The development of startup ecosystems and e-commerce market on the example of CentroBit

The end of the year is a time to sum up and reflect on trends that will influence our lives in the future. Today we decided to take a look at two seemingly different topics - the development of start-up ecosystems and the evolution of the ecommerce market in Russia - illustrating our thoughts with examples from the life of our company.

E-commerce

Domestic ecommerce is developing at a rapid pace - in the first half of 2013 alone, its volume amounted to 160 billion rubles. Analysts point to the "acceleration" of the market - in 2012 it grew by 23-25%, and this growth will be 29%. According to various forecasts, ecommerce turnover by 2015 will be $ 30 billion. Such growth rates correspond to the US market indicators.
')


This will inevitably lead to both a multiple increase in the number of online stores - now there are about 48,000 - and to an increase in the number of new start-up projects that will in one way or another help ecommerce market players to solve various problems, thereby pretending to their piece of ecommerce -pirogue.

For example, one of the main problems facing online stores when working with suppliers of goods is the so-called drop shipment model in which the store does not buy goods into its warehouse, but implements it directly from the supplier’s warehouse. Only big players, like Ozon, Enter or Lamoda, can afford their own warehouse.

Startup

To alleviate the current situation, we at CentroBit decided to create the Agora cloud platform, which contains B2B and B2C commerce models, a content management subsystem and a B2B portal for market participants.

The main idea of ​​the project is to create a network of sales offices for various companies, distributors, dealers, resellers and manufacturers, which would allow to sell goods in the channel of online stores. In this case, shops would be spared from the need for costs for the purchase of goods at the warehouse.

It was decided to divide the development of the project into two stages:

1. Cloud service for each Agora Optima provider, which will allow working with the pool of its online stores.
2. The global trade portal AgoraB2B.ru for the sale of goods suppliers in the channel online stores. In other words, online warehouse suppliers of goods.

Difficulties

The development started in 2011 and was conducted at the own expense of the company's founders. As a platform, we initially chose PHP. Then came the first version of the service and the connector for 1C: Trade Management. Testing on the first clients revealed a problem of the low speed of the framework and flaws in the 1C connector. As a result, we changed the framework to Python and created a connector for 1C, which is connected in two clicks and allows you to adjust to changes in the configuration of 1C.

In the middle of 2012 a new version of the service was released and official sales started, which made it possible to get the first investment. These funds went to marketing and expanding the state, and otherwise we, like any decent startup, optimized costs as we could. So, the whole team worked on Linux, and we used OpenOffice to work with documents. Of course, it was inconvenient, but on the other hand it allowed to save.



Here Microsoft's BizSpark program helped us a lot, thanks to which we not only saved much on software (according to our calculations, more than $ 70,000 came out), but also got into the Microsoft Startup Accelerator acceleration program. We were able to become the winners of this competition, which brought us contacts with potential investors and new customers.

Venture Capital Trends

The domestic start-up market, like ecommerce, is developing quite actively. There are more and more venture capital funds that are actively investing in new projects, and, remarkably, the state has seriously joined the process of financing start-ups at the seed stage in the past year (one can recall RVC and IIDF).

With all this, the majority of investments, as is customary in Russia, occur in a “quiet” mode, when neither the investor nor the startup team once again spread about the deal. Thus, for many start-up entrepreneurs, it becomes a real problem to simply collect information about investors acting on the market, their outputs and areas of work.

In this case, an active participation in various events (conferences, forums, exhibitions, start-ups) can be of great service to the new project team, since there are quite a few of them on the market. Despite the fact that you can often hear opinions about their uselessness, but as the experience of our company shows, this is not exactly the case at start-up events, you can not only exchange experience with colleagues, but also establish contacts with investors and find new customers.

For illustration, in the last year alone we took part in several diverse events (links are reports from visits):

• Startup Lynch in St. Petersburg .
• Forum "Around Data Center, Business and IT, Around the Cloud and around IP" .
• The Open Innovations Forum and Open Innovations Expo 2013 .
• The first online conference on e-commerce .
• ECOM EXPO 2013 .
• Meeting for RusBase fund partners within Demo Europe .
• Conferences "Cloud Technologies: Innovation and Practice of Use" .
• Online Trading Forum 2013 .
• International specialized exhibition “Warehouse. Transport. Logistics 2013 .

As a result, in 2013, our company CentroBit and the Agora project got into the list of 100 most promising innovative projects in Russia and reached the final of the Startup of the Year 2013 award - without active networking at events, it would be very difficult to achieve such results.

Conclusion

From all this we can conclude that the field of e-commerce is one of the most promising in order to start a new business. And it is not at all necessary to create another online store, where it is more interesting to establish a startup that will really help the participants of this market. This thesis is confirmed by the example of such projects as RetailRocket, which recently received significant investments and was included in the list of the most promising Runet projects.

On the other hand, starting a new project is hard work, which becomes even more difficult given the general closeness of the Russian venture capital industry. In this regard, various events, such as industry exhibitions and conferences, as well as start-up parties, hackathons, and meetings can be an excellent tool for promoting your project.

We hope that our experience will be useful and some of the readers of our blog will also become a participant in the e-commerce market, which together we can change for the better.

Thank you for your attention, we will be happy to answer questions in the comments. Happy New Year, habrauser!