StockAgile

01The full story

StockAgile is a cloud system for running a small retail business: inventory across stores and warehouses, the till itself, a wholesale ordering portal for brands that sell to other shops, light manufacturing costing, and automatic stock sync out to the client's webshops and marketplaces. Two brothers from Vic, near Barcelona, both software engineers, built it. The starting point was a dead end. One brother's final-year university project was software for dry cleaners, because the family business was a dry cleaner; the incubator they joined made them go out and sell it, they visited around thirty dry cleaners, and almost nobody wanted it. The pivot came from a single meeting. A contact who had three stores, his own brand and distribution deals for several others invited them to sit in while a consultant quoted him roughly 30,000 euros for a Windows-based system. Asked whether he could check it from his phone, he said yes, and opened a remote-desktop app to zoom into the screen. They took him as their first client and put six stores live in June 2018 — a chaotic first day of mislabelled products and sale prices — then spent about a year building the product from inside his warehouse and shop floor, at night, after their day jobs. Clients arrived by referral: three months from the first to the second, one month to the third, twelve by the start of the pandemic. At the time of this interview in April 2021 they had about 25 paying customers, 1,400 to 1,600 euros of MRR at roughly 70 euros a month each, 41 more accounts signed and queued for onboarding, and a 350,000 euro round just closed, with itnig putting in 105,000 of it. The money goes to a sales team. The twelve-month target is 400 clients and 30,000 euros of MRR.

Everything came through people, not channels. The first client was a personal contact with three stores who invited them into a meeting with his own consultant; they walked out with the deal and put six stores live in June 2018.