Business Tech Africa’s editor, Greg Stewart, spoke with Alex De Bryn, Co-Founder of innovative SaaS development company, Lets-Create, who has the ambitious goal of becoming a new South African Unicorn and driving SaaS developments without the need for funding:
Take a listen to our most interesting conversation and discover great Tech start-up insights here:
Key Quotes From Alex
On Learning Lessons About Market Pain-Points – Not Always needing a Solution
“I came back here, and I thought I was untouchable. First product, technology product I’ve built won awards. And the reality is, we took it to market, and no one really cared. The market didn’t want it, I couldn’t sell it, we were bleeding cash. It just wasn’t happening”.
“And eventually a close friend of mine in the construction space pulled me aside and said, Look, Alex, there’s just too much money in the mess, we’re never gonna adopt a tool that shows our inefficiencies.
Lessons on Pivoting When Needed:
“COVID happened, and it either did well for you or did badly. At that time, it pretty much collapsed our business overnight”.
“But what it did, it highlighted a very big opportunity in an industry where we could pivot quite nicely into it”. “So we converted the product that we had into a tool, which we now call Let’s Trade, to help tier two retailers to enter the on-demand space quite well”.
Finding Gaps and Executing on Them
“There was a massive gap of tools that could orchestrate orders to and from stores”. “So we saw that gap and we’re really grateful that we took it and we ran with it and we’re now operating over a thousand stores nationwide, over a million transactions a month”.
Learning Through Failures ans Building on Core Products
“So we’re grateful for that and we’re one of the lucky ones that had the wrong product at the right time and we saw through, but we had to purely learn through failure”. I think it is it is part and parcel of building successful technology, but I don’t think it has to be that way”.
“So we started identifying quite a few opportunities on the outskirts of Lets Trade being the center of commerce. And we could build products that answered a lot of pain points for enterprise.
Building Business Purposefully Without Funding
We bootstrap everything, we don’t raise money, we focus on making sure revenue directs our business growth. And we’re quite particular about, you know, not winning but succeeding.
“So Let’s Create was built around figuring our own way out to success, and that’s now become a framework and a way of business that we empower entrepreneurs, internal entrepreneurs …. to build B2B solutions globally”.
Failure Not a Prerequisite For Success:
“What we see a lot is that people talk, they almost see failing as a way to earn your stripes and what we’re starting to identify is that a lot of entrepreneurs almost become self-destructive to fail first”. “Now you must be okay to fail, you must be able to accept failure, it is part of the learning, but it is not a prerequisite to fail to become successful”.
Securing Funding Through Building Effective Solutions
“If an enterprise is willing to pay for the problem to be solved, then only do we tackle it because we believe revenue is the best funding mechanism out of that”.
“What we also find is adding VC money to the mix, it changes the dynamic of the entrepreneur because what happens is you start focusing on the benefit of making return for the money and yourself, than purely solving on the enterprise problem where if you’re bootstrapping, you’ve only focused on the problem. You’re not focused on the money, and…it sharpens your sword quite a bit where you know you have to solve that problem for the money to continue.
Principles for Product Progression
“When we start building products, look at three things before we start taking on a venture”.
- “We must be able to break even on a product within three months”
- “And we must get three independent clients to be willing to pay for it, so we make sure that we focus on getting revenue first before we start building, or at least close enough to that”.
- “The product must be globalizable – So we don’t typically go into products that can only fit per region”.
