The challenges of a young ecommerce founder

When Filipino entrepreneur Jake Lagazo encountered what he calls a “quarter-life crisis” in 2017, he did what many millennials do in the face of an existential predicament – he went traveling.

“I went to Bohol and Cebu by myself in December and spent the New Year there because I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life,” says the 26-year-old, citing two popular travel destinations in the Philippines.

Medusa Luxuries founder Jake Lagazo / Photo credit: Jake Lagazo

Lagazo, who was working in sales at the time, decided that his calling was to start his own ecommerce business. After his holiday, he went back home to Manila – the country’s capital – to get started despite the odds stacked against him. He was convinced he “just needed to do it.”

“I told myself that doing something I could call my own would make me happy, despite how little I would make,” he recalls.

Entering a difficult market

Lagazo knew that penetrating the ecommerce industry in the Philippines was no easy task. Big players like Lazada and Shopee dominated the market, being the first e-tailers to offer cash-on-delivery payment options for local online shoppers.

Because 77 percent of Filipinos still don’t have a bank account, online merchants that allow only credit card payments or bank transfers lose out on a large unbanked customer base.

Lagazo also had difficulty finding role models to emulate when he first started.

“I didn’t have any mentors to guide me on how to run an ecommerce business. I couldn’t even refer to online courses because most of them catered to US or European markets, which don’t rely on cash-on-delivery payment,” he recalls.

Not one to be discouraged, Lagazo went all in and quit his sales job. In January 2018, he launched Medusa Luxuries, an online retailer of affordable jewelry.

Establishing partnerships

But Lagazo couldn’t start a marketplace without products to sell. The first step in his plan was to onboard traditional jewelers onto the platform. However, the merchants didn’t take him seriously because of his age, and they were unwilling to sell through the internet.

“I even tried to convince some of them to give me the products they were going to dispose of and let me sell them instead,” he recalls. “No matter how good my presentations were, all they wanted to see were results. But I couldn’t give them that because I’d just started.”

Photo credit: Unsplash

He also faced challenges when he was trying to onboard courier service providers.

“They’d ask how much volume I deliver per day. Of course, I’d just started so I didn’t have much to show,” says Lagazo. Some of the service providers also asked for a cash bond before doing business with him or had “drawn-out payment schedules that weren’t ideal.”

To solve his problems with landing merchants, Lagazo changed his strategy, purchasing jewelry stock from smaller businesses. He then worked hard to “sell their products one by one” and marketed them online under the Medusa Luxuries brand, persevering in spite of his merchant partners’ lack of enthusiasm.

Lagazo also came across CheckMeOut, a delivery and payment service by digital logistics solutions provider QuadX. He was easily able to tap its courier services and provide his customers with the option to pay for purchases via cash on delivery. This gave Medusa Luxuries access to a bigger customer base in the Philippines, and all he had to do was set up a CheckMeOut account.

“You just had to register – it’s just like Facebook,” observes Lagazo. “When Medusa Luxuries became more established, other courier services approached me with offers for business partnerships, but I decided to stick with CheckMeOut because of how efficient it is.”

A long way to go

Lagazo has come a long way since his time as a solopreneur, packing orders into delivery boxes late into the night by himself. Aside from Medusa Luxuries, he set up a number of other online shops that sell different types of products such as clothing and accessories.

Now he has a team of six employees and claims that his businesses have earned over US$150,000 in collective revenue in October.

Lagazo has come a long way since his time as a solopreneur. / Photo credit: Jake Lagazo

Despite the company’s successes since it rolled out earlier this year, Lagazo says he’s nowhere near done. At present, he’s reviewing the system his company is using.

“Imagine if we had a better system with a better budget for marketing or a better way of selling stocks – our revenue would be way higher,” he shares.

The most important thing for Lagazo throughout his journey was to keep believing in himself and his vision.

“There will come a time when everyone will doubt you: your partners, your mentors, your merchants – everyone,” he says. “As the founder, you shouldn’t doubt yourself.”

Converted from Philippine pesos. Rate: US$1 = PHP53.21

As the Philippines’ first customer-centric digital logistics company, QuadX is dedicated to helping Filipino entrepreneurs by providing simple and seamless solutions.

Visit QuadX’s website to learn more about integrating digital logistics processes into ecommerce business.

This article is part of the coverage of QuadX’s event, where founders like Medusa Luxuries’ Jake Lagazo and other established players in Philippines’ ecommerce scene will discuss how to drive the industry’s growth in the country on November 22, 2018 at the Makati Shangri-la Hotel in Manila.