Hey, thanks for tuning in to another Partner Interview at EcomBalance. At EcomBalance, we’re all about creating win-win partnerships where we are able to grow with other companies in the eCommerce space.
In this exclusive interview, we interview Chad Rubin from Profasee. Profasee helps Amazon brands predict the perfect price for every product by analyzing hundreds of real-time data points through dynamic pricing.
Chad Rubin builds e-commerce businesses and is a top 250 Amazon seller. Fresh out of college and Wall Street, he took his family vacuum business online and built his own direct-to-consumer e-commerce business called Crucial Vacuum. After growing it from 0 to $20 million dollar valuation in 7 years, he co-founded Skubana with DJ Kunovac and built one of the industry’s hottest operational softwares. Skubana is the only tool you’ll ever need to manage and accelerate the growth of your e-commerce business. It is beautiful, intelligent, highly intuitive and incorporates every feature imaginable to drive your future success.
His latest venture, Profasee, helps Amazon brands predict the perfect price for every product by analyzing hundreds of real-time data points through dynamic pricing. This is Chad’s story, and his inspiration to keep fueling his passion.
We hope that you enjoy the interview and that it brings value to you as an eCommerce business owner.
Connor: Hey Chad, thanks for taking the time to chat with us here. We love getting to know our partners better so that our community can benefit from what our partners are offering and doing in the industry. To get started, can you give us a high level overview of Profasee and how it got started?
Chad: So after the sale of Skubana, I went back to start focusing on my eCommerce business, Think Crucial. With that business, we have 550 private label SKUs and 1000 listings on Amazon, and started to find a way out of the profit compression that we’re experiencing and the entire industry is experiencing on a macro-level given all the rising costs. The lever that’s not being leveraged right now is pricing. So we started experimenting with that.
Today, power players like Amazon, Expedia, Uber, and global hedge funds use dynamic pricing to optimize every penny of profit. We want to give Amazon brands that very same superpower. Since Amazon shoppers leave behind billions of clues about their behaviors, preferences, and searches, Profasee’s AI analyzes these data points in real-time, combining machine learning, statistical science and behavioral economics to pinpoint the optimal price.
Connor: That’s awesome! Can you dive a bit more into the products and services that you offer to help with data management? I’m sure our audience would love to know exactly what problems you could solve for them.
Chad: Our dynamic pricing platform enables Amazon brands to predict the perfect price for every product at each precise moment.
The result? Amazon brands can optimize their revenue and improve profit contribution – automatically. Our algorithms take into account everything from search performance to seasonality to ensure you’re winning the search results page, and the sales. And all at a price primed to capture the most profits possible.
Connor: Jumping off of that…if there was one problem you’d say that Profasee solves best for your clients, what would it be? Why?
Chad: Amazon has allowed merchants to compete for the buy box on their third-party marketplace for decades. With the era of direct-to-consumer brands and accessibility to Amazon’s marketplace, brands have risen at an unprecedented scale. With Amazon’s unlimited product shelf space and the sheer number of data points that would need to be processed, brands have struggled to effectively price their products, relying on manual, unreliable data and disjointed processes. These brands are typically faced with a “black box” of consumer behavior and a sea of competitors, unsure how to optimally price their products most effectively.
For most brands, finding a price means manually analyzing market pricing and competitive positioning. And then just sticking with it. But Amazon is an incredibly dynamic platform that changes every second. In a perfect world, these sellers would be optimizing their prices on a daily basis. With massive catalogs + unsophisticated tech, they struggle to grow their brands. Rising labor and supply chain costs are putting pressure on margin opportunity.
We help Amazon brands seeking a force multiplier to aid in EBITDA margin expansion. Even the most sophisticated brands struggle with foundational questions like “Are we priced correctly?” or “Are we leaving money on the table?” Pricing is the single largest lever that is not being leveraged. The complex questions we need to answer to improve price — are we priced to perfection, and how can we adjust price without sacrificing best sellers rank — are not being solved. In an inefficient marketplace like Amazon, there are price arbitrage opportunities everywhere.
Connor: As the company continues to grow over the next year, what are your plans for expansion? Any new products or offerings or enhancements to your current products?
Chad: We are showing incredible results with our clients right now, on average roughly 10-12% profit lift. Over time, this will improve even more as we add features and variables that can improve our machine learning model’s performance.
Connor: And how specifically would you say that Profasee and your team is different from other similar businesses in the industry?
Chad: Traditional Amazon repricing solutions are solely focused on optimizing the buy box. They are designed for resellers and are only focused on competing for the Amazon Buy Box. Leave those old school Amazon repricers in the past. Today, the real sales battle happens well before the customer clicks on your product – the Amazon search results page. If you’re not succeeding on the search results page, you can’t win at all. By aggregating and analyzing billions of external data points like competitive dynamics, cost conditions, seasonality, holidays, Amazon listing, and traffic data, Profasee’s AI can react to changes in the market with precision, helping users predict the perfect pricing strategies in real-time, enabling users to win the search results page, and ultimately, the sales.
Connor: What made you decide to get involved in the software space? What’s your starting eCommerce story? From what we’ve found, a lot of business owners in the space have fun stories of how they first started…
Chad: I got fired from my job on Wall Street, where I covered internet stocks. Then I started selling on Amazon after I discovered the marketplace and how powerful it was. Solving problems, as a multi-channel retailer, you needed a software. Yet there was nothing on the market that could support my business. There are a lot of software promising you the best of both worlds, but I found them under-delivering, so I decided to build a software not only for myself, but for other sellers as well.
Connor: Love it! Talking more about the eCommerce industry, where do you see it going in the next 1-2 years? Any unique predictions that you could share?
Chad: Rise of the algorithmic brand.
Connor: Giving you an open mic for a minute, what is something you’d want the EcomBalance audience to hear?
Chad: Getting your books in order with Ecombalance gives you a great view of gross profit, net profitability, and cash flow. Profasee helps improve and maximize those fundamentals in an automated fashion.
Connor: Changing gears a little bit…When it comes to bookkeeping and accounting, what do you think the biggest pain points for business owners are? Feel free to speak from personal experience as well.
Chad: Accuracy is a large problem in the bookkeeping and accounting space.
The delay in receiving the financials. By the time you get the previous month’s numbers, you’re already half-way into the following month. So if you needed to take corrective action, your lagging a bit.
Connor: As we close this out, I just have one more question. Where is the best place to find and follow you and the company online? Also, if you have one, is there any special offer that you’ll be offering to the community today?
Chad: You can follow along at:
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/itschadrubin/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/itschadrubin
You can check Profasee’s socials:
Website: https://profasee.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profasee
Twitter: https://twitter.com/theeprofasee
