We came across a wine app, which allows you to scan the label of the wine and see customers ratings and reviews of the wine, and thought, well, why can't you have your wine delivered? That idea evolved to why just wine, what about alcohol? 

I think the tools available today are much different. In 2020 there are a ton of off-the shelf-solutions you can get for e-commerce websites, apps, and end-to-end management software. The barriers to entry are a lot lower than they used to be and there are fewer raw materials that an entrepreneur really needs to start an e-commerce business today.

You need to start by asking what is the consumer insight? Or what is the problem that you're trying to solve? In our case, as I said to you earlier, who hasn't wanted to press a button and have drinks magically appear?

With any e-commerce business, one of the biggest challenges is trying to scale a business. You need funding to scale and margins are normally quite low in e-commerce. We all know the stories of some of the biggest e-commerce players in the world, the Amazons and Ubers of the world, who have ran for 5-10-15 years at massive losses.

I think it's super important. We all know mobile penetration or smartphone penetration, not just in South Africa but globally, is really high. People are spending more screen time on their phones than they are on a desktop, as an example. The second part is, when you're providing a shopping experience, not just a browsing experience, a shopping experience, the more you can make that shopper experience super user-friendly, super-easy and seamless, the more stickiness your product will have.

E-commerce really just gives you an online store. That's all it really is. I think today, in a COVID world, we've become far more acutely aware of how important that is, because people are wanting to go less to the store. They want to stay safe in their homes. They want to get things delivered to their house. E-commerce has become far more important but that doesn't mean that every business needs it.

My co-founder and I both come from corporate backgrounds. We both spent eight to 10 years working at some of the biggest FMCGs (fast-moving consumer goods) and tech companies in the world. That allowed us to hone our skill sets in very well and we could apply a lot of the principles we had learned from big corporate into our startup. We focused on the right areas upfront.

We've had to learn a lot of hard lessons, partly because we launched slightly before the e-commerce trend took off, especially mobile apps and on-demand e-commerce. As an example, when we first started we had no logistics solution, so we built the app and got one bottle store to say, "Hey, we'll partner with you".

The first thing is, just do it.

I think it's a super exciting space to be in. In the current tough economic environment, e-commerce has a role to play, not just to help keep people safe in their homes, but to help stimulate growth in the economy, to help create more jobs.