My today’s guest is Sharoon Thomas, CEO of Fulfil.io — a platform that helps retailers always know their inventory, whether they sell online or offline. Fulfil combines inventories from multiple marketplaces like Amazon, Etsy, Shopify, e-Bay. Sharoon and his co-founders founded the company in June 2015 in India, and already a few months later got approved to the accelerator program “500 Startups” in Mountain View.
What did the jury like in Fulfil.io that got the team approved so quickly? What tools did they manage to build their system with in such a short time? Where and when did Sharoon meet the other three co-founders and how did they start working together? Watch the interview and discover answers to these and other exciting questions!
Here are a couple of highlights from the interview:
- What 500 Startups liked about Fulfil was the immediate proof of concept, as the company already had customers actively using their product:
“One of the things that 500 Startups looks into is if the company is getting the product market fit, or already has a product market fit.”
- It’s worth using existing solutions to build the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and prove the concept as early as possible:
“Today there are tons of things available for the programmers to really get to the market faster, for example Amazon web services make it super easy to build your cloud infrastructure, Telephony, Twillio. There are a lot of tools that are open source frameworks. There is existing infrastructure which you should definitely leverage and get to market faster.”
- Do not give up when things go wrong:
“Most ERP systems fail, in fact 60% of ERP implementations fail. We had a failure there too, which was what drove me to start looking more into ERP systems and try to have a successful implementation there.”
- 500 Startups accelerator program helps a lot in growth strategies:
“500 Startups specializes in growth and distribution, and we have been getting a lot of help in the space. Without this program I don’t think we would be growing as fast as we are growing today.”
- After completing the accelerator program, Fulfil plans to stay in Silicon Valley and scale the company from here:
“After the program we will be splitting into two teams: to grow the engineering back home in India, and to have the rest of the company scaling right here in the US.”
- Angel.co is the best place to look for employees for a startup and find startup job posts:
“Everyone on AngelList probably expects to find a startup job, while on other platforms people usually look for larger companies.
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