Benjamin Yee, Founder & CEO
Are you struggling with managing your inventory using spreadsheets, pen and paper, or a convoluted software package?
EMERGE App was born out of my frustration dealing with stock inaccuracies, endless paperwork and accounting mayhem when I ran a custom t-shirt printing business back in 2011.
“Surely life could be simpler, faster and more interesting?” I thought to myself one day, heaving under the burden of solving one issue after another. Customers weren’t billed because invoices were literally all over the place, they had far too generous credit terms, and my t-shirts were overstocked!
I looked for a software solution to fix all this. I tried one solution after another. For those that I didn’t try, they were far too expensive or complicated for a small business like mine. I didn’t have time for a long software implementation project. / Benjamin Yee, Founder & CEO
More from the CEO of EMERGE App! Interview with Benjamin Yee.
Q: Tell us about your company and about your product. When did the company start?
A: A complete system for growing business dealing with traditional offline wholesale, distribution & online e-commerce sales. EMERGE App full suite of features manages your entire operation from multi-channel sales to purchasing, product, inventory & simple accounting management.
Company was started back in 2010.
Read more on our story: http://emergeapp.net/our-story/
Q: What inspired you to start this venture?
A: Estimated 95% of product wholesale & trading company globally are using spreadsheets, hardcopy paperwork & memory (yes, memory) to manage their orders, inventory & billings. This process is extremely unproductive and especially if the team is small. This man-hours loss instead should be focussed on sales related activities to grow the business.
27 years old entrepreneur Benjamin Yee, wants to help this gigantic industry adopt software at a much faster rate. Ben and his team developed a cloud solution: EMERGE App, focused on user-friendless, affordability & flexibility. For traders not keeping stocks, keeping partial stocks or selling entirely from stocks, simplicity is the key to disrupting in this industry.
Benjamin started EMERGE App after failing to find a suitable solution online for his T-shirt business he started during Polytechnic School days. He believes if this problem if faced by him, millions of entrepreneurs worldwide will face it too. Developing EMERGE App was not an overnight thing, and he and his team met at least 150 product wholesale & trading companies around the region to understand their pains before launching the App. Also, while creating EMERGE App, they also implemented the software as customised enterprise solutions for companies that had actual inventory and order management issues. This experience was also translated making EMERGE App as it is today: a tried and tested problem solver.
A cornerstone of EMERGE App was when 2 employees decided invest their own money into the company. EMERGE App is also backed by venture funding, and leading investors include TNF Ventures & 21 Black Partners.
Q: Tell us about your journey so far .What is the current team size, revenues and in how many cities have you expanded to ? (Please feel free to elaborate as much as you can).
A: The journey so far has been amazing, with great support from both our customers and our investors. Just read the reviews we have at Getapp, Capterra or FinanceOnline, and you will realize that we have a good product that is actually solving our customer’s issues out there in their business operations. We are very proud of our product and the progress we have achieved so far, and we want to spread the word and make EMERGE available to more small and medium businesses out there. We have an awesome team of 20 spread across 4 countries, namely Singapore, Vietnam, China and India.
We have customers all over the globe. Currently we have users from 5 continents of the world. We are actively serving about 100 companies worldwide, with most clients coming from the US and Europe.
We cater to companies from a diverse range of industries, ranging from healthcare, tooling systems, jewelry to the food and beverage industry.
Q: How is your product different and unique? What’s the vision?
А: EMERGE App focuses on companies that are growing (3-10 employees) and selling both online and offline will find it difficult or near impossible to find a complete solution for their inventory and order processing needs. Our user access control, order, purchasing tools & pricing structure puts EMERGE App above our competitors.
The SaaS for ecommerce inventory management focus purely on the online order & fulfilment workflow where else the traditional software companies selling on-premise ERP / inventory management solutions are way too costly for our target customers.
