Hi folks, We, Runa (runa.com), are looking for great developers to join our small team. We’re an early stage, pre-series-A startup (presently funded with strategic investments from two large corporations) playing in the e-commerce space. We’re creating a new product in the small-to- medium online-retail segment, and if we’re successful, it will be a very large disruption in that space.
Techie keywords: clojure, hadoop, hbase, rabbitmq, erlang, ruby, rails, javascript, amazon EC2, unit-testing, functional-testing, selenium, agile, lean, XP If you’re interested, email me at a...@runa.com. If you want to know more, read on! What do we do Runa aims to provide small-to-not-so-large online retailers with tools/ services that companies like amazon.com use/provide. These smaller guys can’t afford to do anything on that scale, but by using our SaaS services, they can make more money while providing customers with greater value. The first service we’re building is what we call Dynamic Sale Price. It’s a simple concept – it allows the online-retailer to offer a sale price for each product on his site, personalized to the individual consumer who is browsing it. By using this service, merchants are able to - increase conversion (get them to buy!) and offer consumers a special price which maximizes the merchant’s profit This is different from “dumb-discounting” where something is marked- down, and everyone sees the same price. This service is more like airline or hotel pricing which varies from day to day, but much more dynamic and real-time. Further, it is based on broad statistical factors AND individual consumer behavior. After all, if you lower prices enough, consumers will buy. Instead, we dynamically lower prices to a point where statistically, that consumer is most likely to buy. How we do it Runa does this by performing statistical analysis and pattern recognition of what consumers are doing on the merchant sites. This includes browsing products on various pages, adding and removing items from carts, and purchasing or abandoning the carts. We track consumers as they browse, and collect vast quantities of this click-stream data. By mining this data and applying algorithms to determine a price point per consumer based on their behavior, we’re able to maximize both conversion (getting the consumer to buy) AND merchant profit. We also offer the merchant comprehensive reports based on analysis of the mountains of data we collect. Since the data tracks consumer activity down to the individual product SKU level (for each individual consumer), we can provide very rich analytics. This is a tool that merchants need today, but don’t have the resources to build for themselves. The business model For reference, it is useful to understand the affiliate marketing space. Small-to-medium merchants (our target audience) pay affiliates up to 40% of a sale price. Yes, 40%. The average is in the 20% range. We charge our merchants around 10% of sales the Runa delivers. Our merchants are happy to pay it, because it is a performance-based pay, lower than what they pay affiliates, and there is zero up-front cost to the service. In fact, the above mentioned analytics reports are free. We’re targeting e-commerce PLATFORMS (as opposed to individual merchants); in this way, we’re able to scale up merchant-acquisition. We have 10 early-customer merchants right now, with about 100 more planned to go live in the next 2-3 months. By the end of next year, we’re targeting about 1,000 merchants and 10,000 merchants the following year. Our channel deployment model makes these goals achievable. At something like a 5 to 10% service charge, and a typical merchant having between 500K to 1M in sales per year, this is a VERY profitable business model. That is, of course, if we’re successful… but we’re seeing very positive signs so far. Technology Most of our front-end stuff (like the merchant-dashboard, reports, campaign management) is built with Ruby on Rails. Our merchant integration requires browser-side Javascript magic. All our analytics (batch-processing) and real-time pricing services are written in Clojure. We use RabbitMQ for all our messaging needs. We store data in HBase. We’re deployed on Amazon’s EC2. Here are a few blog postings about what we’ve been up to - http://s-expressions.com/2009/05/02/startup-logbook-distributed-clojure-system-in-production-v02/ http://s-expressions.com/2009/04/12/using-messaging-for-scalability/ http://s-expressions.com/2009/03/31/capjure-a-simple-hbase-persistence-layer/ http://s-expressions.com/2009/01/28/startup-logbook-clojure-in-production-release-v01/ We’ve also open-sourced a few of our projects - swarmiji – A distributed computing system to write and run Clojure code in parallel, across CPUs capjure – Clojure persistence for HBase Culture at Runa We’re a small team, very passionate about what we do. We’re focused on delivering a ground-breaking, disruptive service that will allow merchants to really change the way they sell online. We work start-up hours, but we’re flexible and laid-back about it. We know that a healthy personal life is important for a good professional life. We work with each other to support it. We use an agile process with a lot of influences from the Lean and Kanban world. We use Mingle to run our development process. Everything, OK mostly everything :) is covered by automated tests, so we can change things as needed. We’re all Apple in the office – developers get a MacPro with a nice 30” screen, and a nice 17” MacBook Pro. We deploy on Ubuntu servers. Aeron chairs are cliché, yes; but, very comfy. The environment is chilled out… you can wear shorts and sandals to work… Very flat organization, very non-bureaucratic… nice open spaces (no cubes!). Lunch is brought in on most days! Beer and snacks are always in the fridge. We’re walking distance to the San Antonio Caltrain station (biking distance from the Mountain View Caltrain/VTA lightrail station). What’s in it for you Competitive salaries, and lots of stock-options Cutting edge technology stack Fantastic business opportunity, and early-stage (= great time to join!) Developer #5 – means plenty of influence on foundational architecture and design Smart, fun people to work with Very comfortable, nice office environment OK! So, if you’re interested, email me at a...@runa.com. Thanks for reading! Regards, Amit Rathore, Architect, runa.com --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
