How The Pandemic Underscores The Digital-First Startup Strategy

Each organization laid out its own path to reconcile with the sudden impacts of the pandemic earlier last year.

For larger firms, investment in digital-first solutions took on a new priority to promote business continuity while professionals worked from home. For smaller firms, although resources were limited, a greater sense of agility allowed many businesses to pivot business models or adjust existing workflows to support teams working from home.

Regardless of which strategy an organization took, nearly every firm experienced disruption of some kind. Yet for sleep supplement and coaching eCommerce company Proper, the experience of wading through the pandemic was far from typical.

That’s because the company was born in the midst of the pandemic, having launched last summer. Speaking with PYMNTS, Kamiu Lee, who is co-founder, chief operating officer and also heads financials for Proper, explained how the market climate only reinforced existing digital-first strategies for the young company.

“Proper is in the unique situation in the sense that we launched in the midst of the pandemic,” she explained. “We didn’t have much of a pre-pandemic view — we launched after the pandemic was already underway.”

Supply Chain Volatility

Although for some new companies and startups — particularly those in brick-and-mortar industries like the restaurant sector — the pandemic likely thwarted, or at least redirected, launch strategies, Proper’s foundation as a digital-first commerce organization meant that its rollout plans remained more or less on course.

That’s because the company made decisions from the get-go to embrace the kinds of technologies and paradigms that are now key to business continuity. One of those is to support a remote workforce, and while Lee said Proper had plans to embrace the work-from-home strategy, the pandemic reinforced that plan.

“We were able to hire, recruit and onboard folks together effectively, efficiently and remotely, just as well as we would have if we were in an office together,” she said, noting that through the adoption of third-party FinTechs, a range of other back-office processes like accounts payable (AP) were also built on a digital-first approach.

The decision of a startup to build its foundation on digital and remote working solutions may signal the “new normal” of how businesses of all sizes, ages and industries will choose to operate in a post-pandemic market. Indeed, the virtualization of the enterprise has proven to promote resiliency through market volatility today, which many firms will more than likely choose to carry into a post-pandemic world.

One of the biggest hurdles for an eCommerce business such as Proper, however, does not involve operations within the enterprise, but rather the impacts of supply chain disruptions that are largely outside of the company’s control.

“eCommerce businesses across the board, in all different industries, have seen delays — even eCommerce organizations as big as Amazon,” said Lee.

A Forward-Looking Outlook

While managing potential supply chain disruptions like late shipments may be outside the control of any company, embracing real-time data analytics can be a useful tool in being able to more quickly and effectively respond to disruption.

An even bigger opportunity for Proper is in wielding real-time analytics of customer behavior to guide future financial strategies. Because it offers both a one-time purchase and a subscription sales model, Proper is continually aggregating data on buyer habits like repeat purchases and retention.

Taking that insight and positioning it in the context of cash flow creates an “intersection of live data for the business” that raises visibility into understanding and guiding future predictions in the long term, Lee noted.

As the head of financials at Proper, Lee said she views her role as vital to the success of the startup. As a venture-backed company (the firm announced a $9.5 million investment at the time of its launch, with funding led by Snoop Dogg’s Casa Verde), managing financials is critical to the overall growth strategy of the company.

“We have our expectations of where the business is going to go, and we’re making sure that, with limited resources, we’re allocating those resources appropriately to the right projects to get the outcomes that we’re looking to get, from a financial perspective,” she said. “In my mind, financials are the ultimate key part of the KPIs.”