EXPERT TAKE
Somewhat similar products targeting primarily sales force automation have been there since a long time. But EXEED appears to be different in its overall approach, scope and scale. It promises to address all execution-related aspects rather than only automation of transactions.
The potential impact of such products in driving revenues can be very high. The EXEED platform also uses the muchtalked about data analytics in a much simpler and impactful way with day-today actionable insights.
I foresee two key challenges that Applicate would be facing in the near and medium term. First, the adoption of such products can have a longer gestation period, especially from large organisations as it would need them to migrate from their current platform, on which there could be sizable investments.
Second, scaling up such platforms to a sizable number of companies would be challenging for any startup, given the resources and time constraints. Applicate would have to find a cost-effective and efficient deployment model to attract large organisations to consider the advantages of migration and mitigate the cost and time disadvantages.
Also, they should leverage their strength of the first-mover advantage and domain knowledge to establish one unique product from their portfolio at a very high-scale, like Trade GINI, which is quite unique and has a huge potential of a quick scale-up if they can make it available with a ready-to-deploy module at a very low cost on a SaaS model.
As a small company growing very fast, the biggest mistake Applicate can make is on execution. If they can keep executing effectively, they will do very well. Their products are suitable for the global markets so the sky is the only limit.