A check-in with the co-founder of Elliot, a 'no code' e-commerce platform that's

gearing up for a public launch on 18th June.

A lot of stores have had to abandon their physical presence and are now selling
online. How many of Elliot's customers are first timers?
The majority. That's just the nature of the space we operate in – the ‘no-to-low-
code’ space. But yeah, with what's happening with Covid, we've seen businesses that
were brick-and-mortar now pivoting online and we’ve released features to support
them, especially in hospitality. Restaurants are coming to us wanting to sell
things – we’ve got a feature for local pick-up and delivery along with radius pick-
up, for instance.

What's the deal with Elliot’s unusual marketing?

That stems from the camaraderie we have as co-founders – me, Marco and Sergio – and
our experience working in Saas, e-commerce, fashion and tech over the years. Tech
just feels square, serious, boring and faceless. We wanted Elliot to feel human,
relevant and up to date with how internet culture works.

You guys handle cross-border shipping and nitty gritty logistics. Is that a
nightmare at the moment?
Not necessarily. Sergio's [Elliot’s CEO, Sergio Villasenor] background over the
last decade was building out cross-border functionality and supply chain tech for
enterprise-level businesses. He took all of that knowledge and just sort of
productised it into Elliott – things like being globally compliant country by
country, being secure from a privacy standpoint, being able to pull in carrier data
from different shipping carrier networks, giving you duties and taxes auto-
calculated, being localised in terms of currency and language, etc. Those are
normally different apps and tools that you pay monthly subscriptions for to plug-in
to your existing store. What you get is a sort of patchwork which, when you need to
do something, you need to install another app. We wanted to remove all that
friction – that’s stuff we've just built out of the box.

What have you learned in the last few months?

Having empathy for the people on your team and the people you're selling to is
something you can forget about – but it's really important. This is just a weird,
strange time for literally everybody. And so it's easy to take offence or see
things from the wrong perspective. Another thing is that you don't need to have
your shit figured out today. You know, building something really takes time. It's
hard to see the forest for the trees, right? When you're above it, when you're
outside of it, you can obviously see how different things are pieced togethe