Starting a business is an exciting and ambitious venture, but it’s not easy.

Many entrepreneurs dream of securing substantial funding to give their venture a flying start, but not all startups succeed in this pursuit.

In such cases, entrepreneurs often turn to bootstrapping, which comes with its challenges and requires unique skills and strategies.

What is Bootstrapping?

The term “bootstrapping” is inspired by the saying “pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps,” referring to achieving success or improvement through one’s own efforts. In the context of startups, bootstrapping refers to starting and building a business with minimal external funding or financial resources. Instead of seeking substantial investments from external sources like venture capitalists or angel investors, the goal of a bootstrapped startup is to be self-sufficient.

Currently, many entrepreneurs are deviating from the traditional path of seeking external funding for various reasons and are opting for bootstrapping instead. As a result, successful bootstrapped startups are now becoming more common. One example of such a success story is Druppelachtig (dropshipping and delivery), an Amsterdam-based automated dropshipping solution that specializes in finding and connecting the right customers for suppliers and brands.

To delve deeper into the mission, bootstrapping strategy, and challenges of Droppery, Silicon Canals interviewed Marco Mulder, the visionary CEO and founder of the company. In addition, Mulder offers valuable insights for aspiring entrepreneurs.

The Birth of Droppery

Marco Mulder, who has been in the e-commerce industry for nearly a decade, noticed a recurring problem. Mulder states that many wholesalers, suppliers, and brands offer retailers an automation option through a “Custom Portal.” However, this approach has various limitations and challenges.

“There were often two options: Option 1: As a retailer, build your own integration with the supplier’s API. Developers typically charge €1500 to €2000, and then you only have product and inventory synchronization from one CMS and one supplier. The order automation isn’t even taken into account here, meaning retailers still have to manually input orders via a B2B portal during the day,” Mulder continues.

“Option 2 is an Excel or CSV file where you then have to map all products in your own CMS and also have the images sent via WeTransfer to subsequently provide these products with images,” he adds.

Druppelachtig aims to address these challenges with a solution. Over time, the COVID-19 crisis further highlighted the need for brands and suppliers to expand their sales channels beyond marketplaces.

“Marketplaces mainly benefit from this, but you’re not growing organically and building your brand awareness in the long term if these places are your only sales channel,” Mulder shares.

“Due to these developments, we have thought more about developments in society. Brands always need to be present through direct channels and retailers; otherwise, you will never grow. The number of selling parties through marketplaces continues to rise, and there’s no point in having 10 selling parties on one marketplace to sell your brand,” Mulder states.

Droppery recognized this shift in the industry and attempted to connect suppliers with new online retailers, both nationally and internationally. “This was the main reason for us to add the matchmaking aspect, connecting suppliers with new online retailers, both nationally and internationally, to foster as much organic growth and as many reliable partnerships as possible,” Mulder notes.

Facilitating Communication

Droppery serves as middleware and facilitates communication and automation between suppliers and online retailers. Droppery’s comprehensive platform enables end-to-end management of product data, inventory, and orders. Droppery also introduced a matchmaking solution that connects suppliers and retailers and expands their sales networks.

“With our software, long and expensive processes are unnecessary, as we have already built most integrations. Whether it’s an existing or new supplier, retailers can plug in within five minutes and submit a request to their chosen supplier(s),” Mulder explains.

This approach gives suppliers full control over their business partnerships and terms while relieving them of the burden of constantly providing data and inventory updates.

“Suppliers can easily scale their retail network in the desired regions, as we now have retailers in 16 different countries,” he adds.

“One example is Bazar Bizar, which has organized itself very well and built a network in 16 different countries, a streamlined process for all D2C customers, and very little maintenance since everything runs automatically,” he cites.

Bootstrapping: Challenges

Bootstrapping offers entrepreneurs independence and control over their business, but it also brings a multitude of challenges. Speaking about the challenges, Mulder says, “When you start a startup, you should be aware that you won’t earn anything for the first few months to a year and need to invest in the growth of the company.”

“This brings many challenges and requires you to be creative to keep growing. Furthermore, it’s crucial that everyone you work with recognizes the urgency and is willing to go for it; otherwise, you won’t get far,” he continues.

“A year ago, we added a new CCO to the team, Cathelijne Mooren. Thanks to Cathelijne’s contribution to the team, we achieved significant growth,” Mulder adds.

When asked about his recipe for success, Mulder jokes, “A good cook doesn’t share their secret recipe.”

Bootstrapping: Pros and Cons

According to Mulder, the process of bootstrapping has its advantages and disadvantages.

“If you have confidence in your own business, you can determine the right strategy for yourself, your direction, and your course. That provides flexibility.”

“The downside is that for a certain period, you don’t have financial security, and you have to provide that yourself. If you can’t handle that pressure or have too little knowledge of the market, I advise entrepreneurs with a good idea to seek an investor immediately,” he adds.

Mulder’s Strategy for Building a Cohesive Team

According to Mulder, Droppery offers its employees the highest level of flexibility in performing their tasks, allowing them to negotiate how they work together.

Moreover, significant investments are made in the development of the team, ensuring their growth and progress within the company, he says.

“In addition to hard work, we also find it important to invest in enjoyable activities for the team, for example, when a goal is achieved. This way, we try to build and maintain a close bond within the team,” Mulder states.

On Effectively Allocating Resources

Regarding effective resource allocation, Mulder shares, “Being able to multitask is an important factor, but by blocking time and working in a structured way, you can manage your time very efficiently.”

“Based on your priorities, you then determine what you can do when customers or partners are unavailable. For instance, from 9:30 AM to 5:00 PM, we want to have as many contact moments with customers as possible,” he adds.

“All other matters that don’t require customer contact, such as administrative work, strategy development, and all other tasks, can happen before and after those hours,” he states.

Mulder’s Advice for Startups

Mulder also provided valuable advice for aspiring entrepreneurs looking to start their business.

He says, “Stay focused on the end goal and the solution you found with your company. If the first strategy doesn’t work, switch to another strategy. Make sure you always have multiple ideas within your business model to achieve your goals.”

Roadmap

Droppery has a mission to improve the entire D2C supply chain for suppliers and brands based on data processing. “It’s all about supply and demand; the better the offerings from the brands and suppliers that are connected, the more great retailers will join Droppery. For this reason, we also focus on as many useful integrations as possible to make the network as qualitative as possible in different countries in Europe,” Mulder shares.

Droppery also plans to roll out the logistics network to further enable international expansion, which suppliers often haven’t set up yet.

Suppliers are usually set up for purchase orders. We use the logistics process to ensure that B2B orders can also be delivered to the consumer. This way, Droppery will further support brands in their cross-border strategy,” he concludes.

Droppery is not only acting as a technical bridge between suppliers and resellers but is also eliminating the stigma associated with dropshipping. “We believe in suppliers and brands from Europe with trustworthy logistics, good quality and fair margins,” says Marco Mulder. “There are plenty of these, but not collected on a central platform yet and often not automated yet.”

Droppery sees an opportunity where a number of professional webshops want to work with suppliers looking to do business with them. Marco says these webshops have experience in the business, understand omnichannel strategy, have their own stock, and some of them even have a physical store. With Droppery, Marco and a small team have built a platform that matches these webshops with expert suppliers.

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For businesses, dropshipping meant terrible quality, bad delivery times, and no guarantee. Mulder says 85% of the dropshipping orders came from outside of Europe. Now that Droppery is focussing on suppliers active in Europe and relying on dropshipping, the businesses are warming up to see the benefits.

This focus is clear when you look at the amount of resellers available to a supplier on Droppery. The supplier also gets to decide whether they would like to approve a reseller or not since there is demand from suppliers for this.

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An e-commerce experience

Founded in 2021 by Marco Mulder, Droppery is young but it is layered with e-commerce experience and expertise. Mulder, founder and CEO, and Cathelijne Mooren, CCO, have years of experience in the field of online marketing and e-commerce.

During their years working in the e-commerce industry, they had the opportunity to speak to a number of brands and webshops on a daily basis. They offered them help with data migrations and custom API projects. Mulder says they also noticed the “current possibilities of dropshipping on the professional market were very limited and outdated, for both suppliers and resellers.”

He cites the use of CSV or XML files and a login portal as an option to complete dropshipping orders. They also felt that dropshipping as a model was not beneficial for suppliers.

Dropshipping, according to Mulder, creates a great opportunity for suppliers to display and sell a lot of their products by their resellers. This is in contrast to wholesale business where resellers work with a limitation in terms of budget and storage area. According to Mulder, this is an opportunity to transform dropshipping and they did that by turning to the suppliers.

Droppery now offers a fully automated dropshipping ecosystem with multiple integrations from different data sources. It connects suppliers and brands with a new reseller channel to increase their sales in different countries. With a cross border strategy, Droppery is active in 15 countries to optimise the supply chain. The suppliers, brands, and resellers on Droppery are in the business for years and focus on the top-end of the market.

Solving the problem of manual processes

Droppery Dashboard
Droppery brings value to suppliers with its focus on high-end brands/suppliers and high-end resellers | Image Credit: Droppery

Even before we get to the problem that Droppery solves, it is important to note the challenges that it overcame. With the proposition of connecting high-end brands and suppliers to experienced retailers and webshops, Mulder says they faced the challenge of finding these customers initially.

They overcame this challenge by “finding the right partnerships, developing their needs, and by focussing on a small target group to create a domino effect.” The domino effect has led to Droppery now having a good portfolio of customers and creating more value with a strong network of resellers.

As a business, Mulder says they saw many companies struggling with manual processes. “Building custom connections is expensive, takes a lot of time and isn’t scalable. In addition, we also see that customers find it difficult finding the right connections that match their expectations, especially across borders, and we ensure that we solve these problems with Droppery,” Mulder explains.

Droppery solves some of these problems by offering integrations with any datasource and the ability to connect an existing or new reseller in just five minutes. Since Droppery handles the questions, businesses need not worry about support. With a scalable sales channel and the order information being pushed automatically to a supplier, Droppery ensures that there are no errors.

Droppery is also designed as a plug and play infrastructure that can connect a store to different suppliers in one catalogue. It eliminates manual CSV/XML files by offering all product data with translations, stock information, and order data in a single overview.

Bootstrapping to success

“Dropshipping is now indispensable in the Benelux region,” says Marco Mulder. The founder of Droppery also sees the market to only grow bigger in Europe in the coming years. However, to get this started, Mulder and Mooren did not raise any funds and they funded the startup themselves.

The startup’s business model is an accessible licence fee, for both reseller and supplier. Starting from the first quarter of 2023, Mulder says they are planning to implement two more solutions to make Droppery more scalable for their customers.

The team is cognizant of the fact that they will need to raise funding to grow internationally. If they raise any additional funds, Droppery will use those funds to scale its development and expand the sales team in different regions.

Plans to disrupt e-commerce

Droppery how it works
Droppery removes manual process and plans to disrupt e-commerce | Image Credit: Droppery

One of the most surprising things about Droppery is that the startup is made up of only 5 people. However, armed with several freelancers, Droppery is looking to not only expand but also disrupt the e-commerce industry in all of Europe.

Droppery has set itself a goal of hiring a dedicated sales team for the DACH region. The startup is also busy setting up a customer success team and investing in development. Marco says the goal is to scale the team from 5 to between 15 and 25 people in 2023.

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“We have momentum now with Droppery, it is important for us to focus on the Benelux and DACH region and finding opportunities in different markets,” says Mulder.

While Droppery is focussing on building its team and product, it also aims to disrupt the industry by always staying “two steps ahead of competitors.” With the scalable solution in place, the startup is also looking to offer sustainable solutions.

The edge for Droppery lies in the fact that it is essentially competing against platforms focussing on dropshipping, marketplace integrators, and 3PL providers. As a true believer in an omnichannel strategy, Droppery can work together with marketplace integrators and 3PL providers. With a different perspective and option to collaborate with these platforms, Droppery is in a unique place to deliver value and service for companies looking to build their D2C channel.