SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1273 270,000 ECommerce Shops Use This Tool (Not Shopify)
18 Jan 2019
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
did a stint at Google, was then brought into Lead Press to Shop, or sorry, Lead Partnerships to Press to Shop about two years ago. Took over as CEO just about four months ago. They now have over 270,000 merchants using them who want a more customizable, open, really open source version of Shopify.
They raised $15 million a year ago in June 2017, doing about $16 million in revenue, hoping to break 20 million here in 2018 with their team of 100 people based in Paris. This is the Top Entrepreneurs Podcast, where founders share how they started their companies and got filthy rich or crash and burn.
Each episode features revenue numbers, customer counts, and other insider information that creates business news headlines. We went from a couple of hundred thousand dollars to 2.7 million.
I had no money when I started the company.
Chapter 2: What is PrestaShop and how does it differ from Shopify?
It was $160 million, which is the size of many IPOs.
We're a bit strapped. We have like 22,000 customers. With over 5 million downloads in a very short amount of time, major outlets like Inc. are calling us the fastest growing business show on iTunes. I'm your host, Nathan Latka, and here's today's episode. Hello, everyone. My guest today is Alex Arimi.
He is the founder and CEO of a company called PrestaShop, a leading e-commerce solution that's being used worldwide today. Before that, he was at Google leading digital transformation and marketing solutions for retailers. And before that was at Roland Berger doing strategy consulting. All right, Alex, are you ready to take us to the top? Yeah, sure. All right. Hello.
Tell us more about PrestaShop. What are you doing? How do you make money?
Yeah, so actually PrestaShop has been co-founded 11 years ago by a French engineer and we mostly monetize through add-ons sales. So we've built and developed a software which is open source and distributed for free on our websites. And the way we get money, it mainly comes from So modules or add-ons or connectors which are sold on our marketplace.
So either they're paid by merchants or they are sponsored by partners such as PayPal or Google, also with whom we are monetizing.
Now, is this a pure play SaaS model or no? It's more like an as-you-go basis?
More as-you-go basis. So it's on-premise and we've just launched our SaaS platform
software and a sas version last week okay in france italy and spain and how is this tell me about the sas version how does it work so it's called prestige up ready it's a brand new offer uh launched in the market so we will extend in europe first and then worldwide and the objective is to uh make it simple for for newcomers on e-commerce so we are targeting um
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Chapter 3: How does PrestaShop monetize its services?
We'll see. But in the meantime, give your team everything they need to be more productive and focus on the work that grows your business. Try Asana free for 30 days. You can get started now at nathanlatka.com forward slash Asana. That's nathanlatka.com forward slash A S A N A.
when you look at activation of these of these e-commerce folks once they sign up to you what are some things that that you're tracking you know i'd ask about things like you know churn but it sounds like you're just now launching your sass product so i'm curious if you were you know how and if you measure churn on your legacy product uh yes that we we do it via some uh
External crawler and data we can gather on our stores, but that won't be the same type of, let's say, native data that we can get from a SaaS product. So we have developed a different data source to monitor and identify which stores are PrestaShop active Because they are changing their logos, they are a true sales funnel, they are also changing texts and so on and so forth.
So we can identify the active stores. And so that's based on the URL. We know that when there are just... well, they are created online and then when they are dead.
It's a crawler that looks for JavaScript code, right? And if you're in the code, you know it's active. Yes. And are these 270,000, are they free or paid? Free. Okay, got it. So of those folks that are using your free tools, how many of them, is it just a couple hundred you have on the SaaS platform that are paying?
Yes, because we just launched a few days ago.
I see. I misunderstood you. So you just launched a paid version of what you're doing via your SaaS offering. Before that, it was all a free model. Yeah. And you would sell some of those leads back to Google to make some make some money in the short term.
We are on acquisition level for our partners so that they can get access to our store base. Yep, I understand. We have generated the store base through open source and a free to use and downloadable version of the software.
I totally understand now. Open source version of Shopify with more freedom. Great. Walk me through funding history. So are you bootstrapped or have you raised capital?
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Chapter 4: What are the features of PrestaShop's new SaaS platform?
Two years ago and I've been CEO four months ago.
Okay. And were you brought in with one of these funding rounds? You were an EIR at one of the investors? No?
No.
No, no. I was recruited by the former CEO.
Okay. Did he or she recruit you or did you try and convince him or her?
No, no. She recruited me as head of partnerships and business development. And then the founder appointed me as CEO four months ago.
That's great. Okay, very good. So tell me more about the team size today and where you guys are based.
So we're mostly based in Paris with, well, more than 100 people here with the full teams of products, tech, sales, marketing, and business partners. And we also have a sales office in Miami. Uh, with match and success team and partnership teams. And we have country managers in, uh, well in, in, in two countries in Europe and our founder in San Francisco.
So overall we have, uh, almost 120 people.
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Chapter 5: Why is PrestaShop's model considered more flexible than Shopify's?
To eight. Okay. So we'll say average maybe a five or six there. And what's your situation? Married? Single? Do you have kids? Just married. Oh, congratulations. That's exciting. That's what the thing is behind you. Exactly. So no kids yet? No kids yet. All right. And Alex, how old are you? 31. 31. Last question. What do you wish your 20-year-old self knew? Learn more. Learn more. Learn more.
Guys, there you have it from Alex. Again, did a stint at Google, was then brought into Lead Press to Shop, or sorry, Lead Partnerships to Press to Shop about two years ago. Took over as CEO just about four months ago. They now have over 270,000 merchants using them who want a more customizable, open, really open source version of Shopify.
They've raised $15 million a year ago in June 2017, doing about $16 million in revenue, hoping to break $20 million here in 2018 with their team of 100 people based in Paris. Just launched a SaaS platform. Alex, hope to have you back on in a year and hear how the SaaS platform is going. But thank you for taking us to the top. Thank you, Nathan.