12 minutes of eComm Wisdom: Youri Moskovic from Prediko

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Great to have you here, Youri. You and I have been looking at some of the same challenges for quite a long time. So thank you for taking the time. for the audience, could you give us like a quick elevator pitch on what you're working on with Prediko, what's the problem that you're looking to solve?

Yeah, of course. And thanks for having me team. so I'm one of the co founders of Prediko. what we're building effectively isa way for e com entrepreneurs and merchandisers to streamline the inventory operations, and helping them focus on their core strengths, which is creating and selling products.

So in essence, what we're building now is an intelligent inventory management system that helps you plan inventory,demand accurately. Turn this into what we call a buying plan.

So helping you understand when you need to order and restock at your suppliers in a timely fashion and then another thing we're working on is then helping you finance those orders as we know that this can be quite expensive

to invest in as an up and coming merchant.

So there's there's three parts then: there's the intelligence bit in terms of understanding, how much inventory you might need. Then there's the purchasing component and then there's the financing component of the inventory. would you say the first two are already like a lock in terms of being fully operational.

Are you still working on the second part around purchasing, for example?

No, the first two are very much a lock as you call it. This is really the base of our software. We're helping these companies plan, figure out when to order it and placing those POs collaborating with the suppliers was, as you correctly pointed out, the financing is more something in the works and that we've already started trying.

With some of our customers here in the UK, working well, but something that, we are,not focusing on 100% at the moment because, we want to make sure that the first bit is, is where most of the value from our software comes from.

And you guys have been around in market for, over 2 years now, or just around 2 yearsand you're obviously super passionate about the problem that you're solving for, and you have seen lots of merchants now that have gone through the experience and used Prediko. And I'm sure you've seen like some wins or some companies that are essentially maybe saved by Prediko in some ways and people thriving off the software.

Is there, just so that people can really understand how it all comes together, is there like one brand that you've worked with that comes to mind where you feel like Prediko has just absolutely been a game changer for them?

There's a few. I think, there are some,power users, as we call them of our platform.

There's one in particular that I can think of, which is called 'Healf'. it'sa supplements brands here inin the UK, they sellproducts of other brands as well. So kind of like a marketplace play as well as their own. And, these guys have been incredible in the sense that they were growing extremely fast and they were managing their entire operations manually, meaning that their forecasts, whether manually it was.

Quite time consuming, very much prone to error, especially at the rate at which these guys were growing. And they wanted to implement a solution that was stronger and more efficient than the one that they were using, which was, the manual, input from their ops team. We onboarded them within, a week.

So plugged into their Shopify within a day, we. Personalized the platform during the week that followed. And in the next 2 months after that, we helped them reduce their stock out rate from 4% to 1%. And for a brand that's, growing at the rate that they were growing without, sharing some numbers we're talking about, hundreds of thousands of dollars of extra revenue per year by planning more accurately and ordering on time for the right products.

And that's helping us on the revenue side, as I mentioned, but it's also helping them reduce overstock, which is another big problem for brands that are overshooting and overestimating what the demand for certain products are going to be, which leads to having way too much inventory in your warehouse and that's cost of goods, but that's also storage costs that you try to minimize as well so that you're improving revenue, you're decreasing costs and overall you're driving profit, profitability up.

Yeah, that's cool. Now just more on like the founder journey side of things.

Because you're in the thick of it, and you're doing an amazing job with Prediko. Uh, you've raised some money from some of the best investors in the game, Felix Capital being one of them, in London. How has it been? So you've raised your seed round to, about a year and a half ago, or some, somewhere around that.

Are your eyes set on like a series A fundraise? Or are you just thinking day to day, how do I grow the business? and fundraising doesn't take up that much of your brain space.I have to say we're very much in execution mode right now.

Not really thinking about, like the next race per se. that said, like we have a goal that we want to achieve. it's our mission and it's a qualitative mission in a way, but we want to become the number one inventory brand within the Shopify ecosystem. So if you think about it every other industry has their leader, within Shopify.

If you think about like Gorgias and customer support, you can think about Klaviyo and email and SMS, recharge as subscriptions. But then when you think about Inventory, very often nobody can put the finger on Who is the leader within that space? And that's what I want us to become. And that's really the mission that we're on.

So instead of thinking about like, when should our next raise be? I'm very much trying to think about like, how can we penetrate the Shopify ecosystem as, as much as possible and become the best inventoryplatform within, that space and I say it's a qualitative goal because it feels whenever you're becoming, the number one reference when people start talking about you and you've got that word of mouth going, then you know that, you've got your shot at this and we're starting to see this a little bit, but obviously it's early days and

that's what we're thinking about in terms of our execution for the next, like 12, 18 months and ensure we do our job well, then perhaps there will be opportunities for us to do something or to carry on our own. Let's see. Let's see how that goes.

Yeah, it's funny you mentioned like being the go-to reference when it comes to inventory planning

'cause I had stumbled upon, an app called Inventory Planner, a couple years back. Yeah. And I believe they got bought by a massive group Brightpearl by Sage. So Sage is a much bigger company that acquired Brightpearl, that acquired Inventory Planner.

Yeah. So do you think they were the reference then? And if so, what, like how much of a gap is there between Prediko and Inventory Planner by Brightpearl at this stage?

Let me tell you this in terms of the market landscape, 85-90% of the customers that we meet that end up becoming a customer or not are on Excel spreadsheetsor Google spreadsheets. So I would say that right now, for the market that we are after, which are brands that are like pre ERP, if you will: Our biggest number one competitor ultimately is a human with their Excel. And once we're not trying to replace the human, we're very much trying to replace the Excel, right?

So we want to become that tool that you're coming to, because as we know, Excel is manual, it's time consuming, you need to consolidate all of the data. And the goal with Prediko is not only that we help you plan more accurately, but that we also help you save time through the levels of automations that we have.

And you're right, like inventory planner back in the days, where one of the companies out there that were doing a great job, But since the acquisition things have changed,they're decided to hide their pricing. They went up a little bit up market, which is to follow the trajectory of the bright pearl and the sage brands ultimately.

and so that opens up a, an opportunity, for Prediko. And, yeah, we're coming sometimes against them on, on, on some deals. I know that we've migrated many brands from them over the past 6-12 months. and, so I know that there are obviously some advantages that we have but it depends who you're talking to in terms of the customer prospects.

Yeah, that list that this does feel short though, in terms of like players that are out there and then there's Excel. So I feel like there's a really good opportunity for you guys to keep growing as you have been. Okay, we don't have that much time. So I want to do two more questions for you.

One is around as a SaaS founder at this stage in your journey. Want to know what the most difficult part of growing Prediko is? And then, and then the last question will just be around, what's the most fun part of, of doing your day job today. let's start with the, the tough bit.

Yeah. What's, what's challenging right now in terms of growing Prediko?

Right now, I would say like for the past couple of years, what's been the toughest, number one, I think is hiring exceptional talent when you're doing new kid on the block, and you need to hire talent to build your first product or the best product, generally speaking, it's difficult, it's hard, we're not all ex OpenAI alumni. And therefore, like you don't attract everybody at the same time. You need to go out there and prove yourselves very much when you're pitching your company to an investor, you need to pitch your company to best talent. And this is difficult when you don't have much, materials to share because it's very early.

And so this has been quite difficult, but it's getting easier over time as you start to proving yourself. So that's been tough. And I would say the second thing Is building your first product in a way, you might think, your markets and you know exactly what the customer needs, but I would say that,like building your first set of solutions so that you have a coherent customer journey, that plan order finance thing, it's.

Not as easy as it sounds, of course. and it's a very humbling journey to go to your product market fit that reminds you almost that nothing, should be grant, like taken for granted. And that you always need to think about questioning whether what you're doing is right. And so these have clearly been the two toughest parts of, of the process.

Awesome. Yeah. I feel I always go back to this when I speak with other, like w like founders in the space. there's,you can raise as much as you want, et cetera. Like time in market, the longer you spend in the market, the more insights you get, and you're able to move your move, move faster, unlock certain things and, and money doesn't necessarily help you do that.

It's really just like amount of time in market and amount of customers you speak with. That's why I said,I, I agree is, fundraising is one thing. And then once you've gotten your money, you've got to go and execute an execution is, it's testing all the time, something,and, getting some results and tweaking based on that.

And so when you're building your product or when you're hiring, or when you're doing, something like, even when it's like pitching, you always need to test new things, see what works, what doesn't based on who you were talking to, and then adjust accordingly based on your plan and the feedback that you get.

And I think that's. Especially in the early days is difficult because your product is not entirely there. So every customer might think about something differently and you're being pulled into so many directions and you need to remain focused and find that right balance between, the vision you've got for this product, what customers are telling you and who you're really targeting.

and this can take time. so yeah, you got to go at it, relentlessly. Awesome. Cool. you got to run. I know that. So I'll be very quick with this one. It won't be more than a minute, but, we talked about the bad stuff or the challenging stuff. Let's talk about the good stuff. what's the best part of, of doing like being CEO of Prediko.

what's your favorite piece?

Well, there are two things. one goes back to the team, which is once you build your team and you're very happy with the team that you've built working with the team on a day to day is what, should help motivate yourself and make you happy on a day to day, because these are the people you work with constantly and that you need to rely on and stuff.

once you've chosen your team wisely, hopefully you're happy with it. and at least we are. And that's one of the cool things. I guess the other goes back then to the customers. I personally love being in touch with the customers. So I'm still doing the commercials myself.

I take most of the demos. and. I meet new people. I,ultimately make new friends within the space and learn new things. Whenever we've got a new brand coming up with this different use case, then it's always interesting to go deeper, understand if, and when,we can help, if, and when we can help them.

Sorry. So for me, that's what also, it's something that I really love is just meeting new brands every day.

Beautiful. Great. Cool Youri, Pleasure to chat as always, and thank you so much for the insights, and yeah, speak to you soon.

Speak to you soon, Tim. Thanks for having me.

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