Startup Interview with Edris Bemanian, Engage3 CEO

HackerNoon Reporter: Please tell us briefly about your background.

I’ve worked with, for, in, and around start-ups my whole life. As it turns out, I’ve unintentionally found myself at the intersection between entrepreneurship and retail for my last 3 gigs. More recently, I’ve been a part of growing the team at Engage3 for the last 8 years, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

What's your startup called? And in a sentence or two, what does it do?

Engage3 will transform the way that products are bought and sold by bringing human values into pricing decisions, creating positive outcomes for consumers, retailers, and brands alike.

Today, we help retailers and brands profitably grow revenue and drive store trips by tracking and optimizing their price image.

What is the origin story?

Our two founders, Ken & Tim Ouimet, grew up collecting pricing data in their parent's company, Comparative Prices International. So before they were 10 years old, they traveled across Canada collecting data from stores and learning the business.

While working on his Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics, Ken realized that he could apply the models he was learning about to retail pricing. So he and Tim (who had sold his successful pool cleaning business to help fund the new start-up) founded Khimetrics. Khimetrics was the very first retail price optimization company in the world. They were incredibly successful and were able to consistently drive 1% of sales to the bottom line, doubling the net profits of their retail customers. They were acquired by SAP in 2006.

After a few years with SAP, they left and founded Engage3 to create a pricing platform that would unlock transformative business models via personalized pricing, which brings us to where we are today!

What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem?

I don’t think you will find a more committed team out there. Our team has been to hell and back as we underwent an incredibly challenging pivot back in 2016 from a B2C to a B2B business model. As a result, our team built a lot of grit. And that grit has persevered even as we’ve grown. Although we’ve been recognized by Inc. Magazine as one of their fastest-growing companies five times, our team has never let that go to their heads.

We’re the ones to solve this problem because we have incredibly deep domain expertise, we are committed to an innovation roadmap and have products and patents that reflect this, and we are already working with many of the most innovative companies and investors in the world, which means we get fantastic collaboration and input on our roadmap.

If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing?

If I wasn’t working on another start-up, I would most likely be working on getting a fantasy novel manuscript I finished with my friends in college published. It needs a lot of work :)

At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your core metrics?

The lifetime value of our customers. We have an incredibly high retention rate, and our customers are growing with us, so it’s a key metric for our team and our investors.

What’s most exciting about your traction to date?

I’ve been impressed by how effectively our team has been able to solve incredibly complex data science problems. It’s led to us working with 6 of the top 10 retailers in North America and a fantastic growth rate over the last 5 years. And we have no reason to slow down now.

What technologies are you currently most excited about, and most worried about? And why?

We are just scratching the surface of what is possible. From an R&D perspective, we’re further incorporating the use of deep nets, reinforcement learning, NLP, and sampling theory, etc., into our products to solve problems like predicting inflation, reverse-engineering pricing strategies, understanding psychological thresholds around different prices, etc. It really speaks to the econ nerd in me.

What drew you to get published on HackerNoon? What do you like most about our platform?

It’s a fresh take, approach, and style to the content. There are SO many sources out there of this information, and we’re all getting overloaded all the time. HackerNoon has figured out how to make the content fun & engaging vs. feeling like a job in and of itself.

What advice would you give to the 21-year-old version of yourself?

Focus, prioritize, block and tackle. Focus, prioritize, block and tackle. Focus, prioritize, block and tackle. I cannot say it enough.

What is something surprising you've learned this year that your contemporaries would benefit from knowing?

Asking for help does not make you weak or ineffective. Embrace the vulnerability, bring people in, and learn.