Q&A: Bertie Stephens, founder of Flubit

With $1m investment and a $4m valuation Flubit – the online discount platform threatening to “change the face of buying online,” has made a name for itself since launch in September 2012.

Hot on the back of winning the London Web Summit’s start-up of the year award, we catch up with the founder of Flubit, Bertie Stephens to find out more about the platform and what it can do for ecommerce retailers.

Congratulations on the award Bertie! Can you tell us what Flubit does?

When we set out, what we wanted to do felt almost like an impossible task. We wanted to be able to offer a consumer discount on almost any product they want to buy, at any time. We also wanted to make sure that the merchants selling the products could really benefit.

We have seen a lot of retailers struggle against the three big vendors, Amazon, eBay and Argos – there is almost a monopoly and if merchants sell on those platforms, they dilute their brands.

Also, when it comes to offers and discounts there is a real spamming culture – people have to delete three or four emails every morning of offers that aren’t relevant to them.

So we built a proposition that could benefit merchants, help with incremental sales and offer discounts that work. It is a private, demand driven market place. It creates a one-on-one relationship between the customer and the retailer which is exciting.

How does it work?

Customers find the url of something that they are about to buy and put it into Flubit. We will go away and create a lower offer for them. What is important is that we aren’t a price comparison site – we go out and create unique offers from customers’ demands.

We call what we are doing ecommerce 3.0. It is the evolution in ecommerce as we are reversing the market place. Consumers are sending through demands and we have seen the price that other merchants are offering, so we can help our merchants to win the sale because they are reacting to the existing price of their competitors.

So merchants that are signed up to Flubit see the demand and make an offer?

No we actually make it a lot easier for the merchant. They don’t have time to go away and make a decision about what they want to offer based on a customer demand. We create a framework with boundaries. They let us know how far they are willing to discount their products and we make the decision on what the offer will be when we see the demand, based on their frameworks.

Merchants can just sit back and know that if the demand is there, we will try and capture it for them.

Amazon do brilliantly on customer reviews and it is a wonderful tool but we realised no one is really looking at the end part of the purchase journey, when I am ready to buy – can I get it cheaper? We help retailers to make offers by comparing what prices people are already putting out there.

Where did the idea come from?

I used to be a film producer. I was lucky enough to work on the Harry Potter movies which was great fun being surrounded by so much talent. I created a couple of feature films and then started my own agency which I absolutely loved. But it got to a point where I was having a lot of ideas for other businesses and projects and I just wanted to see one of them through.

As a producer I was buying things all of the time, props and costumes etc. I just wanted an easy way to say, “This is what I want, lets see if I can get it at a discount.” I started out looking at the whole group element – offering discounts based on bulk orders.

But what became very apparent, very quickly is that more often people just buy single objects. If we can create an environment where the retailer can give one-on-one offers we could be on to something. The idea definitely evolved over time, starting with my idea and then learning from the team.

How did you get it off the ground?

We got $50,000 initial investment and I decided to take the risk and leave my agency in April 2011 to start Flubit. We got another round of investment of $1m after that and I was able to build an amazing team. We ran with the group idea for a few months before realising the power was in the private discount. We ran a beta version of the site through most of 2012 and built the technology that we needed.

We are still evolving the technology now, by talking to users and finding out what they like and don’t like. For example, we had a field where you could nickname your demand but speaking to users we found that they don’t need this option so we have just taken it away.

The site looks fantastic, it’s very visual – was that a consideration?

I think it must be my background in film or something but it definitely helps if a website is nice on the eye. My brother is a web designer and he gave us a lot of advice. Going into such a big project like this you really have to call on people to help. The worst thing to do would be to think you could do it yourself.

How do you intend to grow?

We launched in the end of September and we have had a really exciting start. We have the investment to push Flubit a bit further so one thing we want to do is build our merchant presence. We are very open with merchants, we aren’t as big as Amazon but what we can do is push through sales where they old have lost them otherwise and grow their incremental sales.

We didn’t want to turn the whole thing an open market pace there will be set commission of 12% as is often the case. The way we charge commission is flexible based on the offers we decide to make on behalf of the retailers. We do have this power of foresight, we have the upper hand because we understand what others are charging first.

We are just UK wide at the moment and concentrating on that but we will be building up to an international launch eventually.

What do you say to people to liken you to Groupon?

We are not Groupon, we don’t even see it as competition! In our eyes our competition is anyone that can sell things where customers browse at competitive prices. We don’t focus on groups. Also our focus is on what customers want to buy. You might see a great deal on Groupon but the chances of you wanting to buy it are slim. We focus on the moment that consumers want to buy.

We also make it easier on merchants. They don’t have to think about what they want to make an offer on – they can hand us an entire inventory of products which we can then offer out on.

Flubit will be presenting at the Internet Retailing Expo in Birmingham on 20th March, to book your free tickets visit the website.