These Y Combinator grads are reinventing ecommerce

Two Tap founders Razvan Roman (left) and Radu Spineanu.

“I thought he was really good at this startup game,” Razvan Roman praises his co-founder Radu Spineanu. “Whenever I wanted feedback from someone, I always wanted to talk to Radu.” The two sat near each other in a co-working space during the early days of Romania’s startup scene.

While both computer science graduates moved on to new things – Radu sold his company and Razvan joined Seedcamp to help early stage companies in Europe – they kept in touch.

And then Radu had an idea.

“I was in London,” says Razvan, “Radu asked me if I wanted to work on a new concept or a new product.” The two got together to fix mobile checkouts.

Write code

There’s no silver bullet. It was a process that literally took years.

Radu used to run one of Romania’s first affiliate networks, where websites could link to a product and share revenue with the seller. During his time there, he noticed that content creators often generated more sales than the retailers.

“Links are not the future,” explains Radu. “It was a program that was started in the 1990s. You should be able to buy the product at the point of discovery.”

Radu and Razvan created Two Tap to make that happen. With Two Tap, customers can buy a product directly on an affiliate site without being redirected to the merchant.

It was a solid idea, but signing up the first merchants was difficult. “There’s no silver bullet,” says Razvan. “It was a process that literally took years.” Getting into Y Combinator (YC) in 2014 helped get them some much needed name recognition.

“We couldn’t be here without Y Combinator,” explains Radu. “They helped us from just being random people, to being someone people wanted to talk to and be taken seriously.”

(Disclosure: Tech in Asia is also a YC graduate.)

The world-famous accelerator’s mantra of “Write code, talk to users,” runs strong in the two founders. It also helped them earn a spot on Romania’s Forbes’ 30 under 30 list.

Talk to users

Although they were initially focused on the ecommerce market in the US, the majority of orders were coming from abroad. Overseas customers were using Two Tap’s order consolidation feature to ship purchases from multiple vendors to international shipping services and then forward the package to their home address.

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