Jason Wyatt On Raising $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.

Jason’s platform, Marketplacer, has attracted funding from top-tier investors like Salesforce Ventures, Ellerston Capital, Acorn Capital, and Soul Patts.

In this episode, you will learn:

• Jason’s accounting background, despite not being his true passion, 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.
• The process of raising $120 million involved storytelling, understanding investor needs, and navigating a tough capital market.

 

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About Jason Wyatt:

Jason Wyatt is the current Executive Chairman & CEO at Marketplacer. Prior to that, he was the CEO of BikeExchange.com.au from January 2007 to December 2014.

Before that, Jason was the Financial Controller at General Motors from February 2006 to June 2009. Jason has a degree in accounting from the Institute of Chartered Accountants Australia and a Bachelor of Business Administration (B.B.A.) from RMIT University.

Connect with Jason Wyatt:

• LinkedIn
• The Org
• Crunchbase
• General Assembly

Read the Full Transcription of the Interview:

Alejandro Cremades: alright Hello, everyone, and welcome to The Deal Maker Show. So today we have another founder, you know another repeated founder. He’s done it a couple of times, and right now he’s riding a rocket ship. and But we’re going to be talking about all types of good stuff. We’re going to be talking about pivoting. We’re going to be talking about getting large accounts from large customers. We’re going to be talking about figuring out scale, but again, the whole thing that we like to hear, building, scaling, financing, and beyond. So without further ado, let’s welcome our guest today, Jason Wyatt. Welcome up to the show.

Jason Wyatt: Thanks for having me and I really appreciate you letting me speak to your community.

Alejandro Cremades: So originally born and raised in in Melbourne. So give us a walk through memory lane. How was life growing up for you, Jason?

Jason Wyatt: ah As Australians, we’re pretty fortunate. Australia is such a beautiful country. It’s got a very safe and stable government. um But you know we had an amazing upbringing with an amazing family. And yeah and yeah my father was ultimately a um ah business person, so he sort of drilled it into us from day one, you know the love and passion for business and and helping people with the problems they need to be solved.

Alejandro Cremades: So you also went to university there, you know, and basically you did the whole thing in accounting. You know what? We’re accounting out of all things.

Jason Wyatt: yeah It’s really interesting like because ah when people maybe i’m obviously not a born accountant, let’s say I’m a born salesperson, if anything, but um yeah dad growing up, ah he wasn’t he was actually an accountant and started a accounting practice. So no different to most kids you know if the apple fuckt doesn’t necessarily fall that far from the tree and follow it in his footsteps. But you know from day from about the age of 11,

Jason Wyatt: yeah he He never forced me, but he encouraged me to you know pick up the ah financial paper and read five pages every single day, you know just so I could start to learn about business, learn about learn about those concepts. And then I got good marks at school.

Jason Wyatt: um And Ben, I didn’t really know what to do. So rather than picking something generalist, I picked the commerce degree where it could be quite open and keep my open and my choices open um as an 18-year-old boy who was sort of discovering the world. And yeah eventually ah I pretty good marks and then you went to one of those career days that you have at a college or a university. and you know, KP&G and all the big accounting firms were there and they sort of scattered you and recruited you and lured you in with ah with a but big hook to say how great they are and and sort of, you know, what that career progression would take. So, you know, just took the opportunity. um And I look back on it now with reflection and

Jason Wyatt: You know, ultimately, you know, was I ever going to be an accountant zero chance? But what it gave me was an amazing background. You know, no one can fool you now. You’ve got that little weapon in your pocket around understanding penile and cash flow and all those things. A good basis behind it.

Alejandro Cremades: Now, for you, you ended up going to London. You know you left in Melbourne, you go to London. I guess, what kind of what kind of world do you that it gave you to see what was outside of Melbourne?

Jason Wyatt: um It just completely opens your mind, doesn’t it? You go to a great big city like London and you know I was a massive surfer growing up. I remember actually catching a tube from Heathrow London tube and yeah I had a bag on one shoulder and I had my surfboard. I had four surfboards on the other

Jason Wyatt: go over there and party and um surf the coast of France um amongst it. But you get off this tube and you look up at the you know you look up at the you look up at the city and you’ve got nowhere to live. You’ve got no job. You’ve got no money. So very quickly, you’re a little kid in a big city and you’ve got to learn survival, right which is one of the the primary functions of life within it. But you know a city like London’s just sensational. It’s got so much diversity, so it’s so cosmopolitan, it’s so much fun, um but it can it can it can teach you so much, but it can also spit you out if you you know if you don’t change and adapt and and put yourself in the environments where you can be successful.

Alejandro Cremades: and You also went through different companies, as you were saying. i mean You did Morgan Stanley, you did Reuters, a little bit of everything. you know I can say, what do you think was the pivotal moment for you that really got you to be like, okay, now is my more time now to take over my own destiny and create my own future?

Jason Wyatt: I was sitting there working in in London and yeah you’re working banking or you’re working finance and you’re kind of you’re working in decimal points or basis points and there’s no innovation really in the product. You know you talk about spreads and whether I can make a 0.001 of a more margin today or you’re working in accounting and yet you’re working in the past, so the whole time you’re focused on doing financial reports or or telling people what’s happened and you’re not really focused on telling people what’s going to happen or shaping what’s going to happen. um So that the pivotal thing for me is that I think I was just ultimately completely bored. There was just no, it was like like the places, the cultures were great fun, the companies were good companies that were just boring in what they did, if that makes sense.

Alejandro Cremades: so then So then how did the whole ideal bike exchange come together?

Jason Wyatt: um Actually, ah my best friend and I, Sam Salter, he was living in Melbourne at the time. His family was from a cycling industry and he had a classified background. So before marketplaces, there was classified things so of cars dot.com and those types of businesses where you couldn’t actually transact online.

Jason Wyatt: um And then i i I fundamentally, at the same time, wanted to get out of just working for a company um and putting some of that knowledge together. So we kind of teamed up um We looked at the market at the time and we said, you know what, there’s more bikes sold than cars. These bikes are often 10 to $20,000. We looked at the industry and said, the bike shops are never going to be able to figure out in ah in back in 2007, never going to figure out out SEO and SEM and online marketing. um yeah and And the consumer was demanding you know a destination, a single destination where we could provide ease, convenience and choice for their consumer journey and just make it easier for them to buy.

Jason Wyatt: so When we look at those forces together, you know but it’s a great industry um with a big tan. The industry is ripe for disruption um and and we knew a model that was going to work um within it that we could scale quite quickly. and From day one bike exchange work, which is fascinating, right?

Jason Wyatt: because and yeah yeah I remember the first single day we put up and we put the website up within an hour there were people talking and communicating through it and within a week there were 500 and then within a month there were thousands. So quite often the market speaks whether it’s a good idea or not and in this case the market spoke quite quickly.

Alejandro Cremades: And you were there for about seven years. I mean, how was that journey? I mean, seven years in a startup is like a lifetime.

Jason Wyatt: it is It is like a lifetime in there. But again, when we think of it back then, um the access to good technologists um and the access, you know, it’s not like living in Melbourne, we were living in in the bay in San Francisco, right? Like, so it’s a different sort of acceleration path. So you had to graft it out a little bit more. You had to, you know, we had to take our time. It wasn’t as easy to raise money in this market back then as it is now.

Jason Wyatt: um But what we quickly realized is is yeah the bike business was really good and and in 2012 we won um Telstra, like an Australian business, small business of the year. right like So we just spun it up and we and and it was humming along. And on the back of that, actually many people approached us and said, can we use your platform to do you know We don’t want to do a bike marketplace, but we want to do a babies and kids marketplace, or we want to do a furniture marketplace. And then we just constantly got these inbound calls and emails from people saying, hey, oh I want to do that same model, but in a different industry. And that’s really sort of when Market Placer was born. yeah We had a very different model back then. yeah know we We took

Jason Wyatt: We took an equity stake in their business. We took a license fee behind their business. The platform wasn’t built for any product at that time, but what it did, is it taught us, it taught us that maybe our biggest asset wasn’t actually the bike business, but probably the technology business that the bike business was built on.

Alejandro Cremades: So then at what point do you decide this time to walk away? Because i mean this is say also your first company, your first baby. you know I think that eventually, when it’s your first company, you know it happens many times for entrepreneurs that that you think you are the company. You become attached to it in every shape and form, especially after seven years. What happened there for you to decide it was time to turn page?

Jason Wyatt: Well, when you’re working 18 hours a day, you’re involved in nine businesses. All of them are going okay, but you know ultimately ultimately, it’s very difficult to run that many spreads of businesses and then you have to pick one. So i ultimately come to the decision, if i’m if we’re gonna be successful in marketplace, it needs 100% of my time, 100% of my focus. And it was probably one of the biggest lessons that I learned was, you know, these things are hard. If you want them to go fast, it’s 100% dedication into them, it’s 100% passion into it. So, and that that’s exactly that’s exactly what I did. So, I stepped off every other single board and Marketplace have got 100% of my focus with zero distraction.

Alejandro Cremades: So because I know that tool bike exchange was listed, so what was the evaluation I’d speak?

Jason Wyatt: It listed at its peak for about $80 million. dollars So i walked away yeah and it was but I walked away before listing, but yeah I had a great result um out out of that. And you know it was ah was a really great journey and a really great story. But it taught me so much around creating a marketplace, leading a team, building a technology team, and all of those things. So you know it was an incredible journey and an incredible result.

Alejandro Cremades: So then for you eventually, you get going with Market Placer. So obviously, you know like after the experience with bike exchange, you know doing it for seven years, you know you you had a very good understanding on how to think about building and scaling, and also how to think about building something in a really good market. So how do you start to think about Market Placer becoming that next you know part of the chapter in your in your journey as a founder? and And why did you think it was meaningful enough for you to take action on it?

Jason Wyatt: Well, when you think about um the opportunity behind Market Placer is, one thing I’ve always looked at is what, if you’re gonna sell a technology product to a customer, ultimately what problem are you trying to solve? And the problem we were trying to solve was how do we make it easier for people to sell things that they don’t own? How do they how can we make it, whether you’ve got a big audience, whether you’ve got an existing customer base, how do we make it just so seamless

Jason Wyatt: that you can grow without the need of opening new warehouses, to grow without the need of owning inventory, and ultimately leverage your unfair advantage, which always comes back down to your position in the market with an incredible customer base and or um deep relationship with suppliers and accelerate that at a, you know, with basically like an autopilot mentality at a speed that you would never be able to do if you were buying, owning, shipping and sending inventory in its own right. And that’s ultimately with the problem marketplace that solves

Jason Wyatt: is is if you’re ah if you know if you’re a large retailer or a medium retailer or you’ve got a big audience, how do we plug our technology, our supply base in and ultimately put you on autopilot to scale without the need of a huge capital base behind you? And that’s that’s what we that’s what we sort of went out and did and and yeah we’ve been fortunate enough to secure some of the best and leading contracts in the world.

Alejandro Cremades: So for the people that are listening to get it, what ended up being the business model of Marketplace, or how do you guys make money?

Jason Wyatt: Yeah, so we work with some of the biggest retailers like Albertsons and Tesco and retailers all over the planet ah and we you know We connect our platform into their e-commerce engine and just significantly increase their supply base. A good example is the gap in in the United States. When you when you shop on the gap,

Jason Wyatt: You’ll see they’ve got the traditional gap clothing, they’ve got the connection traditional products, but you’ll also see now that they’ve got you cots and prams and all of these new categories that they’ve never been traditionally been selling before.

Jason Wyatt: So all of those new categories are actually powered through the marketplace platform. So when somebody buys something on the gap, pushes the order back through the marketplace platform through the supplier. So we’re effectively, to you know, the gap wouldn’t say they’re waking up and creating a marketplace.

Jason Wyatt: but we’re enabling the effectively dropship or send third party products and open up all of those new categories behind it. So the way we make money is we charge a monthly SaaS fee um and then we take a percentage of that of of that turnover. So when we work with businesses like Tesco or Albertsons or The Gap or Woolworths in this region, which is some of the largest retailers,

Jason Wyatt: is not only that we get the SAS fee, but and we get ah we we truly see ourselves as a partner in that business, and we get a percentage of the turnover forever.

Alejandro Cremades: It was quite the um you know the interesting hit on product market fit because right away you guys you know started to receive a phone calls you know from from potential customers. so How was that like? you know It sounds like it was a really good start.

Jason Wyatt: It was amazing, but it was frightening because these phone calls weren’t from um small little startups. They were from some of that the largest retailers in the world. right like So our products started effectively at enterprise, which most tech companies take 20 years to get into enterprise. So um it was a really interesting it was a really interesting journey behind that.

Jason Wyatt: You know, never forgetting the same month we had Tesco, um we had Qantas, which is for the airline, um and we had um and we had the Gap email us and said, hey, I want to create a marketplace. Like, it’s very rare you get that in life where you can get such amazing customers um contacting you. so um But, you know, they’re moats now for our business. When we think of the you know our customers, ultimately they’re theyre they’re our moat.

Jason Wyatt: um in there that there we’ve got unbelievably deep relationships and you know we power a huge supply base um you know that transforms that transforms them. A good way to think about it is if you see the, for the United States, if you see the evolution of what Walmart’s been able to do with their marketplace even against Amazon and it’s really started to shift their party product. Walmart really started that journey before we were live and they bought Jet dot.com But what we’ve been able to do is enable these other incredible retailers using that platform to implement a very, very similar strategy on a global basis.

Alejandro Cremades: So for you guys, there was also a very important moment in time where you decided to turn off half of the product. I mean, that sounds quite scary.

Jason Wyatt: It’s very scary when you’ve got investors um and you’ve got 40% of your revenue rolling through that segment of yeah of your business. But what we realized is, and so for the listeners out there, we actually had ah had a full stack. So you could create a marketplace using Marketplace from scratch. So we had an you know a marketplace commerce engine, we had the search engine, we had the shopping cart.

Jason Wyatt: But ultimately, really, if we were ever going to scale, it wasn’t going to be through those small startups or those sort of mid-market concepts where, hey, I want to create a marketplace for a surfboard marketplace and a surfboard industry. If we’re truly going to scale, we had to think of where are all the customers and how do we get into those into that customer base on an easier and faster basis. So then Tesco is never going to re-platform their commerce engine.

Jason Wyatt: um Albertsons are never going to re-platform their commerce engine. So you know we had to go headless. The whole world was going to a microservice architecture and we had to go headless at speed. But in order to do that in the most modern, in the cleverest way, we had to turn off probably half of our product-based and yeah we were never going to compete with Shopify. We were never going to compete with the likes of Salesforce Commerce Cloud. So we made a really brave decision to to ultimately switch off half of the product, switch off a huge portion of our revenue. um But the way I look at that is it’s like this you know it’s like in business, you look at scaffolding. you know You’re building the building, right? The first thing sometimes yeah you know you build is the scaffolding on the outside, don’t you? like And then ah ultimately, what comes straight through the center is the big building, which is the greatest asset of all. So when I think of bike exchange, when I think of the full stack offering,

Jason Wyatt: ah And they weren’t necessarily the mistakes because we couldn’t have got here without all of that learning. But, you know, the building through the centers, clearly, the deep problem that we solve with marketplace. And now, you know, we we just need to determine the opportunity of being so big that, yeah, we’re so focused on that one thing.

Alejandro Cremades: Now, for you guys, you were talking about investors earlier. How much capital have you guys raised to date and how has it been the journey of raising money?

Jason Wyatt: ah We’ve raised about $120 million. dollars And to be honest, the process of raising capital sucks. Anyone who tells you they like it, I think has a different mindset. you know So you’ve got to you’ve got to go out there, you’ve got to really nail your story. like So what problem do you solve? How do you solve it? And why are people going to back you?

Jason Wyatt: um Yeah, over over the other 150 investments they’re currently looking at, you know, ultimately within it. So then it’s it’s like, yeah you know, you’ve got to go to multiple, multiple firms, you’ve got to put your heart on your sleeve um the whole way through. And, you know, it’s its fundamentally a numbers game because

Jason Wyatt: You’re going to talk to many, many funds and it’s not that you don’t have a good idea or you don’t have a good business or they don’t believe in you. You’re just not the right fit for them. You just don’t meet their metrics. You don’t meet their industry. You don’t meet necessarily their sort of mandates behind their funds or it’s the wrong timing. So you’ve got to start with a big net.

Jason Wyatt: um You’ve got to get good advisors to help you on the way through. You’ve got to nail your story um behind it. And then you’ve got to really, really deeply understand your metrics. you know you’ve got to As the market has become more sophisticated, yeah the metrics absolutely matter in this market in particular. It’s become probably one of the most difficult capital markets um yeah with the level of interest rate in the world.

Jason Wyatt: so or the in the time that I’ve been in business. So you’ve really got to understand those metrics and and make sure that they believe in what you’re doing and they’re going to get a great return ultimately.

Alejandro Cremades: so then So then, obviously, you know when when investors make a bet, you know and I think that it’s not just investors. I mean, I think that it’s also customers or employees. I think that vision is a really big factor for them. And and and I guess a question for you here that comes to mind, Jason, is if you were to go to bed tonight and you wake up in a world where the vision of marketplaces is fully realized, what does that world look like?

Jason Wyatt: It’s really simple. yeah It’s ultimately selling on autopilot. I think all of these businesses are just, they’ve taken too long and they’ve cost too much. and And there’s so many manual processes in the past in it. So you imagine a platform where you can just plug in the The world of supply, it tells you what to sell. It tells you how much to sell it for. It makes sure it gets fulfilled. It opens up a world of unlimited growth on a global basis without the need of holding any inventory or capital behind it. So, you know, ultimately that’s what we’re creating behind Marketplace. There is this concept of, you know, your ultimate growth autopilot on a global basis.

Alejandro Cremades: so then So then for these two, i I want to ask you as well, thinking about skill. How have you guys thought about skill and how do you go about figuring out skill?

Jason Wyatt: yeah I think scale comes in many forms and many sizes. right like so we had to scale We started this business in Australia. We had to scale out of Australia. australia so Probably too early in our journey, just through the necessity of getting out of a pretty small country, is we had to internationalise the product.

Jason Wyatt: so And in doing that now, you know, the product has unbelievable product fit in the United States and North America and and right through Europe. So our first point in the product journey is how do you scale the products that can work in the markets you want to exist in there? And then when we when we ultimately thought about scale in what we’re doing is where Where are ultimately our customers living and how can we get to them in the fastest way? Well, they’re already living on e-commerce engines, aren’t they? So whether you’re Tesco or whether you’re on Shopify or whether you’re on BigCommerce, if we want to empower growth for every e-commerce business on the planet,

Jason Wyatt: Well, where are those e-commerce businesses living? So what we went out and did is we made amazing connections and relationships with the e-commerce platforms and just made it so easy and fast for anyone using any e-commerce platform on the planet to turn into a marketplace instantly. So we launched what we call FastArt.

Jason Wyatt: now is where we can turn, if you’re on big commerce, we can get you up and running in a really cool way um and and start your marketplace journey or category extension journey um you ah in ah in a completely frictionless way. So when we talk to scale, we talk to every e-commerce business on the planet and turning them into a marketplace.

Jason Wyatt: And then the second piece of that puzzle is, yes, we’re a technology company, but ultimately, if we’re if if if we’re going to solve that problem, we’ve got to come out of the box with all the suppliers. So you know what we’ve really heavily focused on over the last couple of years is becoming the biggest marketplace of every product supply base in the world as well.

Jason Wyatt: So, you know, when we think of the three things, you know, you’ve got huge consumer base through our customers and our network, leveraging that network effect of those commerce business that exists there. And then out of the box, every supply that you could ever imagine. So we we make it easier and faster than anyone else so to create or to grow on the planet.

Alejandro Cremades: So I guess, say for the um especially for the people that are listening, you know i want i want to I want to ask you something here because we’ve been talking about the future too. We’ve been talking about scale. I want to talk about the past and doing so with a lens of reflection. you know Let’s say I was to put you into a time machine and I bring you back in time, you know maybe to 2007 when you were thinking about starting something of your own. ah Let’s say you had the opportunity of having a chat with your younger self.

Alejandro Cremades: If you were able to be right there with that younger Jason and give that younger Jason one piece of advice before launching a business, what would that be and why given what you know now?

Jason Wyatt: I think it’s a really good question. and So if you think of founders and what makes founders successful over somebody else, and including including myself that is in there, is is you actually,

Jason Wyatt: is the ability to be yourself and to be a founder. And it’s completely okay to be that person within it. Because the reason you’re successful is because you can make fast decisions is because you’re not afraid of failing is because you can think of things that others can’t think of is that because you can make a really complex problem so simple that the world can use it in ah in a really cool way. um And

Jason Wyatt: you know I think there’s so many naysayers out there that say, don’t do this for these reasons. And um ah you you’ve you’ve got to achieve, you’ve got to do it in this way because this is the way everybody else does it. But if you’re a founder and you truly believe in your vision, I would say, don’t don’t let the naysayers stop you. Be the maverick that’s inside you and do it at an incredible pace.

Jason Wyatt: um we Sometimes you will rattle a cage and that’s completely fine. Because if everybody’s happy all of the time in everything that you do, the chances are you’re not disrupting anything fast enough within it. So I would say go harder, go faster, and go sooner.

Alejandro Cremades: Love it. So Jason, for the people that are listening that would love to reach out and say hi, what is the best way for them to do so?

Jason Wyatt: um Just connect on LinkedIn is probably the best way. So JSON, Y, W, Y, A, double T. And you know it’d be great to connect. And um and you know yeah thanks for thanks for the time today.

Alejandro Cremades: Amazing. Well, Jason, thank you so much. It has been an absolute honor to have you with us.

Jason Wyatt: My pleasure.

*****

If you like the show, make sure that you hit that subscribe button. If you can leave a review as well, that would be fantastic. And if you got any value either from this episode or from the show itself, share it with a friend. Perhaps they will also appreciate it. Also, remember, if you need any help, whether it is with your fundraising efforts or with selling your business, you can reach me at al*******@pa**************.com“>al*******@pa**************.com

 

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