
How e-commerce platform Elliot fell back down to Earth - prostoalex
https://www.modernretail.co/startups/how-e-commerce-platform-elliot-fell-back-down-to-earth/
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lkrubner
I recognize this pattern: people who are good at marketing think they can go
into a space and outcompete others thanks to brilliant marketing. This works
in some consumer spaces but fails whenever the key to success depends on
excellent engineering. The use of outside contractors in this case is a red
flag. Outside contractors are a better bet when customizing something
standard, but doing original work requires a much closer feedback loop between
the engineering team and the leadership.

~~~
ZephyrBlu
Isn't this strategy exactly what is pushed in startup-land? Sell first, then
build.

Or are you just talking about outcompeting with great marketing and an
average/shitty product?

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nicoburns
I think the point is that there is an extent to which you need to be able
execute on the build part. Good engineering won't make a successful business
on it's own, but poor engineering can easily sink one.

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janstice
What was their target market? People for whom Shopify is too expensive or hard
to implement? I'm not sure that's a valuable market.

If the market is countries which are under-served by Shopify, this is a
smaller list that it used to be, and I'd think that the cost to serve each
smaller market is going to be low margin until you get to Shopify scale, where
you've solved most of the transnational commerce issues in markets with lots
of high-value customers.

Living at the end of the supply chain, I appreciate that common US-based
services take ages to work their way out to the rest of the world, and there
may have been an opportunity to launch, say, Shopify-for-Latin-America, it
sounds like there wasn't sufficient focus on the product meeting the needs of
this (e.g. by running card processing through Stripe which has a very limited
presence in Latin America), and more focus on twitter beef as a marketing
strategy (and having a fit-for-purpose product).

~~~
senojretep356
Yes exactly. It seems like the market was people who are so small they cannot
afford/work out how to use shopify or woocommerce. Not sure that's a market
you want to be in!

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batt4good
lol. Elliot blowing up was fucking hilarious. Main take-away: high-quality 3d
bovine renderings don't help to solve the "problem" of international shipping
in e-commerce...

Their biggest edge that they failed to realize was the fact their pricing
model was a % of each item sold, not a flat fee per month. However, it's hard
to say I didn't see the fall of Elliot coming - their initial beta was an
absolute cluster a mere two weeks before their slated "launch date".

Also, it's still unclear why some early founders at Parsley Health were
involved with Elliot?

~~~
xal
Btw, that was the pricing model that I launched my ecommerce platform with. I
only pivoted it to the now common saas subscription after the first year
(basically a move of desperation at the time)

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theturtletalks
It was genius to monetize the credit card processing fee instead of the order
directly. Do you see Shopify moving off of Stripe eventually to get even lower
rates? eBay did something similar by with Paypal the past few years.

~~~
xal
No! It's one of the few great partnerships in tech.

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senojretep356
My biggest question is for the investors here. They are supposed to be
sophisticated and yet they bought into a sales pitch that was basically what -
shopify and woocommerce are too complex for small (minority) businesses!?
Seriously?

Where's the due diligence, who's asking questions on product market fit at
these investors.

Stunning and I'd be pulling funds out of any company stupid enough to invest.

[https://www.shopify.com/cross-border](https://www.shopify.com/cross-border)

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chris_wot
"If a potential business partner gave him an answer he didn’t like, he would
call them, angry, or take to Twitter to blast their replies."

Never deal with a person like this.

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Theodores
"For example, Chavez wanted the menu bar on the left-hand side of the website
rather than the right. It took many months for the Elliot team to fix that."

With CSS grid styling that is a change that can be done easily. Yet they would
have built a vast amount of technical debt with frameworks, PDF designs that
had to be pixel perfect, responsive design hacks and a process that made it
all but impossible to fix. They would have spent hours battling with the
client about when this would get fixed and held many internal meetings to move
it around on a whiteboard.

Having worked in e-commerce I should have heard of their platform. I haven't.
Platforms that do promise drag and drop ease do frustrate me though, it is a
bit like working on a car for some small child to think they just need to
scale up their HotWheels toy car in order to render your efforts useless.

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senojretep356
"I'm a former athlete turned maker whose e-commerce products have sold close
to $1B globally" Sergio Villaseñor

This guy is insane - he worked for companies that had $1bn in sales and now he
claims it's his work that acheived that - humble much.

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anonymousab
Sergio's doing an AMA in a few days it seems, it should be interesting to see
if any other new information comes to light.

~~~
d33lio
He did an AMA of sorts in the Discord Server a few days after the "launch"
mostly a sob story about how it "was all his fault" and how he felt bad
everyone was let down. No mention of a number of the systemic or toxic issues
mentioned in this article.

The Discord Server has since been deleted.

I can attest to the beta seeming like something I'd expect from a college kid
and a few friends after a hackathon, definitely not something you hired a
"team" to work on.

I'm curious why anyone else joined the team in late 2019 other than to attach
themselves to a "cool and trendy" startup mess.

It should also be mentioned that his personal twitter has been scrubbed.

~~~
madaxe_again
e-commerce is ridiculously hard - I say that as someone who built a company
and an e-commerce platform. It looks pretty straightforward on the surface,
but when you start getting into discounts, into merchandising, into shipping
and volumetric calculations, into tax calculation and distribution centre
section, into CRM, into despatch management, into refunds and exchanges, into
internationalisation, into segmentation, into all of the myriad intricacies
and business rules that _have to work every time, in every weird scenario_ ,
at scale, with five nines of uptime, you are deep in a world of hurt.

It’s hard to do it properly. I mean, we somehow managed, but we managed to do
everything else wrong.

~~~
Axsuul
Interesting! Can I ask what your platform is?

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madaxe_again
Sure. Was - both my business, and their platform. I left after ten years 4
years ago. Since then, it seems the platform has taken a back seat. The
resource with the most info that I can find is a review over at
[https://ecommerce-platforms.com/ecommerce-reviews/blubolt-
re...](https://ecommerce-platforms.com/ecommerce-reviews/blubolt-reviews) . No
idea if they ever did the planned admin console rewrite. It was built in flex
way back when, because reasons - mostly security sandbox for sensitive data
that kept it away from potentially contaminated admin browsers.

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dzonga
there's plenty of those people, in NY. marketers pretending to be know what
they're doing

