Ram Krishnna Rao is an award-winning entrepreneur, CEO at MarketOrders, and has 13 years’ experience in Forex, arbitrage, and online Bullion trading.
He is a qualified IBM blockchain developer and was named as a Top 100 European Digital Pioneer by The Financial Times and Google with his work at MarketOrders. The startup is reshaping the gold jewelry industry with the use of new technologies such as blockchain.
In 2020, MarketOrders released a White Paper exploring the use of blockchain technology to bring more transparency, speed, and trust to supply chain processes in the jewelry industry.
Last year, Ram’s startup was mentioned over 740 times in the press, was nominated for 20 awards and Top lists, and won 11 of them, including the TechWomen100 Award by We Are Tech Women, the Rising Star Award by Professional Jeweller, and the Best Online B2B Platform Development 2020 – UK Award by Corporate Today!
Please tell us a little bit about your company – what is MarketOrders all about?
MarketOrders is developing a platform-based marketplace and provenance chain, specifically focused on helping jewelry retailers source the gold products they need more efficiently and at better prices. It turns the traditional gold jewelry supply chain model upside down by digitizing every element of the customer journey. Our platform allows suppliers to connect directly with retailers on a global basis and we help with the logistics and payment side of things. Many transactions in our industry are done offline so we are digitizing the customer journey and bringing it online for greater transparency.
Tell us a little bit about your background and how you started your company?
I started my professional career as an FX and commodities trader for an American investment bank where I traded gold bullion and currencies. I really enjoyed the process of buying/selling digital commodities and became interested in the physical movement of these products. This is how I started to learn about the gold and diamonds jewelry trade business, and I started a wholesale company with my co-founder buying and selling gold on a B2B basis.
However, we struggled to scale the business and were self-funding everything and couldn’t get it profitable in a sustainable way. That is when we discovered that by introducing technology in our business, we could get greater economies of scale and run the business operations with greater levels of efficiency; that is how MarketOrders was born.
My co-founder and I used our own savings to bootstrap the first iteration of the website to test demand. We got our first customers using good old-fashioned techniques – by visiting our prospective customers in person and talking to them, building relationships with suppliers and gaining their trust.
We also offered to photograph the products the suppliers had and put them onto our website as none of the suppliers had any online methods of ordering their stock. This led to orders being placed by retailers and we sold 2000 grams of gold jewelry using our rudimentary website. Once we knew we had a valid business model we decided to raise our first round of funding which we did via equity crowdfunding in 2019.
What would you say are the top 3 skills needed to be a successful entrepreneur, and why?
Entrepreneurs do have a special DNA combination – the ability to think outside the box, being solution-focused and greater levels of resilience. This is because running a business comes with challenges you would not have come across before, so you need to have the resilience to push through numerous obstacles multiple times a day and stay focused on the greater vision you are trying to manifest.
What are your plans for the future, how do you plan to grow this company?
The plan is to become the ‘go-to’ marketplace for all suppliers and retailers in the gold and diamond jewelry industry. We want to be known as the most trusted and secure way to source these products on a global basis. Our plans start with expanding the UK market share we currently have and working with suppliers in European countries from 2022.
How do you separate yourself from your competitors?
We are competing with other wholesalers but what makes us different is that we digitize the entire customer journey – from ordering online to payments and shipments. We aim to make the whole process online, transparent, and secure.
What were the top three mistakes you made starting your business, and what did you learn from them?
The first mistake I made was trying to build out the entire online marketplace before we launched but this meant that we took way too long to launch as the build kept taking up so much time. By the time we got to market so many things had changed and our marketplace was already out of date. So, build bit by bit and test out the product with real customers before committing to spending months in product development.
The second mistake was spending our budget on the wrong things; at the start, I kept on adding more and more programmers to the IT team in an effort to speed the build of the marketplace, which increased our salary wage package a lot and I noticed the work was still not being completed. What I should have done was getting rid of the IT team as they were not performing well.
A third mistake would be not chasing up payments in a timely fashion, which meant I ran into huge cashflow issues at the start when some customers wanted longer periods of time to pay. I didn’t manage this process well and some customers didn’t end up paying for their products, which led to cash flow issues in the early days.
How do you go about marketing your business, and what has been the most successful form of marketing for you?
My co-founder and other team members speak at conferences, which helps to build brand awareness. What has had the biggest impact for us so far is press relations. I have an amazing PR manager, Caroline Hoffmann, who has been with us for almost 3 years. When we started, we didn’t have any budget to allocate to PR and used free tools and our network (don’t underestimate the power of your network!).
After 6 months of work, we got fantastic results: over 100 articles in the media, including The Sun, The Telegraph, City AM, Startups Magazine, Business Cloud, Management Today… and over 20 awards nominations. Our crowdfunding campaign overfunded at 112% and 95% of the investors heard of us outside of the crowdfunding platform, through press coverage.
What is the one thing you wish you knew before starting your business?
Don’t procrastinate by overthinking how you will build the business – just do it because you will learn everything as you go along! The biggest hurdles are the ones we often put in our own way. We think we don’t know enough but trust that you can handle whatever comes your way and you can earn any new skills needed as things progress too.
What is your favorite quote?
“Whether you think you can, or think you can’t, you’re right.”
– Henry Ford
What’s your best piece of advice for aspiring and new entrepreneurs?
Take big action! The world is full of great ideas, but success only comes through action. As Walt Disney once said, the easiest way to get started is to quit talking and start doing.
How can we get in touch with you?
If you want to stay up to date our progress, you can follow MarketOrders on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. We also have a ‘Press Coverage’ section and a ‘Blog’ on our website ‘marketorders.net’ where we publish several times a week our latest news and wins! Don’t hesitate to connect with me on LinkedIn as well!
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