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Steve: Katherine Hague joins us. Katherine is in from Toronto. She’s here for a startup
conference going on for Web and Web 2.0 in entrepreneurial-type of companies. Thanks
for coming in, Katherine. Katherine: Thanks for having me.
Steve: Now Katherine, you have your own online site called ShopLocket.
Katherine: Yes. Steve: Which is an online shopping site where
people can create and manage their own listings and promote their products that they’re
selling in a variety of ways. And how long have you been doing this for?
Katherine: We started working on it at the end of last year. Now we’ve been fully launched
for about four months. Steve: So you’re only four months into startup.
Wow. Katherine: Yes.
Steve: How many hours during the day do you work? How many hours of a day do you spend
doing surfing? Katherine: Whenever we’re awake, we’re
basically working. Steve: It’s your absolute life right now
because you’re a young entrepreneur. You’re fairly young, right?
Katherine: Yes. Steve: So now I wanted to ask about it because
it’s a compelling product. I really like the design so tell me how you went about starting
the product then we’ll get into the details of the product in a few minutes but what was
the genesis of this? Katherine: Yeah. So my background is in business
and marketing and I’ve always loved startups and I was a part of the startup community.
And about a year and a half ago, my good friends that founded something called Shopify launched
this new thing called a Theme Store for Shopify and I decided to get involved and actually
launched a theme on that Theme Store. Steve: Now Shopify is a, I guess it’s a
success story in Canadian high tech, I think based in Ottawa primarily?
Katherine: Yeah, Ottawa. Steve: And they are a shopping cart provider
so they’re a website or an internet provider who gives you the architecture, the back end
you need in order to launch a web store. Did I kind of capture it properly?
Katherine: Yeah, exactly. So when you decide I want to launch a new store front to sell
a bunch of different products, you can use Shopify and they’ll give you a new website
that you can have all of your different product listings, people can browse and what the Theme
Store was the ability to pick what does that store look like and you can pick from a hundred
different themes, what are the colors I want, what’s the orientation I want.
Steve: So if I was a fly-fishing store and I had a retail location and I would say I
want to bring my store online, I would go to Shopify and sign up for an account which
I could then tie into my accounting system, my inventory system, they’ve got all those
sort of elaborate hooks. But now for the look and feel of my store online, I might look
at some of the themes. I’ll be looking for the ones in hunter green or maroon design
that’s really going to fit for the fly-fishing aficionado.
Katherine: Exactly and my theme was actually Mad Men-inspired so the first one was Madison
Avenue and then we had Fifth Avenue and whole entire New York theme of stores.
Steve: So you’re basing it off the hit TV series. So very thin ties, thin black ties.
Katherine: So the first one is sort of very maroon and very subtle colors, and cocktail-inspired.
Steve: So how long did it take you to develop the theme?
Katherine: The theme actually I did with a very good friend of mine who is an amazing
designer. He built it in about two weeks and I sort of took on some of the financial risk
and some of the marketing side of things. We actually broke even in about three weeks
after we launched the store. Steve: Wow. So you started building the themes
and that became the business direction for you. Why did you stop building themes and
decide to step out of the Shopify world? Katherine: Well, I loved doing it and actually
we made about $16,000 in profit just in the year that we first launched the theme
Steve: [Interposing] Which is really good for two weeks of work.
Katherine: For two weeks work, yeah. And I didn’t even do that two weeks’ work. [Laughter]
So I loved working with all the store owners and started brainstorming. I’ll see other
cool apps, cool things that I can build for this and I really realized that there’s
this huge opportunity there. Then I had my own product, they’re just some fun T-shirts
that I had made and I wanted to sell them and I was like okay, great! I can finally
start a store front. But I realized that for someone like myself
that has a blog and has a website that really only has one product that they’re trying
to sell from that. It doesn’t make sense to create an entirely new store front, redesign
it. One product can kind of go with in a store. Steve: Yeah, it’s overkill for sure.
Katherine: Exactly. So what could I use that would still make me look professional that
I’m going to be proud to share and I found myself quickly going to Amazon, to eBay—
Steve: [Interposing] EBay, Amazon, Craig’s list
Katherine: Craig’s list, PayPal Buy buttons. After working with something as awesome as
Shopify, it just seems so unprofessional. This problem that seems so simple, I have
one product and I want to sell it, why was it actually just so complicated and that’s
really where ShopLocket was born. We wanted to make selling a product just as easy as
sharing a YouTube video. Steve: Okay and that’s really the theme.
As I look at your site, and I did sign up and start to play with it, it does have the
feel at least from how you manage your listing of kind of like a YouTube video. So you sign
up for an account and your barriers for entry are pretty low. I think they asked me for
my email address and that was it. Katherine: Yeah.
Steve: So there was no whipping out my credit card and charging. So we’ll get into the
financial relationship a little bit later. So I signed up for the account and it says:
so what do you want to sell? It’s basically the way that your site works. As I create
a listing, walk me through what happens as I create my listing and what my options are
as far as selling something. We should point out this is probably not for selling a used
set of snow tires that’s sitting in your garage. This is for more boutique items, something
that’s unique, something that has intrinsic value or maybe a craft that you’re making.
Something that’s unique from that perspective. Katherine: Yeah, something that you’d be
proud to show off so we have a lot of self-published authors. We have companies that have merchandise.
Events that have T-shirts. Bands selling their first record or first CD. So it’s really
things that you want to share with your network, that you’re proud to put on Facebook or
on your blog, or things that other people would want to continue to share as well.
Steve: Okay, so it’s going to be quality product, boutique-type product. What happens
now? I create a listing. I import a photograph into my listing and what’s the next step?
Katherine: You literally just name your product, write a description, and upload a photo. You
can pick the style for what you want your product to actually look like when it’s
embedded I a blog post or on a website. Steve: And that’s what the wrapper around
the Shopify ad looks like. Katherine: Yeah, so it’s basically the Wrap
Around your ShopLocket widget and it’s the color.
Steve: Oh, sorry. Katherine: A lot of you all do that. Too many
things with shop at the beginning. But basically, you pick the color. Basically, that’s wrapping
up your product listing and you hit publish and basically you put in a PayPal email address
and you’re done. Whenever someone purchases your product, the money’s going to go straight
to your PayPal account if you’re in the States. You’ll also have the option of something
called Stripe in beta now in Canada. It’s one of the coolest payment processors out
there. Steve: So we’re going to see the competition
for PayPal. Katherine: Yeah, it’s definitely already
happening in a very big way down in the States with Stripes and just about four weeks ago,
they launched their Canadian beta so I’m very excited to be some of the first people
using that so keep your eyes peeled for Stripe as it comes.
Steve: I’m making a note as we speak. So okay, I think that for some of our audience
that we skipped by a really important part which is you’re saying that I’m going
to sell stuff. First of all, how do I know it’s being sold? B, where am I selling it?
Where is this listing where magically, suddenly people are looking at this ad? So let’s
walk through first of all, procedurally, how are the notification and the transaction handled?
Tell me that. Katherine: So what happens that once you’ve
actually made a sale, we’ll notify you by email and then you can also log back into
your ShopLocket account to actually see a listing of all the orders that have come in
and view more details about each of those transactions.
But the way that you would actually have gotten the word out after you publish it is we give
you, just like when you publish a YouTube video, you can either link directly to the
YouTube video or you can embed that video on your Facebook page, on a blog post, or
on an existing website. So it works the exact same way with ShopLocket. You can either share
a link to where we host it or you can actually embed it directly on any existing site that
you already have. Steve: So the embed code, and for people who
haven’t ever played with YouTube or worked with embed codes, it creates a little snippet
of code which if you have a blog or your own Wordpress site, instead of using the whizzywig
editor where you’re basically looking at your text bolded or your graphics as they’re
in place, you can look at the underlying code behind that and within that underlying code
you can embed this piece of code that you’ve created in ShopLocket. Then when you post
that posting, it will appear as a nice, graphical representation.
Katherine: [Interposing] Interactive widget. Steve: Interactive widget where the people
see the nice wrapper, they see the ad, they click here to buy, and it takes you into your
payment processing system. Katherine: Exactly. Just try and keep it really
simple and not have to deal with any of the complexities, what photos, how am I going
to arrange the text, what do I do I have different colors or different variants of what this
product is, taking all the complexity out of that and just wrapping it into this one
little widget that you can just share anywhere. Steve: How are you going to be paid? How are
you going to make your money out of this, young lady?
Katherine: So we don’t actually make anything until someone makes a sale and then we have
a 2.5% transaction fee that’s just a split payment of your PayPal transaction fee. So
we’re paid every time there’s a sale for our 2.5% fee.
Steve: So if I’m selling something, PayPal, I think, takes about 3%? Is it 2.7% or 2.2%?
Katherine: Yes, 2.9% plus 30 cents. Steve: So PayPal’s going to take that. You’re
going to take 2.5% off not of the net or of the subtracted total but of the grand total.
So you’re going to lose about 5.4% plus 30 cents. That’s what it’s going to cost
you for the transaction which really isn’t too bad.
Katherine: Well really on any store front platform, you’re going to have to pay some
sort of transaction fee whether it’s on Shopify, whether it’s on eBay. Actually
eBay fees are much closer to 9% by the time you’re actually done. So we’re just trying
to keep it really simple and make sure that all of our sellers are not taking on huge
monthly commitments and risks. That they can just, as you succeed, we succeed as well.
Steve: So eBay and Amazon who both sell products and used products take on responsibility of
reaching the market place. People got to search for your product on eBay. That’s a powerful
marketing tool that you’ve decided to completely, you shoo that model and say that you’re
responsible for reaching your customers yourself. We’re just going to be a transactional processing
agent for you making sure that the transaction happens clearly and easily. We lower the barriers
for your customers to purchase and we’re going to give you some nice, powerful tools
that allow you to create ads that are fairly compelling.
Katherine: Yeah. So we’re ideal for the person that, whether it’s your friends or
whether it’s your company or whether it’s your following, already have some sort of
networking you want to sell to. It’s very similar to if you launch your own website
that’s a store front, you have to drive your own traffic and you build up your own
audience but why should that have to take you a couple of weeks or a couple of months
to launch? We’ll let you be just as professional as that but in just a few minutes. And a lot
of people see those marketplace solutions being a little bit unprofessional and I don’t
necessarily want to direct someone where they’re going to see hundreds and thousands of other
products as well as mine. Steve: That’s the challenge that you face
in those areas. So you’ve been going for four months now. Were you in beta before that
or was that included in your beta time? Katherine: We’re still in beta. Before that,
we were in closed betas. You had to have a special invite to get in.
Steve: So now you’re in open beta. We should point out that Google, I think, is still considered
beta. [Laughter] So you might never get out of beta.
So it’s free to sign up now. Are you limited to just Canada or are you worldwide at this
point? Katherine: Some people are actually using
us from all around the world. In terms of currency, however, we support Canadian, USD,
GBP, and euro. Steve: Okay. And so tell me where are you
in your road map now? You’re four months into it. Do you have enough users that you’re
starting to create some critical mass that you’re getting lots of really positive feedback
or lots of useful feedback from your user base and you can see a solid growth curve
happening? Katherine: Yeah, we’re definitely seeing
more pickup every single day and we’re having some great success stories. We had a self-published
author a few days ago that sold out all the pre-copies of his book in about 24 hours.
It’s just so great to see it helping someone like that. I think he had spent three days
trying to set up other solutions and just got so frustrated and in less than an hour,
he was already selling with us. Hearing things like that is just great for us and we just
closed a major amount of funding about four weeks ago so finally we’re settling back
into work flow and having progress and it’s been nice to get back to work.
Steve: Well, I was certainly going to keep an eye on your success. There are so many
places that we could take the conversation. I’d love to know what’s happening around
the crowd funding model if they’re starting to embrace what you’re doing but we’re
kind of run out of time already. Katherine Hague, her website is ShopLocket.com
if you’ve got something cool to sell. It’s well worth your time to check out ShopLocket.
Thanks, Katherine. Katherine: Thanks so much.
Steve: I’m Steve Dotto and you’re tuned in to DottoTech.
[End of video ShopLocket]