https://youtu.be/0xD6lW4jVDQ

Steve Deller, Founder and CEO of Virid, a business that helps retailers navigate ecommerce best practices.

 

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Focus on the Fundamentals with Steve Deller

Our guest is Steve Deller, who CEO of Virid Inc., which is a software technology company in the Washington DC area. And Steve Deller started life as a IT engineer, software engineer. He graduated from the University of Maryland, and then he worked for a couple of companies and he rose in the ranks. And in the year 2000, he struck up out on his own to found Virid, which really is focused on helping retailers navigate e-commerce technologies and best practices. And they've been doing this for 20 years. So welcome, Steve.

Thank you.

It's great to have you. So Steve, first of all, I'd like to ask you about your origin story. So tell me a little bit about, okay, the first 10 years you were working for different companies, but how do you become an entrepreneur and what took you on the journey?

Sure, back in ‘99, I was working for a software development shop, and we had just started, the Internet was new, and we had just started building e-commerce solutions for a number of large name retailers. And at the conclusion of each of those projects, we were always asked the same question, what do we do now? The technology was new, the space was new, and many of the retailers were scrambling to try to figure out how to operate in this space.

And there weren't a lot of resources at the time to help them after their website was created. What types of promotions do you want to do and how do you address different technological challenges and the growing space? So because there weren't any companies out there, I set out to create an entity that would help these folks transition from not having a website to having an e-commerce storefront back in the day.

So I worked with the company, I was a software engineer for such that I would transition out of the company starting my own. I would help them continue to develop solutions using the tech that we had built in the past, and then I would take over those clients as they launched live. So it was a very nice, gracious transition from being an employee to being a partner with a pretty large software shop at the time. So it worked out nicely for me and hopefully for them.

So it sounds like it was an amicable divorce. And I wonder why you made this step. Could you not have self-realized in the company?

They were more focused on the software size of things. They were not in the business of doing ongoing support and maintenance and those types of activities. I mean, quite frankly, there wasn't any money in it for them and so they liked the one and done type projects for them. So it really wasn't part of their business model. Along the way, one of the brick and mortar malls, the Chelsea Simon Property Group, created this online version of that support where they would go out to their various brick and mortar tenants and provide this commerce solution for them as an extension of their brick and mortar rents.

But they decided they didn't want to be in that business either. So there were a lot of perhaps false starts or repurposing of their vision and we just thought we would take advantage of that. It made sense to us at the time. We kept hearing the same things. It felt like there was a niche in the industry that we were filling.

Okay, that's really interesting. So that was 20 years ago. So what has changed in the last20 years?

What we learned is probably what many of the other businesses before us had also learned is that there isn't a lot of money in the services side. It's kind of a commodity and we found that our revenue model was very cyclical. It had ebbs and flows and it was very difficult to maintain an ongoing business. You know, we have recurring expenses every month, but work would come in in the holidays and when new large initiatives would come up, and it was very difficult to predict.

And so we then sought to add to our offerings. In addition to the services and just ad hoc software development type activities, we decided to build our own product that we could build on top of. It would give us a recurring revenue model. It gives us more predictable results. We knew our platform inside and out. So we knew what the capabilities were and weren't. And that helped us quite a bit.

So, your company is kind of a mix of professional service firms because you also provide consulting with your product and also a technology development firm. So what's special about running a professional service firm and also a technology firm?

So yeah, that actually created its own challenges for us just because what we did didn't really fit along the lines of what everyone else did. You know, you focus on what a professional services company does, and that's only part of what we do. Or you could focus on here the metrics that a product company or a SAS company does, and those would apply to part of our business. And so trying to deal with all of that, you know, this kind of dual identity was a bit of a challenge, especially because my background is software engineering.

So trying to learn business along the way, not having any particular model that fits us 100%, it created a lot of trial and error for us in the early days. What's unique about our solution is, and this was part of our plan back in the early 2000s, was to create ourselves as a one-stop shop.

So we could come into an existing retail operation, do an analysis of their existing website, their integrations, their partners, their plugins, how everything's being done, what features they're doing or not doing on their site, give them guidance to it, and if it was the right time in their evolution, we could then migrate them to our platform, build the site on our platform, build out the features, and then give them this ongoing multi-year support contract to continue that evolution, to give them support and help them grow their business.

It became what is part of our DNA to help businesses grow. We started out as a leaf and now our logo is a tree. You can see it in the background. So that is our own evolution from a leaf to a tree, but that's what we like to do for our clients. We take folks and move them along their growth trajectory until either they succeed or are bought or move on to even larger things.

So how much of your work is actually consulting? So how much do you rely on people diagnosing and giving specific advice to people's specific problems as opposed to implementing a software product in their business and essentially servicing that product.

You know, as a line item, our consulting business is probably small, you know, I would say less than 10%. That said, with all of our existing customers, we are continually consulting. We meet with them every week to talk about initiatives that are in progress, what's coming up. They often present to us with challenges. We've seen this on this site. We're trying to solve this problem. We want to do this type of promotion. What do you think?

And so we're frequently asked to consult on a weekly basis with our existing clients. So in that regard, we are consulting a significant portion of our business. The implementation side of those actually becomes less than the part where we're thinking through problems and working through with our various clients. We like to think of ourselves as a bit of a staff augmentation, you know, so we're a member of all of our teams, our client teams, and they look at us, you know, the ones that are really deeply embedded with our company look at us as those extensions.

When they're talking with a new vendor, for example, they'll pick up the phone and ask us to sit in on that call and kind of be an observer and help them vet out whether or not that's a technology they want to embrace or whether they should ignore it for its snake oil components. So it's a great feeling to be part of something. So not only are we growing our own company, but we're helping our clients grow and we share in their success.

Can you share with me and our listeners a success story where you kind of started working with a company a very long time ago and you managed to get them to the next level, maybe multiple levels?

I think probably a great one is the company journeys. They're sort of a skater themed shoe company. They focus on that kind of demographic. When we first began discussing their e-commerce shop is back in 2004, I believe, they didn't have an existing e-commerce presence. We went out and helped them build it on, back then it was the platform as a software developer we were building on top of, and then later we migrated them to our own platform.

And they're still a client of ours today, and they've grown from zero dollars in revenue to a significant amount, I can't share the dollar amounts, but they have a massive following. And then in this current environment, as their stores, they have well over 1,200 stores. As those stores closed down, all of that traffic shifted to the website because that was the only place you could buy shoes from Journeys. And our site was able to take on that load and carry them through that time until their stores could start to reopen again.

Wow, that's amazing. It's going to be a highly stressful transition for a client to suddenly lose their main channel of sale and needing to pivot overnight to online.

Indeed. It has also opened up some new opportunities in having to exist in this environment where you can't have people coming in and out of your stores. We have built capabilities in our system that make things like curbside pickup, buy online, pick up in store, those types of tech available to really the mid-market merchants. Typically that's only available in the higher end, you know, massive scale retailers.