Our special series about businesses founded in 2020 highlights tales of resilience, remote relationships and pivoting. No.1: Web Automation
Victor Bolu鈥檚 wife was expecting their third child when he gave up his 拢100,000 a year job in March to set up his own business.
He and co-founder Ozcan Yukaribas came up with the idea and created a pitch deck during 2019 before moving on to testing and reaching out to potential customers in January 2020. Feedback was positive.
Then came lockdown. 鈥淲e were paying two lots of nursery fees and expecting another baby, and my wife said it probably wasn鈥檛 the best time to be starting a business 鈥� other people said maybe I should put it on hold and wait for the pandemic to go away,鈥� he says.
鈥淚鈥檓 a bit of a risk taker anyway but I had a strong conviction that if I didn鈥檛 do this now, I鈥檇 always be looking for excuses. It鈥檚 never going to be the perfect time so why not now?鈥�
London-based Web Automation allows customers to extract data from websites without writing code. For example eCommerce businesses 鈥� which make up 70 per cent of the customer base 鈥� may need to compare competitors鈥� pricing with their own to ensure they price products and promotions competitively.
Usually, this would involve trawling websites to copy and paste the information, but Web Automation鈥檚 self-service tool cuts the web scraping process from hours to minutes.
Early customers were from the travel sector, an industry that disappeared overnight when the pandemic hit, yet there have been advantages to 2020鈥檚 unique set of circumstances. CEO Bolu believes many of the clients they targeted would not have done business with them during normal times.
鈥淧eople want to buy from people they鈥檝e met and it originally worried me that we couldn鈥檛 have physical meetings, but we鈥檝e ended up with clients in the US, Germany and all over the world,鈥� he says.
鈥淧eople are now more receptive to having a phone call or Zoom, where they would have wanted you to go to see them before, which means things can move much faster.鈥�
There have also been positives brought about by remote working. The original plan was to have everyone working from the same room.
鈥淏y the end of March we were conscious that wasn鈥檛 going to happen, but it ended up working out better because it opened up the pool of people we could hire globally,鈥� says Bolu, adding that they have recruited from Turkey and Columbia 鈥� employees they have yet to meet in person.
鈥淲e鈥檝e also had to adapt to using digital tools so much so that we鈥檝e become experts in things like Zoom, Slack and Google Drive.鈥�
Funding goals were put on hold by the pandemic, yet these will restart again in 2021, while the pair intend to experiment with new tech such as AI and machine learning to improve the product. Though the lack of funding has meant sales have grown organically, Bolu believes the experience has made the business better.
鈥淲e鈥檝e become resourceful because we鈥檝e had to find ways to do things without spending a lot of money and we鈥檝e also learned to accept rejection when we鈥檝e had customers that have had to stop trading,鈥� he says.
鈥淚 made a promise to myself that I was never going to blame COVID because even if we lost a customer there would always be other people who would need our services.鈥�
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