Designed to Make Retailers Love You

Interested in starting your own entrepreneurial journey but unsure what to expect? Then read up on our interview with Dale Williams, Co-Founder of SafeDigit, located in Vancouver, BC, Canada.

What's your business, and who are your customers?

SafeDigit's logistics integration platform is helping couriers win and retain merchants by integrating their delivery service with the eCommerce platforms their customers live in. With SafeDigit, delivery services can quickly launch their own apps on Shopify's marketplace as well as dozens of other eCommerce platforms. We manage all the technical work for them long-term.

Tell us about yourself

I was previously the 1st employee and CRO of a last-mile software platform called Routific. Delivery businesses would often ask us to help them integrate with Shopify and other eCommerce platforms — it just didn't make sense for them to take the focus off their core business and build and manage it themselves. Routific even released its own Shopify app, which was a nightmare to build and maintain. Everyone I spoke with in last-mile logistics seemed to want the exact same thing from a Shopify app. It was pretty obvious that if a company could pre-build and manage these apps and plugins for Shopify, WooCommerce, Wix, and more, they'd be curing a migraine for a lot of people. So I'm motivated because it was a pain I experienced myself and heard others bring up over and over — and now I can actually fix it.

What's your biggest accomplishment as a business owner?

We raised a $1.2M pre-seed right after the venture capital market had started collapsing in tech. Investors were getting very hesitant to spend capital. When I speak to other founders raising money in this new atmosphere, it's clear that we were very fortunate to be able to start our business with this level of financial lift in a down market.

What's one of the hardest things that comes with being a business owner?

My brain is always thinking about the business in the background. When I worked for others, I could generally clock out and be present in my personal life. But once the success of your business truly relies on you, the stakes feel higher — and so the new normal is constantly catching yourself reflecting on business problems, ideas, and tasks in your downtime. The hard part is learning to manage it so that it's useful and not sapping your energy.

What are the top tips you'd give to anyone looking to start, run and grow a business today?

Don't overanalyze before you start. Get started, and analyze while you're out in the field. You're much more likely to fail if you don't foster a bias toward action.
Spend more energy finding the right people to join you. It will absolutely take you a few steps backward if you hire or partner poorly and have to reset. Use your bias toward action to meet more potential team members and/or experiment with working with more partners. I "dated" a co-founder a lot before I found the right one.
Start with the problem. This gets repeated a lot in the startup world, but it falls on deaf ears. I'm constantly meeting founders who start with a solution and hit a wall very early on when no one cares to buy it. People pay you to solve problems, and problems have varying levels of importance to them. Make sure your market cares a lot about having it solved and that the solution you happened to think of is also the solution that makes sense to them.

Where can people find you and your business?

Website: https://www.safedigit.io/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dale-williams-18907729/

If you like what you've read here and have your own story as a solo or small business entrepreneur that you'd like to share, then please answer these interview questions. We'd love to feature your journey on these pages.

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