5 ms·

How e-commerce platform Elliot fell back down to Earth

76 points by prostoalex 6y ago

batt4good 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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)
  - theturtletalks 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      No! It's one of the few great partnerships in tech.
    - agustif 6y ago
      finix payments it's supposed to help you built a stripe for yourself, not so sure about negotiating better rates.. If stripe can't break the visa-mastercad duopoly Stripe has a lot of stuff also in software/services
    - gvkhna 6y ago
      Stripe will negotiate their pricing with larger vendors similar to anyone else and can probably offer competitive rates.
    - mahmoudimus 6y ago
      Just use a neutral vaulting company!
anonymousab 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      Interesting! Can I ask what your platform is?
      - madaxe_again 6y ago
        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-reviews https://ecommerce-platforms.com/ecommerce-reviews/blubolt-re... . 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.
lkrubner 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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?
  - nicoburns 6y ago
    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.
chris_wot 6y ago
"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.
- senojretep356 6y ago
  Donald Trump
janstice 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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!
senojretep356 6y ago
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
dzonga 6y ago
there's plenty of those people, in NY. marketers pretending to be know what they're doing
senojretep356 6y ago
"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.
emke 6y ago
It's incredibly hard to build and compete in ecommerce as the platforms are well established. The Elliot team sure knew how to promote themselves.
Theodores 6y ago
"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.

76 points by prostoalex 6y ago

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 6y ago
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)
- theturtletalks 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    No! It's one of the few great partnerships in tech.
  - agustif 6y ago
    finix payments it's supposed to help you built a stripe for yourself, not so sure about negotiating better rates.. If stripe can't break the visa-mastercad duopoly Stripe has a lot of stuff also in software/services
  - gvkhna 6y ago
    Stripe will negotiate their pricing with larger vendors similar to anyone else and can probably offer competitive rates.
  - mahmoudimus 6y ago
    Just use a neutral vaulting company!

anonymousab 6y ago

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 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    Interesting! Can I ask what your platform is?
    - madaxe_again 6y ago
      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-reviews https://ecommerce-platforms.com/ecommerce-reviews/blubolt-re... . 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.

lkrubner 6y ago

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 6y ago
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?
- nicoburns 6y ago
  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.

chris_wot 6y ago

"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.

senojretep356 6y ago
Donald Trump

janstice 6y ago

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 6y ago
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!

senojretep356 6y ago

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

dzonga 6y ago

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

senojretep356 6y ago

"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.

emke 6y ago

It's incredibly hard to build and compete in ecommerce as the platforms are well established. The Elliot team sure knew how to promote themselves.

Theodores 6y ago

"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.