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What's Rutter's competitive advantage in offering universal APIs for ecommerce data and how attractive is the opportunity?
Peter Zhou
Co-founder & CEO at Rutter
When we first started, our go-to-market motion was basically to go to the Shopify App Store, message all of the apps and say, “Hey, you're on Shopify. Why are you not on these other platforms?” Most of those apps were in channel marketing, like Klaviyo or Yotpo, or in drop shipping or shipping and fulfillment.
What we ended up realizing a couple of months in is that, if you think about the companies that use a universal API for commerce or ecommerce, it's way more diverse than any other type of universal API company. A Plaid or a Vessel sells specifically to a narrower set of customers that deal with CRMs or banking infrastructure. The universe of companies that deal with commerce in some way is massive. You have marketplace aggregators, accounting and fintech companies, lending and financial institutions. Ecommerce is so attractive because there are so many different types of players in the space and so many different companies for us to sell to.
I don't know how to size the opportunity here. Any numbers that I would come up with here are completely wrong. Just think how many companies end up touching commerce or dealing with physical or digital commerce in some way. That's the entire world, basically.