We are publishing an interview of Mr. Barry Pilgrim, Founder & CEO, Gofindo Inc.
About the founders
Barry Pilgrim – He is the Founder and CEO of Gofindo, utilizing a background with over 20 years of experience within the Information Technology industry. Barry has managed delivery and commercialization efforts for the development, execution, and release of multiple products and major infrastructure upgrades / data center migrations work streams within the Internet Service Provider, Telecom, and Information Technology industries.
Reena Pilgrim, Co-founder & VP Delivery – She is a technology focused business leader with a demonstrated track record for business transformation and product delivery. Her work is known for building high-performance teams, holding project stakeholders and executives accountable on objectives while driving rapid decision making throughout the development lifecycle.
What is the problem you are trying to solve? Can you share with us any insights that led you to believe that this is a big enough problem?
In the past 4-5 years, the retail industry has undergone major changes and retailers are acknowledging that it is 6-7 times more costly to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one. This same research shows that boosting customer retention rates by as little as 5% can increase profits up to 95%.
With such incentives at hand, traditional brick and mortar retailers and large shopping mall owners are urged to leverage eCommerce-like data collection and analysis to create a unique customer experience that will keep customers coming back for more.
As a matter of fact, customers—particularly Millennials—have become more informed, less tolerant, and increasingly demanding.
Their ever-increasing ability to shop around, research, compare, share, and explore alternative products, prices and options forces retailers to truly know their customers and understand their shopping motivations.
On the other hand, the retail industry’s technological landscape is comprised of web developers, CRM and ERP providers, payment processors, network providers, and many more.
But the technology upon which nearly all brick and mortar retailers are still fully dependent is their Point of Sale (POS) systems, which are often highly fragmented and cumbersome. With thousands of different POS providers in the market, and no true standardization, many retailers struggle or fail to integrate multiple data sources and retail channels (Mobile, eCommerce, In-store).
Furthermore, while the POS gives retailers access to critical KPIs like daily sales numbers, top selling products, and returns by cashier, but retailers need the ability to associate transactions to an individual customer in an actionable way. This level of insight is integral for retailers to provide a truly personalized customer experience.
It’s very clear, the retail industry is in dire need of embracing mobile to acquire, engage and retain customers. Retailers are increasingly facing competition from online based e-commerce retailers who are seeking to disrupt the traditional brick & mortar retail space. While online commerce continues to be a growing segment focus, it does not represent most of sales, as a large number of legacy businesses still rely on consistent traffic through a physical location. However, this does not mean that these retailers are immune from changes. Mall foot traffic has continued to decline and traditional brick and mortar retailers are struggling to find ways that capture and retain consumers moving through their physical operations into a digital capacity.
To address these concerns Gofindo mobile customer engagement platform:
- Provides a seamless omni-channel experience to end users while collecting actionable data and insights.
- Enables mobile payment options and transactions, reducing merchant’s credit card fees.
- Reduces marketing effort and spend needed to manage offers via traditional online marketing.
- Eliminates the need for retailers to invest significantly in their own standalone mobile application.
- Dashboard and analysis of collected purchase and marketing data provides insight and opportunity for a retailer to increase their store’s revenue potential.
What is the uniqueness about your Startup?
Gofindo is a feature rich customer engagement platform. It is just not any other customer loyalty platform, Gofindo enables businesses to easily build tailor-made mobile engagement programs to connect and reward a merchant’s customers in a personal and efficient manner.
Gofindo provides a cloud-based point of sale and digital marketing platform that is tightly integrated to track, analyze and provide insights on marketing metrics. As a cloud-based point of sale technology, Gofindo provides a low risk and affordable entry cost, while still representing a fully-featured solution which can be used by retailers to improve revenue and traffic at their location.
Gofindo’s multi-featured approach provides various angles to address the technology that is typically lacking in legacy retailers and merchants. While retail has traditionally been an offline medium, modern technology, including that provided by Gofindo, is able to increasingly convert traditionally direct or offline purchases to digital – where they can be tracked, analyzed, & utilized by marketing professionals for improved reach and effectiveness – providing a key shift to support revenue growth for many stagnant retailers.
The platform’s key solution is represented by the ability of consumers to use a “white”-labelled mobile application, which when combined with key loyalty features and discounts provided by the retailer fulfills both merchant and consumer needs. When used by a retailer, usage and purchase information (such as by the Gofindo mobile payment technology), will enable invaluable insights that enable the merchant to create more refined future marketing offers. For the consumer, offers and loyalty points increase engagement and drive more consistent incentivizing purchasing behaviors.
What is the revenue model? Explain your thought process.
We have three plans, namely – Go Plus, Go Pro and Go Premium. All these plans are loaded with features that are designed keeping in mind the specific need of business owners and their size of business. A business owner can sign up with our customer engagement solution for free and explore our wonderful features where they are allowed to create custom campaign templates, and can later upgrade to the above mentioned plans to enjoy the best of out platform.
Who are the consumers that you are targeting? How is this going to affect them?
As I told you earlier, we are here to help traditional brick and mortar retailers, mall owners, and small business owners who find it really hard to deal with customer attrition and loss of revenue. Our cloud based customer engagement solution is designed keeping in mind these segment who are having tough time in handling customer retention, coping with competition from global e-commerce companies, and lagging behind in technology adoption.
Our mobile engagement solution is definitely going to empower them in understanding their customers, their buying behaviour with the help of our in built analytics and dashboard. On the other hand, our marketing automation features are going to enable retailers to design and execute personalized offer campaigns.
Why Gofindo Mobile Customer Engagement Platform For Your Business?
The mobile customer engagement solution has been designed to enable mall owners and retailers:
- To bring more foot-traffic to shopping malls
- To adapt with Omni Channel purchase behaviour
- To bring quality tenants and customers in store
- To increase sales for their tenants
What is the big picture of your startup? Will it lead to something bigger? If so, how?
Yes definitely, we are currently at growing stage. Though we started our operation at Ontario, Canada, at this moment we are making all efforts to make our footprint in India. The retail industry in India is growing and is very vibrant at this moment. Large and gorgeous shopping malls are coming in all metro cities. At the same time, the presence of e-commerce giants in the sector is making the game all more exciting. But we don’t see much involvement of technology in the sector to understand customer behaviour and craft loyalty initiative accordingly. I think in this respect, we can add lot of value to what retailers and business owners are doing.
What is the success story of your startup in your own words?
Every startup has its own share of challenges and we are not exception to this phenomenon. Working on this kind of platform requires massive dependency on excellent tech skilled people. And I am lucky to get a team of fantastic techies who are working on this product from Hyderabad, India.
And then off course financing the development of the product, of this scale is really very very challenging. The entire development project is bootstrapped.
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Thanks Mr. Barry. Best of luck!
