The first whitelabeled SourceSage ecommerce platform was our own. In 2015, we took something we knew, commodities trade, and built a business around it. The idea was to set up an ecommerce platform ("Source Code) and create an ecosystem of buyers and sellers ("Sage"). But there was a problem: the nature of B2B landscape we encountered seemed to work against our ambitions at every step. Back then, existing ecommerce platform was built more for the B2C industries that were popularized by major marketplaces. On the contrary, B2B buy and sell workflows were incredibly secretive, unnecessarily complex, and infuriatingly inflexible.

Existing ecommerce platforms were not designed with B2B in mind, especially in facilitating between the large and small businesses, so we rejected the existing models and created our own. Our custom ecommerce platform met our needs so well that we decided to take everything we learned and shift our business away from commodities and towards fixing the glaring hole in the B2B ecommerce market. We knew that many future B2B businesses would be created online first, and platforms needed to support the first steps of digitization. We set out to create the platform that we wished would have existed, and we pivoted it in 2020 amidst the Covid situation.

SourceSage is exactly this: the only platform you need to build your B2B ecommerce strategy. SourceSage is the first thing our users log into in the morning and the last thing they log out of in the evening. It’s at the heart of their business—a responsibility that we take very seriously. We want to work towards a vision where companies buy or sell products through platforms powered by SourceSage and they will not even realize it. As a brand, we want to remain virtually invisible to our users. This is by design, as our job is to make them look their very best in every interaction they have with their stakeholders.

With over 280% growth over the last month on transactions, we’ve proven that there’s incredible potential in facilitating ecommerce between large and small businesses when they are empowered with great technology. Focusing on helping businesses to start, grow and scale online creates a sense of solidarity: we did it together. We believe that by giving users an affordable, easy to use solution that helps them buy or sell, SourceSage will share in their success journey as they scale. We’ve shown that it was possible to build a single platform that works from the very beginning—a traditional business with no ecommerce capability—to a business where ecommerce sales or purchase accounts for a large part of their day-to-day activities. And while many of our larger merchants switched to SourceSage based on the quality of our platform, flexibility and speed, a large number of our merchants are now “homegrown” and started their businesses with us. I’m incredibly proud of this.

Over the years we’ve also helped foster a large ecosystem that has grown around SourceSage. Financial institutions, payment gateways, agents, and logistics companies have built businesses of their own by creating value for our users on the SourceSage platform. Instead of stifling this enthusiastic pool of partners and carving out the profits for ourselves, we’ve made a point of supporting our partners and aligning their interests with our own. In order to build long-term value, we decided to forgo short-term revenue opportunities and work with those who were putting their trust in SourceSage. As a result, today there is increasing number of partners that have built businesses around SourceSage via integrations or any number of other services for SourceSage users.

This is a prime example of how we approach value and something that potential investors must understand: we do not chase revenue as the primary driver of our business. SourceSage has been about empowering users since it was founded, and we have always prioritized long-term value over short- term revenue opportunities. We don’t see this changing.

In terms of the value we create, we think that the most important thing that we deliver to our users is simplicity. Simplicity isn’t simple. It takes tremendous care, discipline, and craftsmanship to take something inherently complex like B2B commerce and make it intuitive. We have spent the last few years democratizing commerce, simplifying it, and making it accessible for businesses of all sizes.

Today, businesses buy and sell through dozens of different channels: online stores, marketplaces, wholesale, through mobile apps or any number of other ways. Users often hack together different applications and technologies in order to try to address their multi-channel requirements. We’re now showing them that they don’t have to; that their complex setup can be reduced to a single, simple platform. By the time we’re done, we think SourceSage will have established the “new normal”.

I want SourceSage to be a company that sees the next century. To get us there we not only have to correctly predict future commerce trends and technology, but be the ones that push the entire industry forward. SourceSage was initially built in a world where traditional commodities buyers and sellers want to discover one another easily. By accurately predicting how the commerce world would be changing, and building what our users would need next, we taught them to expect so much more from their ecommerce platform.

These underlying aspirations and values drive our mission: Start, Grow and Scale ecommerce between the large and small players. I hope you’ll join us in this journey.

-Jian
31 Dec 2020