He Raised $120 Million To Build A Marketplace Platform And Dropshipping Solution To Help E-Commerce Companies Scale

In today’s ever-changing business landscape, few founders possess the experience of building multiple successful ventures across different industries. An Australian entrepreneur, Jason Wyatt, is an inspiring example of such a founder.

With a career from bike marketplaces to SaaS-based platforms that power retail giants, Jason’s journey is filled with lessons about innovation, adaptability, and knowing when to pivot. Let’s dive into Jason’s journey—from his early days in Melbourne to his success with Marketplacer.

Listen to the full podcast episode and review the transcript here,

The Early Foundations: Growing Up in Melbourne

Born and raised in Melbourne, Jason Wyatt had a supportive family and a father who instilled in him a love for business from a young age. His father was an accountant and encouraged Jason to develop a love and passion for business and help people with the problems they needed solved.

Jason’s father would encourage him to read five pages of the financial paper every day. He taught Jason valuable business concepts long before entering university, which helped him score good marks in school.

Although accounting wasn’t Jason’s passion, it became a foundation for his later ventures, giving him the financial literacy and business acumen that would prove invaluable. Initially, he wasn’t sure about his career path forward, so he opted for a commerce degree.

A Journey of Exploration: From Melbourne to London

After completing a commerce degree in Melbourne, Jason’s curiosity led him to London. Armed with little more than four surfboards and a desire to explore, he quickly navigated London’s vibrant yet challenging business environment.

Jason recalls being a little kid in a big city determined to learn survival. He thoroughly enjoyed London’s diversity and cosmopolitan life. He also knew that it can spit you out if you don’t change and adapt and put yourself in an environment where you can be successful.

Working for renowned firms like Morgan Stanley and Reuters gave Jason firsthand experience in finance and accounting, but it also left him yearning for more creativity and innovation. He was working in decimal or basis points and navigating spreads to make a higher margin of 0.001.

“I was working in finance and accounting, but the focus was always on what had happened rather than what could happen,” Jason reflected. This disillusionment became pivotal, sparking his desire to build his own path.

Although the culture was great fun and the companies were good, Jason was ready for something more.

The Birth of BikeExchange: Finding a Market Ripe for Disruption

Jason’s first entrepreneurial success came when he co-founded BikeExchange in 2007 with his friend Sam Salter, who was living in Melbourne at the time. Sam’s family was from the cycling industry, and he had a background in classified ads.

Jason and Sam started out exploring classified sites like cars.com, and their research showed that more bikes were sold than cars. Their idea was simple yet powerful: they saw an untapped market in the bicycle industry. And that these companies needed SEO, SEM, and online marketing.

Despite the increasing number of high-end bikes sold, customers needed ease, convenience, and choice for their consumer journey and to make it easier for them to buy–a gap Jason and Sam were ready to fill. From the outset, BikeExchange took off. The industry was ripe for disruption.

“We put the website up, and within an hour, people were already communicating through it. Within a week, there were 500 users, and within a month, there were thousands,” Jason recalls. The market responded, and Jason knew they were onto something.

Over the next seven years, BikeExchange became a leading platform for buying and selling bicycles, garnering significant accolades, including the prestigious Telstra Australian Business of the Year award in 2012.

The Pivot: From Bike Marketplace to SaaS Giant

As BikeExchange grew, Jason began receiving inquiries from other industries seeking to replicate his marketplace model. This led to the creation of Marketplacer, a technology platform that enabled businesses to build their own marketplaces.

The realization came that their biggest asset wasn’t the bike marketplace but the technology that powered it. “I realized that the true value lay in the technology we’d built. We were enabling other businesses to scale quickly without needing to own inventory or warehouses,” Jason explained.

Marketplacer became a game-changing platform, allowing retailers to offer products they didn’t own by connecting them with suppliers through a seamless, automated marketplace system.

Retail giants like Albertsons, Tesco, and Gap have since used Marketplacer to expand their product offerings and boost their e-commerce capabilities.

Turning the Page: Leaving BikeExchange and Scaling Marketplacer

While building Marketplacer, Jason faced a hard decision—continue juggling multiple ventures or focus solely on one. “You can’t do everything,” he admitted. “If we were going to succeed, I needed to give Marketplacer 100% of my time and focus.”

Jason was working 18 hours a day and finding it hard to run that many spreads of businesses. He also learned a crucial lesson that if you want the company to succeed, you must invest 100% dedication and 100% passion into it.

Jason made the tough call to step away from BikeExchange and every other board and dedicate himself fully to Marketplacer. Eventually, BikeExchange would go public, and at the time, it had a peak valuation of $80M.

But by then, Jason had moved on, having had a really great journey and story. He has also learned how to build a technology team, skills that he could devote to Marketplacer. His decision paid off.

Today, Marketplacer works with some of the largest retailers globally, offering a SaaS platform that increases their supply base and accelerates their growth without additional capital-intensive investments.

Jason explains the opportunity behind Marketplacer and selling a technology product to clients. The problem they were trying to solve was how to make it easier for people to sell things that they didn’t own.

Despite having a big audience and existing customer base, their clients needed to grow without opening new warehouses or owning inventory.

They needed to ultimately leverage their unfair advantage and market position resulting from an incredible customer base and deep relationship with suppliers to accelerate growth in autopilot mode.

All this would need to be done at a speed that they would never be able to do if they were buying, owning, shipping and sending inventory in its own right. And that’s ultimately the problem Marketplacer solves.

Essentially, the platform enables dropshipping or sending third-party products and opens up all the new categories behind it. Marketplacer makes money by charging a monthly SaaS fee and taking a percentage of the turnover,

Scaling Globally: Securing Major Contracts and Navigating Challenges

Marketplacer’s rise has been nothing short of remarkable. Jason and his team managed to secure major contracts with some of the world’s leading retailers early on, which is highly unusual for a SaaS startup.

“In the same month, we had Tesco, Qantas, and Gap all approach us to help them create marketplaces,” Jason shared. This influx of enterprise clients propelled Marketplacer into a new league, positioning it as a key player in global e-commerce.

However, scaling Marketplacer wasn’t without its challenges. At one point, the team made the bold decision to turn off half of their product offerings, effectively cutting 40% of their revenue.

By then, as Jason explains, they had a full stack technology and could create a marketplace from scratch. They had a marketplace commerce engine and shopping cart.

Jason saw that their enterprise clients would never re-platform their commerce engine, and the whole world was going to a microservice architecture, which needed them to go headless. Turning off half their products was the most modern and cleverest way to complete.

“We realized that to scale, we needed to focus. Competing with Shopify or Salesforce Commerce Cloud wasn’t the path forward,” Jason said. Instead, they focused on going headless—building a modular architecture that would allow integration with existing retail platforms.

This laser-focus approach enabled Marketplacer to become a strategic partner for its clients, offering solutions that seamlessly plugged into their e-commerce engines and dramatically expanded their supply base.

Fundraising: The Toughest Challenge Yet

Despite the success, Jason is quick to point out that raising capital has been one of the hardest aspects of his journey. “The process of raising capital is tough,” he bluntly stated.

Marketplacer has raised around $120M to date, but Jason emphasizes that it’s a numbers game. “You’re going to talk to many funds, and it’s not always that you don’t have a good idea or a good business—it just might not fit their mandate or timing.”

Storytelling is everything that Jason Wyatt was able to master. The key is capturing the essence of what you are doing in 15 to 20 slides. For a winning deck, take a look at the pitch deck template created by Silicon Valley legend Peter Thiel (see it here) where the most critical slides are highlighted.

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Jason advises entrepreneurs to deeply understand their metrics and find investors who genuinely believe in their vision. He also suggests getting good advisors to help on the way and nail the story in today’s sophisticated capital market, where metrics and performance matter more than ever.

Looking Forward: The Future of Marketplacer

As Jason sees it, manual processes of the past take too long and cost too much. He sees Marketplacer as a platform where businesses can just plug into the world of supply. The platform will tell them what to sell and how much to sell it for and ensure it gets fulfilled.

Marketplacer has the potential to open up a world of unlimited growth on a global basis without the need to hold any inventory or capital behind it. Businesses can ensure their ultimate growth on autopilot globally by leveraging the tool.

In Jason’s opinion, scale comes in many forms and many sizes. They started the business in Australia, but the product is an excellent fit in the United States, North America, and Europe.

When thinking about scaling, Jason’s objective was to target where their enterprise customers were living and get to them in the fastest way possible. They want to empower growth for every e-commerce business on the planet.

Jason talks about how they built strong connections and relationships with e-commerce platform partners, making it easy and fast to turn their e-commerce business into a marketplace. This led to the launch of their Fast Start program, designed to streamline the process even further.

In Conclusion

Marketplacer continues to grow, helping retailers worldwide embrace the future of e-commerce. Jason’s journey from surfboards and bicycles to SaaS enterprise solutions is a testament to his adaptability and entrepreneurial spirit.

His story serves as an inspiring example of how recognizing and solving market problems—whether it’s selling bikes or enabling global marketplaces—can lead to transformative business success.

As Jason Wyatt reflects on his career so far, one thing remains clear: his journey is far from over. With Marketplacer positioned as a global leader in marketplace technology, Jason is continuing to write the next chapter in a career built on innovation, focus, and a passion for solving complex problems.

Listen to the full podcast episode to know more, including:

• Despite not being his true passion, Jason’s accounting background provided a crucial foundation for understanding business finances.
• The idea for BikeExchange emerged from recognizing the gap in the bike industry for an easy, convenient marketplace.
• Marketplacer evolved from BikeExchange by leveraging its technology to help businesses grow without owning inventory.
• Jason emphasized the importance of 100% dedication to one venture to maximize its potential.
• Turning off half of Marketplacer’s product offerings allowed them to focus on large enterprise clients and scale effectively.
• Marketplacer helps retailers like Tesco and Gap expand product categories without re-platforming, leveraging their audience and supply base.
• Raising $120 million involved storytelling, understanding investor needs, and navigating a tough capital market.

 

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