Ella Chat built Powered by People by first creating maker-facing digital tools on Shopify, then adding financing services. After verifying a quality group of makers, they launched the PVP Market platform six months ago as their core business.
You know, what were like the first steps that you took to start it as a B2B marketplace?
Yeah, we actually started a little bit more with building out our, our brand tools. We recognize that in business-to-business marketplaces, you know, where's the bottleneck? And I think for global brands and global independent brands, the sector that we're working in, digitization is actually a really big challenge for them. And so access to internet, access to— that's actually not a challenge anymore. I mean, you have a lot of mobile technology and penetration of internet is quite high. But just having business tools is a really, you know, having a, having a mobile phone and having access to Facebook is one thing, but having the actual business tools for some of these independent brands globally is quite unique. And so we felt like a lot of business-to-business wholesale platforms have already proven out the retail space, and we're like, okay, we'll get to that. We already have deep networks in that space as well from our building our own brands. And so we really focused on those tools. We built out our own multi-vendor management tool. which actually serves as a free system that anyone can use. It looks and feels like sort of a Shopify. We actually are built on Shopify right now, just because we've hacked things together over the last 6 months. But we ultimately allow for more wholesale functionality within, within our portal and access to financing, which is a really unique offering. So we built the digital tools and the financing first, and those were very maker-facing. value-added services. And then basically, once we felt like we'd had a critical mass, had an aspirational sort of high-quality verified group of makers, we've now opened the platform. And now just 6 months ago, we launched PVP Market. And that's, that's what we stand behind today as our core business unit.
Yeah, that's, that's really interesting. So yeah, we've actually had the chance to speak with a few other marketplace founders that are in the B2B and kind of SaaS enabled that started by building, you know, some like the SaaS tooling first that solves specific problems and then kind of introduced the marketplace. So, you know, what was like your initial kind of go-to-market strategy then being, you know, building the kind of initial SaaS tooling and the payments and whatnot, as you mentioned?
Yeah, I mean, I think those were very much independent offerings at one point. So we didn't actually launch those together. They weren't, you know, necessarily combined. We are actually on Friday launching the first sort of integrated solution, which includes market, the financing, and the digital tools all now in one interface. And again, we offer that for free for anyone who's in our sector of creative manufacturing, small businesses, and anyone who's looking to and has, has the capacity to basically be— anyways, values-driven is probably our greatest criteria. And then if you want to be featured on our market, it's just a one-click feature to actually then introduce you to our market offering and you can apply for financing. So what's really exciting about this, and I feel like I'm not addressing your question, Mike, but I think that it is— it allows us to not just manage on-market transactions. What we're finding is what's really interesting is that right now we might introduce them to 1%, 2%, 3% of new orders and transactions in their overall business, but they could actually run their other 97% of their business on our tools as well, which could provide them access to financing for off-market transactions. And I think that that's when this platform, as I would say, not just a marketplace, but a platform becomes really interesting. But again, I always say the closer you are to the customer and the ping, the monetary strategy of these businesses and our customers, the better we are in sort of remaining sort of a sticky solution. So our market remains kind of, I would say, the biggest draw for why people join our platform, then it's the financing, because again, if you can assist with cash flow, and then I would say the last is really digital tools, because the adoption is driven by the desire to access new markets and financing.
