Sawaram Suthar / January 7, 2023 | 10 Mins Read
Updated: January 27, 2023
Today my guest is Daniele. He is a 19-year-old Italian entrepreneur trying to transform online payments and ecommerce. He is the co-founder of Sellix, a digital ecommerce platform for entrepreneurs. It allows startups to bring their products to market and accept payments without a single line of code in a matter of minutes. He’s about to start a computer science degree and plans to grow Sellix alongside his university studies.
In today’s episode, he will talk more about his business and work to break down barriers in ecommerce and online payments.
Let's learn more from him.
Sam:
All right, fine. So Mr. Daneile, welcome to the show. Can you just tell more about what exactly you are doing and a little bit about yourself?
Daniele Servadei:
Yeah, sure. Thank you. So thank you for having me. Sure. First off, so let's talk about Sellix. Sellix is basically a software service e-commerce, and it's been founded by me and other director. So in total we are two directors. I'm the CEO and the director takes a of D C O. Okay. And so in total we have actually five employees, but then we have anywhere from 10 to 20 contractors that helps us depending on the period. So for example, we have our UI and UX designer, which is an Indian guy under a contract. Then we have, yes, some other developers, marketing guys, and even our PR firm. And what we do is that we are basically software service e-commerce, as I was saying before, which you can compare to for example, Shopify. And we want to provide a platform for developers, entrepreneurs, and small cloud businesses add that want to start to sell to goods online or want to have a payment provider to sell online.
In fact, we are basically a solution that through one of our many products, such as creating your site from scratch and hosting it on our platform or even simply using our cel C A P to add an additional payment gateway on your website. Or for example, by adding just a simple H M L payment button, you can integrate our various payment gateways such as PayPal, stripe, and cryptocurrencies. So that's shortly what we do as a company.
Sam:
Oh, that's interesting. Okay. So you mentioned that it's kind of Shopify, right? So why do you want to create another Shopify? It's already there, and they have quite good customers. Almost more than 60 or 70% of businesses are already on Shopify, especially small businesses. Right. So why do you wanna create a separate or maybe in another company, another Shopify?
Daniele Servadei:
So we do not really actually see as a competitor Shopify, but more as a solution that goes next with it. Cause we are focusing on digital products. So for example, you go on Shopify to sell your t-shirts, your shoes, your painting or whatever you might want to sell that you can ship to your customers and clients. What we're aiming to is to be the best subs service platform for digital products. Meaning that if you want to, to sell your software, if you want to sell your design services your web development services, or even your tokens, activation key through programs, video courses, anything that can be sold digitally such as subscriptions and memberships, we can take care of it. And we have many, many ways and many products to take care of it. And as you've said, the vast majority percentages of Shopify merchants are actually small businesses or people that are trying to get started. And that's one of the key area that we want to focus because we believe that it's very, very important to keep the proper tools and a proper guidance and a really good solution to not only large businesses, but also to people that want to start out and start selling digital products online because they will be the one leading the digital products market or tomorrow.
Sam:
Okay, that's interesting. And in a pitch, you also mentioned about online payment, right? So are you making online payments like stripe, right? So are you kind of creating the online payment along with your ecommerce -business or it's supporting third-party like Stripe or something?
Daniele Servadei:
Yeah. The way that our payment gateway work is that we do not process the payments ourselves besides cryptocurrencies. The way we do that is that we are partnered with, for example, PayPal. We're partnered with Stripe or we have under payment gateways such as Cash App that says Perfect Money. And the way it works is that you can connect your own Stripe account, your paper account to our platform, and then we use your account to make charges directly to your merchants, to your clients. Which means that your customers do not know that selling exist. And you are completely free to customize your template, your theme, and your website to make it look like the way you want. And we just act in the background to process payments for you. And it's very, very similar for cryptocurrency as well. So for cryptocurrencies we have our own system, meaning we do not rely on third parties such as Coinbase Violence.
We do not rely on them is that we have built up our own infrastructure, meaning that for each cryptocurrency that we offer, we also have our own cryptocurrency node. We ask the solution ourselves and we manage the wallets for you, meaning that if you get paid through Bitcoin, we create a specific address with the private keys shared only with you and the address is only yours. And once we have received a transaction, we send it back to the merchant within 24 hours. And that's really one added perks of our solution, meaning that we, there's currently not a business that first payment gateways this way. And it's something that we're very, very proud of and it's one of the key things that differentiates us from.
Sam:
Okay. that will be a little bit tricky. So what is the percentage that you maximum people pay through? Is that only crypto, or it's PayPal or Stripe as well?
Daniele Servadei:
We actually have 30 distributed between them. So let's say we have around 25 to 25% in PayPal, 30 to 35% in strip, and then the remaining percentage is in cryptocurrencies.
Sam:
Wow, that's amazing. Crypto is going; it's very good. Okay. So what do you see, okay, when you talk about crypto. So just talk about FTX, right? So how do you see that the crypto market crashed, and then what happened with the FTX? Not about your question, but Yes, I'm cur curious about it: what happened?
Daniele Servadei:
Yeah, we actually have been asked many times that from our clients as well. And first off, as I've said, we do not rely on platforms meaning that we have no funds on exchanges cause we do not have to. And everything that our clients receives is held up on their wallets. Meaning that if you receive Bitcoin, we keep your Bitcoin and we do not exchange them so you receive what we receive from your customers. But FTX is a clear example of when a platform mismanages their user funds, meaning that they just used the funds that the users were providing and instead of earning just through fees, they tried to leverage and trade everything that they had as an exchange. And which meant that they wasted billions of dollars due to basically their own incompetence. Cause I mean I'm not sure if you've been following the situation line, but there are so many articles were just, SBF was describing fdx that was basically upon this scheme or the c <inaudible> resources saying irrational things such as like Stop matter.
There were so many examples of them just being completely stupid about how they were dealing with things that Israeli miracle, it didn't crash before. But the important thing in nowadays is to change is, well first off it would be better to keep cryptocurrencies on your own hard wallet's, own the keys, own the coins. But if you need to change to select an exchange, then you should be going with <inaudible> is both regulated and at the same time that publicize how many cryptos they have in their wallet. And they do not do shitty things as FTX was doing. But it's an unfortunate situation for the cryptocurrency world, honestly. Cause it'll for sure set back the market at least for a year.
Sam:
Okay, Yeah, that makes sense. Alright, so since you started this company and so how big is the company like how many people are working in your company in sales marketing and, how many people are there?
Daniele Servadei:
So as employees, as I said before, we have five employees, meaning that they're legally employed under a company, but we heavily rely on contractors. So we have anywhere from 10 to 20 contractors based on what we need. So if we are in a development phase, we have more developers. If we are now in a more marketing related phase, we more have more spending in marketing guys and PR guys. So yeah, I think that as a general number, we are two directors, five employees and around 15 contractors in total.
Sam:
Okay, that's great. Okay, so since you deal with the contractor, right? So there would be a risk factor, right? because most of the time when you work with contractors. I don't know, that's the dilusion. Some people feel it's a little bit difficult to work with contractors, but instead of that they prefer to hire in-house people. So what do you think about it? Yeah, it's
Daniele Servadei:
Difficult legally being able to hire people around the world. Cause for example, our company is based in Italy and we have for example, one guy in Germany, one in Serbia another one in the us, another one in Poland. And every time that we have to hire an employee, legally employee, you're not a contractor, we need to establish a presence in Serbia and Germany or to have another company establish a presence for us. And that's really, really difficult. So it's much easier having contractors cuz it's easier to have contract with them. You do not need to have any illegal binding presence in their country.
And at the same time you are free to scale up and down based on the direction. So let's say that you want to move from development to marketing, you could not do that if you had employees you could just say, you know, could just scale up and down the number of contractors that you need per marketing to development and back and front like it, it's easier the way we are doing now. But for the key employees, which is customer service lead developers, we have them employed because they're the most important members of our company.
Sam:
Okay, awesome. Okay, so you mentioned about scale up, right? So now let's talk about customers. So how did you get the first hundred customers? What are the strategies that you guys use? Because I'm sure most of the time CEO only do all these task, right? Because at the early stage, you don't have that much enough people on marketing, sales, all these things. So how did you get a top hundred first hundred customers and what are the strategies behind it?
Daniele Servadei:
So everything started with both me and the other founder looking out for something that wasn't really ready. And well, what we saw is that we had the idea of an eCommerce, but we weren't really sure what kind of niche we should be focusing on. Then we saw with all the cryptocurrency rally the bull run that went from to 2020 to what? 20 21, 20 22, which is now crypto crashing. But we started during the program there was no viable option for assumption service e-commerce that enabled people to sell digital product online and at the same time accepting cryptocurrencies.
So what we did is that we focused on these crypto communities that were looking to sell their products and at the same time accepting cryptos and we plugged into them and that's how we got our first customers being that we started looking for what was missing and what kind of products these communities were actually searching and they needed. And once we found that opportunity, we set the sell it from a ground up. We were only two at a time. And once we went in those communities, they really, really liked the product. And that enabled us to have the first customers, the first earnings, and based on earnings and we were able to hire new people as well.
Sam:
Okay. Okay, great. You mentioned about community, right? So is that something that you created your own community around the crypto or it's something that already created and you just joined that capital currency like other community? No, we
Daniele Servadei:
Didn't create our own community. We joined a community that was already present, but that was missing something. And that's something that was missing from that community was a proper e-commerce that was also able to provide them with the direct tools to sell their products and accept cryptos simultaneously.
Sam:
Okay, Got it. And what is your vision for this company? Where do you want to take this company?
Daniele Servadei:
Well, the vision why we did it as a study is that we wanted to offer a simple and easy to solutions for not only businesses but also individuals to sell, as I said, personal digital line. But we also want to increase the crypto community behind us by enabling them to use our products and integrate cryptos in the easiest possible way. And so what we want to do is not to just grow as a company, but we want the merchant that are using us to grow with us as well because it's like, it's impressive how much customer turnover can be improved if you have a stable payment solution behind you.
For example, if you had a customer had to refresh the page at five times or try too many payment methods just to get your parents, you would probably just go to a competitor of yours. So our goal is not just to grow as a company but also to help the people that choose us to grow with us. And the best way to do so is to provide a really, really great product and platform behind it.
Sam:
Ah, okay. Okay, that makes sense. All right, fine. Now we have quick questions, like three to four questions. Just you need to reply in one eye line or maybe just one word. Yeah, yeah. Okay. So who inspired you most?
Daniele Servadei:
So that's actually kinda weird one because I'm not really sure how many people have my same answer but for me the person I am looking for the most is Craig Federighi, which is the senior vice president at Apple leading the engineering division.
Sam:
Okay. Okay, that's cool. And when you are not in the office, what do you do?
Daniele Servadei:
Well, if I'm not in the office then it usually means that I'm out with France. And if I'm not outta France, I'm just mostly thinking about business and what great things we can do next.
Sam:
Ok. Okay. And how do we celebrate your success?
Daniele Servadei:
As a company? We are, we always celebrate our success with our team. Cause as I said, we are only seven guys. Our team is pretty small besides our contractors. And every time that something goes well, yeah, it's on your right to celebrate it together.
Sam:
Okay, nice. And if somebody wanted to connect with you, what is the best way to connect?
Daniele Servadei:
To connect with me personally? It would probably be just my email. It's with the company, I guess. Same thing, either to email or link it in. Both work fine.
Sam:
Alright, thanks. So Daniele, that's it and thanks for coming and nice talking to you.
Daniele Servadei:
Thanks for having me. Have a great day.
Sam:
Sure. Bye-bye
