startups

Therefore, as a founder, one should always be hiring.


Prisync is a competitor price tracking & dynamic pricing software for all sizes of e-commerce companies

Please introduce yourself and your startup Prisync to our readers!

My name is Burc Tanir and I am the CEO & co-founder of Prisync.

Prisync is a competitor price tracking & dynamic pricing software for all sizes of e-commerce companies from all around the world. 

We help e-commerce companies to automatically track the prices & stock availabilities of their competitors’ products and help them re-price their products automatically by using Prisync’s Dynamic Pricing Engine. This engine helps them set algorithmic pricing rules which will achieve maximum competitiveness & profitability.

How did you get the idea to Prisync?

Well, many of our close friends were working in e-commerce back in 2013.

And unfortunately – or maybe, fortunately when we think of the inspiration it gave to us back then – many of those good friends’ job at these e-commerce companies were manual competitive pricing analysis. We noticed that those smart friends were wasting their hours on visiting competitor websites, copying & pasting prices into Excel files – quite error-prone, indeed! – and then reporting those files to the final pricing decision makers. And what happened at the last step, i.e. pricing was simply crunching those Excel files manually and coming up with new competitive prices for the products, at best once in every week.

We thought that software that could automate this complete pricing decision making from data collection (competitor price tracking) to price making (dynamic pricing engine) would come quite handy in the huge global e-commerce market.

How difficult was the start and what challenges you had to overcome?

Obviously, on day 1, we had no software but an idea, and, needless to add, no money. So, we needed to make money somehow to bootstrap the early days of product development and growth.

To do that, we started selling the idea – fake it till you make it rocks! – to target companies and generated an early set of customers and when it came to catering these companies, we did what they were doing in-house: manually collecting 1000s of products’ prices a few times a day at tens of competitors. And imagine doing this for a number of companies. Good old days!

This helped us in two ways. We really experienced the pain by heart and of course, helped us to acquire our first few customers, bootstrap the company to build its first SaaS prototype and raise a small seed round from angel investors.

Who is your target audience?

We target e-commerce companies of all sizes that sell branded products that can be simply Google’d and found across multiple sites online at various/dynamic price-points. We don’t have any geographical/technological barriers, and this helped us to scale Prisync in more than 50 countries to date.

To name a few industries where Prisync has solid penetration, I can obviously count consumer electronics, mom & baby, cosmetics, pet food & DIY. 

However, we also have many customers from not-so-predictable e-commerce verticals such as swimming pool supplies or e-vaping products.

What is the USP of your startup?

We’re automating a must-run yet ineffective & inefficient, if not impossible operation, which is tracking prices of 1000s of products at 100s of competitor websites dynamically and coming up with dynamic prices that are being optimized a few times a day according to the competitor prices and profit margin targets.

Can you describe a typical workday of you?

Nowadays, like every day since day 1, our focus is on growth.

Therefore, I dedicate all my time & attention into growth just like all my team-mates.

My typical workday revolves between short-term & long-term thinking in the domains of product, marketing, sales & customer support and I try to remain as hands-on as possible while enabling all my team-mates to achieve better results in their field than I’d. 

Where do you see yourself and your startup Prisync in five years?

Our clear target is to become the go-to vendor for all sizes of e-commerce companies from all around the world when they need help for their pricing operations. We follow this target by heart and even make bold moves such as acquiring our competitors – for ex. we acquired our AU-based competitor Spotlite this March.

This reflects into numbers in the sense that we target having 1000s of paying customers from all around the world in the next 3-5 years.

However, beyond numbers or revenue, we also aim to have a solid impact in e-commerce economy where we’ll be kind of killing the information asymmetry and leveling the playing field for all sizes of e-commerce companies when it comes to pricing power. (We’ll enable even small e-commerce startups to price as smart as Amazon does.)

Additionally, while growing worldwide, we’ll be building the biggest e-commerce product database that will carry live information for millions of products from 100.000s of websites and we obviously believe that this database and the data it carries will have significant value in future markets.

What 3 tips would you give other Start-up founders on the way?

Well, I guess this my tips would be quite personal as I believe, in startup success, there is no one-size-fits-all type of tips.

However, I can’t emphasize the importance of not giving on the worst days down the way. Because there’ll be such days and you’ll definitely consider giving up at the back of your mind. However, sticking to your somewhat irrational perseverance pays off when the lights start to shine outside the tunnel you’re in. (Assuming that you’re in a tunnel, not a black-hole really.)

Secondly, I believe that team-building should start on day 1 and should always be a continuous task for startups. Therefore, as a founder, one should always be hiring.

And of course, hiring is just the beginning of team-building. I really believe that the more important part comes into play later, where you start working with all these people you have picked as your team-mates. There, I value presence and support over every other thing I can provide to my colleagues. In other words, I always prioritize helping my colleagues to perform better than they did in the past, say last week or month, and do my best to overcome all the blocking factors they encounter as they contribute to our growth story, kinda the only story we care about.

More information you will find here

Thank you Burc Tanir for the Interview

Statements of the author and the interviewee do not necessarily represent the editors and the publisher opinion again.





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