Greenwich Entrepreneurs Interviews GoECart CEO Manish Chowdhary

Recently, Manish Chowdhary, founder and CEO of GoECart was interviewed by Greg Skidmore and Pedro Ramirez of Greenwich Entrepreneurs. Listen along to this podcast, where Manish covers topics such as search engine optimization, spending habits, customer expectations, and the future of ecommerce. Learn more about the history of our company and our humble beginnings, and how we grew into the best-of-breed ecommerce solution that we are today.

Because of his expertise in areas ranging from ecommerce, entrepreneurship, business strategy & execution, and online marketing, Manish Chowdhary is a highly sought out speaker who often helps other entrepreneurs learn and grow their businesses. By empowering local entrepreneurs, GoECart strives to improve and contribute to our local community.

Gregory Skidmore is the President of Belray Asset Management, which uses the asset allocation techniques of university endowments and pension funds to focus on serving their clients’ best interests. This institutional investment process seeks to: reduce conflicts of interest, lower fees, improve communication, decrease volatility, fund future needs, and increase predictability of returns.

Pedro Ramirez, Jr. is a successful Weath manager, at Belray Asset Management. There, he consults clients on defining financial goals, identifying risk tolerance and pinpointing investment time horizons. He uses this information to create custom financial plans and investment solutions. His plans and investment strategies seek to reduce risk and help clients protect their capital.

Greenwich Entrepreneurs airs Fridays at 9:30 – 10:00AM (Eastern) on News Talk AM1490WGCH.

Listen to the podcast here:

The Interview

GREG: Good morning and welcome to the Greenwich Entrepreneurs Podcast. I’m Greg Skidmore, President of Belray Asset Management. I’m here with Pedro.

PEDRO: Good morning, Greg. How are you?

GREG: Pedro’s a wealth manager here. So anyway, I always enjoy his company. Our entrepreneur this morning is Manish –I forgot to say your-

MANISH: Chowdhary.

GREG: Chowdhary?

MANISH: Yes.

GREG: Oh, good. He is the CEO of GoECart. I guess if you, people, want to follow along while the show is going on, you can go to his website, www.goecart.com. Manish, welcome!

MANISH: Thank you very much.

GREG: Why don’t you just sort of start off and tell us a little bit about your company and we’ll take it from there?

MANISH: As you said, my name is Manish Chowdhary. I’m the founder and CEO of GoECart. GoECart is a leading ecommerce solution provider. We help small and medium-sized businesses sell online, so if you’re either a company looking to get started online or if you already have an online store and looking to grow it, I think GoECart may be a good place to look for resources.

GREG: Now, talk to us a little bit about your typical customer. What do they look like and what’s the range of dollar size? I mean, if I’m doing $5 a month online, do I call you?

ANISH: Well, I don’t think, you know, we classify clients based on dollar value. What we look for in a client is their desire to grow online and how seriously and how strategically do they think about their online business, and whether it’s going to be an integral part or it’s just going to be something that they want to leave on the side. I mean, online business, like any other business, needs supervision, needs management, and needs active participation. So if they consider online to be a decent component or it may become a decent component of their overall business, I think that’s the kind of clients we want to talk to.

PEDRO: It’s funny when you said “five dollars.” I actually would say yes, because they’re someone who either hasn’t thought about it or has and is not being successful. A corollary to that would be you see the numbers from CyberMonday, and I believe it was “online is growing 11-15%.” The numbers are much smaller than regular brick and mortar, but it continues to be a growth facet of business.

MANISH: Yeah, we just got some report from ComScore, which is a measurement company. This year they’re tracking online retail to grow by 3%, which is obviously much better than offline retail. I mean, we have two categories of solutions, small business and middle markets, so we kind of have clients that do sometimes start off with nothing, because they’re starting a new online business, and then people like Sean Nelson of Lovesac that you had recently, who are doing millions of dollars online. So it’s a pretty broad range of offering.

GREG: Now, Pedro, you came from a garment industry, if we go back far enough. I believe you understand like merchandising and product placement and stuff like that – so maybe you can jump in here when I ask this question – but the store is about placing the products and there’s all this psychology components to it. Do you get involved in the construction of the store to help people buy more, or are you more of the-

PEDRO:The store or the site?

GREG: The site, I mean, the online store. Or are you more the infrastructure behind the scenes?

MANISH: Excellent question. Because one of our mantra is really helping merchants “sell more!” So a lot of our clients are merchants who are coming from an existing online store, they are using a different platform and they’ve had some kind of a bottle neck or they’re not able to grow further. What’s happening is the expectations for your online store are driven by some of the larger sites on the internet, like Amazon and Buy.com and so on. As a consumer, you expect almost the same kind of performance and the same kind of sophistication even from any website that you go to, because the competition is so large.

That is where GoECart shines. We provide the right blend of technology, infrastructure and services to help merchants sell more. Part of that does include helping them with merchandising. It is all done primarily through the software itself, so we give them the tools to enable them to do this easily, quickly and efficiently.

PEDRO: And you help them as they do it, right?

MANISH: Yes. There’s always two components: we have the software, which you can do use on a self-service model-
GREG: So basically they can ask if there’s a self-service model?

MANISH: Yes, because our goal is to provide merchants with services at a very reasonable cost. If they have the expertise in-house and they want to use our software and use the technology and the tools, what we generally do is we’ll train them on how to use it, how to make the maximum use of it, and if they want our help in form of professional services or consulting, then we can help them in that capacity as well.

PEDRO: Do those services- oh, sorry.

GREG: No, go.

PEDRO: One of the things that’s always gotten me, so let’s make the assumption that we have a fabulous site, and “fabulous” as defined by ease of customer use and they go in and they pay products or place and all that, but what about, how does the customer find that site? That’s one of the things I’ve always chewed on, so to speak. So now, do you help? ‘Cause isn’t that more of a marketing function?

MANISH: Well, it is. However, in the online world, getting found is a very important component.

PEDRO: Yes it is. Exactly.

MANISH: See in the offline world, we’re sitting here in Greenwich, Connecticut, you want to go buy a piece of apparel, you’re only going to go so far.

GREG: Right.

MANISH: But in the online world, going to Tahiti, French Polynesia is same one click away from the local J Crew Store right down the street. So the distance from desire to delivery is only one click and that’s where, which is also a big equalizing factor because that puts everybody at easily accessible. But then also, if you’re not able to compete against the big boys, you’re also at a major disadvantage.

PEDRO: But my point actually is more, let’s use J Crew, obviously a clothing store, if you pass the J Crew, obviously you’ve thought of them and you can say “I’d much prefer to shop online” but you don’t pass Pedro’s clothing store. So how do you compete on that level?

Let’s assume that the sites are equal, but that’s what’s always gotten me about online. Any business – because we’re talking to entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs at all different levels; they could be start-ups out there – any mid-range make the assumption that the site is fine.

MANISH: 90% of most commerce inquiries originate from a search engine. Most people first go to a search engine if they’re looking for something to buy or even research.

PEDRO: That’s true.

MANISH: So-

PEDRO: Google.

MANISH: Google, Yahoo-

PEDRO: I think I Google everything.

MANISH: Bing, Microsoft-

PEDRO: Right.

MANISH: What we help merchants do is rank high on the search engines.

PEDRO: Okay. So you do get into that?

MANISH: Absolutely.

PEDRO: Okay.

MANISH: It’s a core aspect of our platform. So you’d ask, “Why would you use GoECart?” GoECart provides a far better and superior platform for merchants to get indexed in the Google natural results so that they’d get found easily for relevant keywords.

PEDRO: Now, I’ve never heard of that term “Google natural results.” What is that?

MANISH: Well, basically, it’s like a newspaper. A newspaper has a PR, which are PR stories, and then they have advertisements.

PEDRO: Okay.

MANISH: And Google, if you look, the results that go down the page from one to ten vertically down, they are unpaid listings that Google considers important for certain keywords and they promote them accordingly.

PEDRO: Okay.

MANISH: And along the side, on the right hand side are the advertisements.

PEDRO: Right.

MANISH: So if you’re providing a great website that has meaningful content and is optimized for search engine and it has a lot of equity and links built in, then you will rank high in the natural results that you don’t have to pay for.

PEDRO: Right. Okay.

MANISH: So we really help merchants get ranked high on those listings.

PEDRO: So that’s great. That seems one-stop.

GREG: You know, I was just looking at your website as we were talking, and it looks like, on a small business version of your software, there are two versions: There’s a standard and a professional, one is more expensive than the other. What that got me to thinking a little bit is now how much of your business is the sort of the self-serve and how much is of corporate clients that you have to engage more intimately?

MANISH: Well, as I mentioned, you know we have clients, Fortune 500 clients, you know like Pitney Bose and then we have small clients. Some clients may have a very large business, multibillion-dollar business but their online component might be really negligible.

GREG: What I’m curious about is, you know, and I was fishing through this, but I see small businesses now being able to put money into online sales and marketing where it was too expensive before but now it’s getting affordable. So, you know, if we talked to local merchants around here – I don’t mean someone that was like trying to start an internet business – I just thought the local merchant, he’s now able to sell online. So, I’m curious the big enterprises have been putting money on online stuff heavily for a long time but it’s the small business owner that I’m sensing. So are you seeing that trend in your sales?

MANISH: Well, having an online store or a website is almost expected today.

GREG: Yeah.

MANISH: So it’s like having your phone number listed on the Yellow Pages, so that you almost are expected to have a presence online. Now the question becomes “How large of a presence and how big of a sales channel are you looking to make it?” Are you looking to simply aid your offline consumers with an online presence or are you really driving an online strategy?

GREG: Right.

MANISH: And that’s where the key difference lies. So the barriers to entry on having an online presence and having an online store have come down significantly. But if you’re really looking to take on the big guys and trying to compete, there’s a lot of competition online.

GREG: Right, right.

PEDRO: Kind of foreword to that then, are you seeing more people as wanting to have an online presence or an online store? Do they want to do the business online?

GREG: Seeing the brochure, versus something that-

PEDRO: Although I think your point was interesting. With Belray, we do have a website that a part of it is actually educational, and that’s what we want: educational. But if we were – and we’re a heavily regulated business – but if we wanted to actually- so let’s just make the assumption right now: we’re in the education and we’re using the internet as an educational tool. But what happens is all of a sudden we said “Let’s make the internet a business model, a way of getting a new business,” are you seeing people staying more with the educational or some sort of a presence or are they moving towards wanting to actually do business on the net?

MANISH: I think it’s both, because you probably hear a lot about the social media. Nowadays, commerce is very closely intertwined with the content, you know. It’s no longer, “I’m going to just put up my products and hope people are going to come and buy.” I have to make them aware, I have to give them education, and hopefully through that process, I’m not only going to get customers to buy but also improve my brand loyalty and brand recall and retention.

So they’re really merging, and that’s the new web 2.0 kind of thing. Today, I mean, just yesterday, I booked a hotel room in New York. I mean, the first thing that I looked for was reviews. I mean, if I’m looking to get a good deal, I don’t know, I mean, I trust the reviews. Now-

PEDRO: I’ve done that.

MANISH: The content is what drove the sale.

GREG:Yeah.

MANISH: So you can’t really differentiate the two, and you have to marry the two together.

GREG: Sure. Let’s talk about you for a second. I mean, you started this business when you were fairly young. I mean you’re not old yet!

MANISH: I used to be younger, yeah.

GREG: Yeah. Exactly.

PEDRO: Didn’t we all?

GREG: And so why don’t you- you started in college?

MANISH: Yes. So the company was born in a dorm room at the University of Bridgeport.

GREG: Okay.

MANISH: I still remember 860 [13:43] Hall.

GREG: Shut out the 860 [13:45] Hall.

MANISH: Exactly. University of Bridgeport, my Alma Mater. I was very blessed that they had given me a full scholarship which allowed me to explore my entrepreneurial spirit very early on, and I’m immensely grateful for that. Basically, there was a good opportunity and I had a friend who needed to pay for college, although I had my scholarship so I don’t have to worry about it. We got and started selling computers. Back in the day, there was market for assembled computers and we started selling-
GREG: So did you buy the parts and put them together?

MANISH: Well, my friend wanted to, because he didn’t have any capital and I was working fulltime at the time, so instead of him going to the computer show every weekend and getting one computer, selling one, I said “You know what, I’m going to be the financier and I’m going to be a business guy. Why don’t we buy ten computers and we sell ten a week as opposed to going one at a time, and we quadruple our business?” And so-

GREG: Did that work?

MANISH: That really worked because we were basically the “go-to” guys in college if you wanted a new computer. But you know that the market for assembled computers just depleted, and I knew that the way to go forward was towards the internet and software. Then we moved from that to starting doing consulting. People thought that this was a hobby and we were doing it just for fun, but I was really serious. I said “Now that we’ve established the company, we’ve got to keep it going.”

PEDRO: Were you out of college already at this point?

MANISH: I was-

PEDRO: Or this was still in college?

MANISH: I was already getting out of college. Everybody was looking for a job. Everybody started getting a job, whereas I continued on because I was just driven to make the company succeed. I didn’t have a short-term view about it because I wanted to do something really, really big.

GREG: You know, I think young entrepreneurs often have a problem with convincing people that have known them for a long time that they’re actually, you know, serious. It’s a serious business. I mean if your parents’ friend has known you since you were 12 and he runs a company, you know it’s not his fault, but it’s a leap to go from imagining you in diapers or something to advising him on his ecommerce.

So do you have any advice for young entrepreneurs to help them get people to think about them differently as their business grows?

MANISH: Well, I think I learned this a little bit late and after a lot of pits and falls. I think my biggest advice for young entrepreneurs would be to surround themselves with other previously successful people and basically get an education track, find a mentor and attend or be part of CEO organizations. Really surround yourself with successful peers. I think the best learning, in my opinion, happens through people who’ve been there before like you. That was the realization I got later and obviously I wished I’d done that sooner. So joining an organization like Young Entrepreneurs Association, Vistage, or other round tables, I think, is great, and continue that learning experience. Because I never had expertise in HR or finance or marketing; I never went to school for that. I went to school for engineering.

PEDRO: Right.

MANISH: So I had to pretty much self-teach all those various things that you need in order to succeed in business, which was a slow and long process.

GREG: So you basically decided- were your parents entrepreneurs?

MANISH: My parents are entrepreneurs. They are business owners. My dad runs his own salt manufacturing facility back in India. So I was very fortunate that I had the entrepreneurial gene and that’s what really got me started.

PEDRO: It started that way, because it was interesting, the point you made.

Was it ever difficult? I think I know the answer but I’ll ask the question anyway. When your friends in school were getting jobs and you were pursuing this, did you ever find it like, “Am I really doing the right thing?”

MANISH: Well, I never doubted-

PEDRO: That’s what I thought that would be-

MANISH: -that I wanted to, because never did I ever doubt whether I would be successful or not. The question was “When?” and “How long is it going to take?” I never thought it was going to take even half as long as it has taken so far. I don’t even consider myself to be immensely successful at this point, because success is always relative, you know.

PEDRO: The length of time that’s a- I could do the “aaaahhhh.”

MANISH: Yeah.

PEDRO: It’s so- It’s such a poignant point.

GREG: We had, Sean Nelson, the chief exec over at Lovesac. Now we were talking about this, how-

PEDRO: I’ve had this conversation with numerous people.

GREG: Time is so important. You just got to get the ball rolling, because, you know, you’re so lucky you started this when you were 24. I mean, you were younger. But whatever, the point is, you’re just lucky because you have that much more time for this to mature and develop and the seeds to grow and all that. I mean do you sense that, now as time is passing, you’re seeing things, seeds that you planted years ago and they’re turning out as something?

MANISH: I mean, the last ten years have been the greatest learning experience of my life.

GREG: Yeah.

MANISH: And I could not have done if I had started now, or it could be much more difficult. I think that learning, the energy that you have as a young entrepreneur, you have full confidence and you refuse to give in. You know, I’ve gone through so many different challenges and obviously as you grow, you got more responsibility and so on, but-

GREG: Now let’s hear about a few of those challenges.

PEDRO: We weren’t going to let you go on that one. I thought the same thing.

GREG:You’ve opened up the Pandora’s Box. But we have 90-year-olds on the show. They’re hilarious because they’ll tell you everything, because it just doesn’t matter anymore. So we’re not going to, you know you don’t have to tell me everything that-

PEDRO: This is not dirty laundry time.

GREG: We’re not trying to nail you against the wall on this, but what are some things that were tough and but good learning experiences?

MANISH: Well the first and foremost, you know, see I came here to study. I did not have any contacts in America, so I had absolutely no one to fall back on. I had to start this with no contacts, no money, I came on a full scholarship, and I was determined to prove people wrong that they thought that I was doing this as a hobby in college and it’s not going to last, but I was absolutely determined. So obviously the first round of investment to financing came from my credit cards.

PEDRO: Yeah.

MANISH: Thankfully, credit was loose back in those days. So obviously I ran up a big debt. That was what worried me, because we were growing the business, we got the basic infrastructure, we were working out of a home office, you know, where basically every room was an office and also I slept in. I recruited my friends from college, they would come and work. So it was, you know, I think most people thought that this is something that I will simply, you know, it’s a matter of time.

We started doing consulting and doing services business and so on, and getting clients while I was working fulltime, while going to school fulltime. So, I had basically, three different fulltime initiatives running in parallel, and my hours were 80, 100, 120 hours. Any time I was awake, I was thinking about I’ve got to make all these three things work because I wasn’t ready to give one versus the other.

Because you often hear about these stories about the guys that you know, they went to Harvard and they dropped out. But I wasn’t determined to drop out because of, well, one I couldn’t, and second, I did not want to.

GREG: Right, right. Now going back to the debt thing for a second, I want to talk about that because I think a lot of businesses, I know a lot of, especially the young ones, okay, the easiest line to credit is credit card debt. So all the young entrepreneurs I know, that’s how they finance their stuff. So, you’re getting on the other side of where it sounds like your business has real revenue now and it’s growing. It’s a real thing. You’re beyond the survival phase where “is this going to survive?”

MANISH: Well, thankfully, we’ve got millions of dollars in revenue, we’ve got hundreds of clients, and we’ve been around for a long time, so we’ve been very blessed.

GREG: So if you could go back and talk to yourself, you know, eight years ago when you had debt and it was tough, what would you say? Like “Don’t worry about it” or “It’ll work out later”?

MANISH: No. I mean, I worried about it because I think that it’s stupid not to worry.

GREG: Yeah.

MANISH: I still worry about it even when we do have money, because it’s a matter of financial discipline. That was something that we needed and I did not have an alternative. I mean, that’s not the preferred way to start a company. My advice to anyone is if you can find an investor, that’s perhaps the best way to go forward.

GREG: Yeah.

MANISH: Because that does multiple things. It makes you accountable for the money that you have even more than if it were your money.

GREG: Yeah. Absolutely.

MANISH: I think that one of the big things that we talked about Sean and other that we haven’t done so far is taken money from an investor. So that’s very unique to grow a business to this magnitude completely organically. We have zero debt and zero external investors and zero external capital. That is what took us this long, because it’s so hard to grow a business organically, particularly a software business of our kind. So-

GREG: Well, it’s interesting because, to speed up the growth of a business, it’s very hard. Right? I mean, you can get lucky, but if you take luck out of the picture, I mean you either have to take an infusion of capital that lets you do some things, or it just takes time!

PEDRO: Kind of a corollary to that, because one of you just put it up. Let’s assume, I mean this happens in science fiction theater all the time, we could make a tape of you right now, that you could see back when you were getting out of school, what would you tell yourself?

GREG: Oh I like this.

MANISH: Wow.

GREG: You want to think about it for two seconds?

PEDRO: You know, it’s interesting how we talk about the process – and all entrepreneurs we have listening – we’ve all gone through evolution and the mistakes. You know, sometimes you need to make a mistake, and the mistake is fine, it happens. It’s done. Some mistakes could have been avoided and-

GREG: Again, make this mistake now. Do it.

PEDRO: You know, I often think to myself, “What would I say?” Because you were talking about how you were very passionate – you knew, you felt it –and while passion is fantastic, there’s always reality that it may not work. You can be as passionate as you want but if the formula isn’t right, you come up against challenges.

GREG: So what would you say to that?

PEDRO: Did I give you enough time to think of something?

MANISH: Absolutely. In fact, if you ever ask me what kind of mentor would I like, a mentor that has had more failures in their life than successes? Because success-

PEDRO: I could mentor.

MANISH: Because it’s the failures that teach you. Successes are forgotten. There’s a great saying that “Sometimes you’re successful in spite of your flaws, not because of your flaws.”

PEDRO: That’s right.

MANISH: Back in those days, I think the biggest, looking back, I would certainly have a greater regard for humility. Because when you’re young, you think you know everything.

GREG: Right.

MANISH: You know, you don’t have as much respect or appreciation for experience and wisdom, because you think “You know what, it doesn’t matter. I’m smarter.” But the world doesn’t quite work that way. There is a place for experience. There is a place for all those softer side of things. You know, you’re a young hard-hitting, hard-charging guy, but in life, you have to slow down, you have to sensitive because you need people around you to help you succeed.

I think that’s one thing that a lot of the young entrepreneurs sometimes forget: that it’s not them alone. By being a founder and CEO, you’re simply navigating, but it’s each of your on-board staff that’s actually going to help you succeed, so, appreciation for that.

And learning, never forget learning. And never think that you’re an exception. Never think that you are so special that you’re going to buck the trend. I think by assuming the worst, you’ll be preparing yourself for the challenges. There is no easy way to success. I mean, that’s one thing that I- I thought that I’ll be done in two or three years. I mean, everybody back in the day, internet dream, you’ll be a multimillionaire, you don’t need to work. I think real successful businesses and companies and entrepreneurs have learned the art and skill of business. You cannot be immensely successful unless you’ve mastered that.

GREG: Right. Well, Manish, thank you so much. We’re sorry we’re coming to the end here, and so anyway, we’ve got to wrap things up. But it’s been very fun talking to you today. I appreciate it.

MANISH: Thank you Greg. Thank you, Pedro.

PEDRO: Thank you for your time.

MANISH: It was excellent and I hope to come back here when I’m even more successful.

GREG: Absolutely. Absolutely.

PEDRO: That’s good.

GREG: So anyway, thank you Pedro. I enjoyed your company.

PEDRO: Greg, as always.

GREG: And anyway, this has been Greenwich Entrepreneurs. Be sure to visit Manish’s website which is www.goecart.com. If you want to give him a call – I’m sure he’d be happy to answer any questions – it’s 203-336-2284. Just ask for Manish I’m sure somebody will find him.

MANISH: Absolutely happy to talk to anyone. We’ll welcome any calls. Anything that I can contribute, I’m always more than happy.

GREG: Okay, well thanks so much and we will see everybody again on the next podcast. This has been Greenwich Entrepreneurs.