This week, UK-Based Boticca announced a $4 Million round of fundraising from MMC Ventures, a fund whose portfolio includes Alexa & Alexa, Wool & the Gang & other budding e-commerce companies. The curated marketplace for jewelry also received follow-on investment from previous investor ISAI. As pointed out in TechCrunch, this round of funding will give founders Kiyan Foroughi (CEO) & Avid Larizadeh (COO) the kind of rocket fuel they need to start attacking the international market (the site is currently only in English).
In an interview with Foroughi, he told the Rude Baguette that the next year is all about growth & international:
We’d like to see Boticca enjoy a significant year-over-year increase in our customer database, traffic, sales and having successfully expanded into international markets with local language version websites – all the while continuing our profitable customer acquisition.
As Foroughi notes, the company spent the past two years using the roughly $2.5 Million in seed investment to test, perfect, and scale paid customer acquisition models that would work for the company:
In the past, the biggest hurdle was to demonstrate a scalable, formulaic and sustainable customer acquisition strategy. That is what successful e-commerce is all about. Your acquisition cost needs to be lower than your lifetime value. If that’s not the case, you don’t have a sustainable business.
We spent a year testing several different channels and acquisition methods – which is quite tricky when you’re building a pioneering business model such as the curated marketplace – and then found our ‘secret sauce’ towards the end of last year. We now have a scalable customer acquisition strategy and profitable unit economics with a lifetime value four times the cost to acquire a customer.
The biggest hurdle we face today is to keep that sustainable strategy as we expand into new markets as well as hire the best talent to allow us to execute our objectives.
Going forward, the company will likely be localizing its site into French & other languages, all the while hoping that its ‘secret sauce’ is scalable, can be localized across multiple languages, and will continue to hold strong.