From idea in Bulgaria to customers in Canada for 1 year

How a Bulgarian startup climbs to success in a digital interconnected world

The idea of a platform for data analytics for the visitors of Retail chains, now the company ShopUp, was born in the end of 2015. The two founders – Sergi and Ivan – see the opportunity to offer a service to Retailers that is either non-existent or technologically complicated and expensive for using. ShopUp provides its users (real-time) data about the customers’ flow and heatmap in their Retail chains. The platform supplies data for the volume of visitors, trajectory of their movement inside the store, time spent in, preferred places, as well as statistics about new or returning customers. The purpose is to help the management of the stores to take better decisions and to improve their brand and performance.

Who is who?

ShopUp is founded in 2015 from Sergi Sergiev and Ivan Ivanov. Sergi has graduated Executive MBA in Vienna, and his rich professional experience includes work for corporations like IngramMicro, Experian and Coca Cola, as well as work in several startups. He is also the founder of Data Science Society, He mainly focuses on business development, Sales and data analytics.

Ivan is a programmer for more than 15 years and works on the platform functionalities. His experience includes companies like Nokia, Texas Instruments, Qualcomm, where he has worked as a consulted or solution architect.

Technology

“The ShopUp solution is based on developing software for managing hardware devices, through which in an easy and accessible manner one collects anonymous data for the visitors of commercials venues. The collected data are uploaded in SAP HANA, where they are analyzed, processed and visualized,” shared the co-founder Sergi Sergiev.

The entire business logic for aggregating, analyzing and visualizing the data is written on SAP HANA. The advantages of HANA as a database are mainly scalability and support, and of XS as a platform – all calculations are executed in-memory, which allows fast results with no big data traffic.

The sensors, which collect the data, are written on C, and the analysis and data modeling are written on Python.

First steps

Sergi hears for the first time for HCP Challenge from a friend, who works in SAP Romania. When they understand that the Challenge is being run again, they decide to participate. “It is compelling to choose a competition, where the jury is interesting and contains innovators. That way, participating would bring you also validation of your idea or product,” says Sergi.

For less than a month the team has a prototype of its idea. “We got to work and for a short time we achieved huge progress. I thought the work on the prototype will take us months, but after the second week, we already hard a working version. It’s true that most things were based on open-source, but we had a prototype, which showed we had a working base technology. From there, the rest was building on and creating a product, shaped to the needs of our customers”.

One of the advantages, highlighted by Ivan, is utilizing the SAP HANA platform – “SAP supply demo accounts, so you can use their libraries and build an application. You can quickly turn an idea into a product and demonstrate that it works, and then with the upgrades to build into a complete product.”

The big dreams

Sergi remembers with nostalgia: “we believed a lot in the idea, but nevertheless we were really surprised to be one of the winners. This was one of those moments, when you truly understand it is worth it to work on this product.” A year later ShopUp already presented on SAP Forums in Hungary and Czech Republic, and three more are upcoming in Romania, Serbia and Bulgaria with the help of SAP. “We already showcased in Prague and Budapest, now we have 3 more. We made first contacts, we met the local SAP sales teams. The audience in Prague and Budapest showed real interest to ShopUp,” shares Sergi.

One of the reasons for participating in general, besides the quick idea validation and the local marketing support, is the availability of taking the journey and pitching to the SAP customer base. For Sergi “part of the motivation is the support you are receiving early on. The SAP program is advantageous in its availability, as the SAP store is accessible and not overridden with thousands of other applications, where you can gain competitive advantage and access to real customers. There are more than 300 000 SAP customers globally.”

ShopUp exists the validation stage and already has big customers like Mr. Bricolage and Debenhams, who trusted the service, and the co-founders are facing the opportunity of closing another big deal. They are dealing with a big Canadian company, which has more than 30 years of experience and over 150 installations in the world for big malls management and customer traffic. They believe that together they can create a unique product, combining the two technologies, which will supply complete information for the customers, their traffic, behavior and all. In October ShopUp starts a pilot project in one of their malls in Toronto, and after successfully completing it is planned to have access for installing the platform in the other 30 malls.

Their message

Both are adamant that success lays in having a few light motives – “good idea, great team, persistence, a lot of work and never stop experimenting – this is our recipe for starting a business!”.

Author: Stelyana Louisova
Vision: Personal archive