEO do you follow? – N/A Favorite online tool? — Instacart How many hours of sleep do you get?— 5 If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – "I would have helped my wife use Instacart"

Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:50 – Nathan introduces Adrien to the show 01:20 – Mirakl is a technology company that allows retailers, distributors and manufacturers relaunch and operate an online marketplace of third–party vendors 01:45 – Mirakl is similar to Amazon 02:10 – Mirakl is a technology solution and most of their customers are large enterprise companies 02:39 – Mirakl doesn't compete with Amazon but allows their customers to have their own marketplace 03:05 – Mirakl's technology would allow Best Buy to have different merchants on their website 03:20 – From the consumer's perspective, they can purchase different products from different merchants within one website 03:28 – Mirakl currently has 125 customers in 25 countries 03:41 – Mirakl is a SaaS business 03:58 – Mirakl takes a small percentage of their clients' generated revenue 04:24 – Mirakl provides companies a technology that leverages 12 years of experience in operating 05:13 – Mirakl's cut depends on the revenue bracket they've set 05:49 – Mirakl's charges vary per industry 06:15 – Mirakl's customers charge retailers a certain percentage and Mirakl charges depending on those percentages 06:52 – Generally speaking, the charge is more than 5% 07:20 – Mirakl allows companies to operate a new business 08:15 – The additional earnings a company can get will be from the partnerships they have with other retailers using the Mirakl's platform 09:19 – Mirakl was launched in 2012 09:26 – Mirakl was initially bootstrapped using the money from the previous company acquisition 09:36 – Splitgames was acquired by FNAC in Europe 10:04 – Mirakl raised $2M in the first round and $20M in 2015 10:23 – Both were equity rounds 10:30 – Adrien was the founder of Splitgames and it was initially bootstrapped, but raised later on 11:30 – Adrien is French and he thinks that they are more conservative when it comes to risk than Americans 11:48 – Adrien's risk level when he started Mirakl was fair 11:56 – Mirakl has 2 founders 12:06 – The split was 50/50 but there's a bit more for the one who had the idea 13:02 – Adrien's had a background in banking prior to Splitgames 13:28 – Team size is 160 13:36 – 40% engineering and 25-30% sales 14:05 – Mirakl spends money on programs and lead generation 14:44 – Mirakl makes industry reports with people like Gardner 15:05 – Last month's total paid ads spend was around $30-40K 15:58 – Mirakl sells something that is strategic for their customers 16:42 – Payback period is less than a year 18:50 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points: Creating relationships will not only nurture your network, but increase your opportunities for revenue as well. One can be considered radical or conservative when it comes to taking risks; choose to which degree of risk you're most comfortable taking. In pitching to clients, you have to give them the assurance that your product is valuable to them and that they will NOT be needing any other product.

Resources Mentioned: The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you're doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator – The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible – Nathan uses Audible when he's driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives