Shopventory integrates with Square and other mobile payments providers to give you in-depth information about the inventory of your business. Conversation with Co-Founders Bach Le and Rares Saftoiu.
Q: You two have been working together for awhile now?
Bach: We’ve worked together for seven years across three companies.
Q: What’s your first memory of using Square?
Bach: It was about two years ago. I signed up for an account because they were giving them away for free.
Rares: I wanted to use mine to collect money from my friends, who seemingly never had cash on them when we needed to pay together for food and other stuff.
Q: Are most of your current customers in the retail space?
Bach: They are so varied, they run the gamut. One customer owns a wine tasting shop. We have retailer clients, boutiques, pop-up shops, and all kinds of others.
Rares: Another kind of client we see often are event-based such as farmers’ markets or Comic Con, people that are setting up their items during a certain time frame. They tend to be very passion-based salespeople. One of our clients is a yoga clothing company and their booths were earning $50K per festival but prior to using Shopventory, they had no real way to track their best sellers other than assumptions.
Q: In what language is Shopventory built? How does it communicate inventory details to a business owner?
A: It’s built on Django and it runs reports at any time the user needs. Whatever the state of their inventory is, you select the date range and request the report. As part of the report, we illustrate which items are selling well and track trends as they occur.
Q: Thoughts on the TechStars program?
A: Busy, busy, busy. It’s super beneficial and we’re starting to notice that we’re finally adjusting to the pace. We were able to write code this week. It’s been a great experience so far. It forced us to really clarify who we’re targeting and focus on customer development. It’s been great.