Max Brun started Button with 57 medical products from surplus inventory, selling them online at 20-40% discounts. Doctors didn't trust e-commerce, so he hired three salespeople to call physicians in Washington State and build relationships. The combination of personal sales and a simple website created repeat business that let the catalog grow to 2.5 million items.
Chapters
Like, what were the first steps to actually starting Button as a marketplace that you took? And could you maybe like walk us through the initial kind of early stages? Yeah. So when we launched Button, we only had, I think, 57 products that we could sell. And the way that we did that was that we reached out to regional distributors and I'm talking, you know, Google right now, like medical supplies by near me. And we would call those people and ask them, hey, do you have any extra supplies that you'd be willing for us to sell through the internet? And they'd say, sure, we have some surplus inventory that we'd be willing if you can sell it at this price. And we go, great, sounds good. And what we'd do is we wouldn't mark up that price, right? We'd buy it at a discount and, you know, add simple, simple markup to it and resell it. And what we were finding was that even on those small selection of products, we were 20 to 40% less expensive than what they were paying today for those medical supplies. And that was groundbreaking, right? To have that realization like, wow, we have no economies of scale, we have nothing cool going on, we don't have the right products, but still we're saving people money even on these small selection of products. And so as we scaled, we just had to keep selling only those 57 products and the majority of which weren't done through e-commerce. We had a 3-person, me being one of them, sales force that was calling doctors across Washington State because we're based here in Seattle and basically saying, hey, I can save you money on medical supplies. Let me tell you a little bit about Button. And we did direct sales pretty much for the first month almost exclusively just to get that flywheel going. And it was mostly because our customers weren't comfortable with technology. You know, these are, you know, later generation, not familiar with tech, don't like, have a bad perception of e-commerce and other materials. They've been convinced that by the industry that it would never work in their environment. And only when we showed them, hey, you still have someone to call, if you can't figure it out, but we'd prefer and you'd prefer to not call me every time you need one of these 57 products, then they started going to the website. Then we started seeing the repeat purchases come through the platform and then we were able to scale accordingly. But getting it off the ground was just, you know, please buy one of these 57 materials. And then, you know, now our catalog is 2.5 million different SKUs as we've aggregated demand and found more supply. But it was a slug to get to this point to start.
