Earlier this year, we witnessed the founders of cloud-based inventory and sales management SaaS (software-as-a-service) application TradeGecko pitch their product at JFDI-Innov8 2012 Bootcamp Demo Day. Last week, the startup finally announced its public beta launch.
Targeted for small- to medium-sized enterprises, TradeGecko is designed to simplify the tasks of running a wholesale business and making it more social and engaging. Founded by three Kiwis – Carl Thompson and brothers Bradley and Cameron Priest – the service aims to fill a gap in the market between users of enterprise solutions such as SAP, Netsuite and SalesForce, and those who use spreadsheets, and is particularly useful for small scale importers, distributors, wholesalers, manufacturers and designer-makers.
“We’ve taken complex business processes and applied our user-first design theory to create an application that is beautiful and easy to use,” says CEO of Singapore-based TradeGecko, Cameron Priest. The team spent the past few months researching and redesigning business management workflows and created an application that instead focused on team engagement, workflows and activity feeds.
Co-founder Carl Thompson should know the pains that his target segments suffer from – after all, he ran his own clothing label but was quickly snowed under with administration when that business grew. “Running my clothing label was exciting and I enjoyed it a lot. But we grew very fast and the amount of administration quickly overwhelmed us,” shares Thompson.
“I couldn’t find a solution to pull it all together. Spreadsheets and manual data processing turned into an absolute nightmare.” But it was those lessons that helped shape TradeGecko.
“SaaS applications for business are on a very healthy incline and it’s only in the last few years, with the latest development technologies, that complex business systems can be build in a cost effective way,” Priest concludes.
TradeGecko is currently closing its first round of funding.
