The winners of the acceleration program, a team called SellerSkills, have shown the greatest progress among other participants in these 9 weeks. The team proved that it is quite possible to do global business from Ukraine and scale it. What does it take and how does it feel to work with giants like Amazon and Ebay? We talked to Maria Stadnyk, product manager of SellerSkills.
About the product
Our startup is called SellerSkills. We are oriented towards vendors who sell their products on Amazon, Walmart, Ebay etc. This means, people who work not only through one, but through multiple channels. First of all, our product allows to manage basically all processes: from product publication to order, warehouse or delivery management. Our app helps reduce the time spent on all these processes compared to when they are done manually.
How did you come up with the idea?
Pavlo and I worked on a lot of projects together; he has good expertise, he used to work in the field of e-commerce and on a product in America. I have extensive experience in outsourcing and e-commerce, as well as the rest of our team. We’ve seen that most customers come with the same queries: transfer all products on Amazon or Ebay. We thought, “Why not make an app that should always provide such services?” Gradually, we moved from outsourcing to our current product. After communicating with our beta testers, we received positive feedback, so we started to expand and since 2020 we have been working on this product full-time
What brought you and your team to the Acceleration Program?
We had a problem: we understood our product a little differently than our users. We needed to see how other people perceived our product. We wanted to see where our mistakes were, what we were doing wrong, and what we needed to improve. Now we position our product as an E-commerce management tool for sellers, so our customers and the positioning in the market will be a little different and much clearer.
The acceleration program really helped us, because we paid attention to the causes of our problems and we know what to do next.
CfE focuses mostly on potentially global startups, you are one of them. Your orientation towards Amazon, Ebay and others confirms it. Tell us where you plan to go next, how you want to scale.
At this stage of our work, we are entering the markets of the US and Canada, right now – we are entering the US market. Since China produces a very large number of goods, this country can also be a potential destination for our future development. However, now our main goal is to make our brand familiar and recognized in the US’ and Canadian markets. There is also a chance that we will find a new application of our product in another niche.
On motivation
When you first start working on a product, you will have a lot of motivation. Problems will definitely start later, because making a great product is not easy. This is where this motivation disappears. I think if you have started a startup, you need to understand what you are signing up for – it is going to be a trip from one failure to another. You must overcome all those obstacles and reach your goal. Never leave the business.