Welcome to a conversation with Moritz Weistbodt, CEO and Founder of Alaiko Capital, a leading logistics and fulfillment-as-a-service platform. Alaiko Capital enables e-commerce brands, especially SMEs, to scale their operations seamlessly. It provides online shops with access to state-of-the-art warehousing, operational excellence, and automated process control through the Alaiko Logistics Operating System®
Founded in 2020, Alaiko’s founders recognized the growing demands of the e-commerce landscape. Today, we explore Moritz’s journey, as he offers insights into Alaiko’s vision and the innovative strides the company is making in the e-commerce sector. He also discusses the challenges and the future direction of Alaiko in this rapidly evolving digital marketplace.
Can you start by giving us a brief overview of your entrepreneurial journey and how it led you to co-found Alaiko?
My Co-Founder Gabriel Thomalla and I have known each other since university. We then worked together scaling a food delivery company and connected with entrepreneurship. After that, we went on to found Kaia Health – which became a leading e-health platform. With our next entrepreneurial endeavour, a direct-to-consumer (DTC) brand, we came in touch with complex logistical challenges in the e-commerce space. That ultimately led us to start Alaiko. We are keen on solving the problems that we have experienced closely ourselves.
Can you walk us through your thought process when you first identified the gaps in the e-commerce logistics sector? What inspired you to take the entrepreneurial leap with Alaiko?
With a DTC e-commerce brand, we experienced the many friction points that e-commerce shops face: many processes were inefficient and above all intransparent. Though we found great solution providers, they were all isolated from one another and each solved one particular problem. It felt disjointed and led to problems when things inevitably fell between the cracks. Logistics in particular was a huge black box with a lot of pain points and manual, slow work. Many processes of logistics service providers were outdated and not digitized. All of this meant that the opportunities to sell and scale quickly were not there. These challenges needed to be solved – that’s why we founded Alaiko. It very quickly became apparent that a tech-focused end-to-end service would be the best way to resolve and remove these issues from the process, and that automation could change an industry for the better.
What does Alaiko do, and why do you think it’s relevant and timely in the present context?
Alaiko is a tech-driven fulfilment provider for DTC e-commerce brands. Fulfilment is a competitive advantage and vital to a business’s success. What differentiates Alaiko from competitors is our capacity to provide a holistic, Amazon-like, end-to-end e-commerce fulfilment solution that brings together all important stakeholders of a shop’s fulfilment process through technology. While other fulfilment providers simply take over the logistics of a store, Alaiko offers a comprehensive model based on three pillars:
- A state-of-the-art warehousing and logistics network that ensures reliability, flexibility, and state-of-the-art tech and automation.
- Alaiko Logistics Operating System® – an innovative platform that addresses the most common challenges for eCommerce customer service and operations. It also provides numerous tools and automation to scale fulfilment and logistics processes more efficiently. The combination of streamlined logistics and our cutting-edge operations platform improves what matters most: The customer experience. With extensive track and trace options, a return portal, and automation like address correction, shops can offer their customers self-service and a positive, smooth post-purchase experience.
- The experts that shops have at their side. Logistics is a people business as well. We are committed to providing an A+ service level, including a dedicated account manager as well as access to product development, onboarding, training, and consulting.
Informed by our own experience, we realized that there are specific friction points that are expensive, slow, and difficult to manage – especially if you’re a fast-growing business. So, we identified these points of friction and used technology to resolve them.
The best thing about using technology, robotics, and automation is that they are not affected by growth in the same way a traditional fulfilment setup would be. For instance, much of customer service is answering questions about the status of orders – for a rapidly scaling business, answering all of these questions would be time-consuming. But thanks to automated messaging and live tracking, customers don’t need to turn to the customer service team, reducing workload and maximizing customer convenience. We aim to create happy moments for all parties: warehouses have better processes, shops can concentrate fully on their core business again, while shoppers benefit from a seamless, first-class shopping experience – now, that is more important than ever.
What were some of the initial challenges you faced when starting Alaiko, and how did you overcome them?
The obvious challenge is that we started Alaiko in April 2020, which was an unnerving time for all businesses – especially those that hadn’t launched yet. But, for us as a service that facilitates e-commerce, we had better odds and were able to hit the ground running.
I guess more broadly, one of the biggest initial challenges is one that many businesses face which is finding the right partners to realize your vision. We wanted to find infrastructure partners and warehouses that could meet our demands for digitalization and high-level service. For us, this was not something that we would compromise on because, without great partners, we couldn’t deliver a cutting-edge service. Today, we have established a strong network of partners internationally, including in the UK.
Alaiko has grown substantially since its inception in 2020, securing over €27 million. What is the most crucial decision you’ve had to make that positively impacted Alaiko’s ability to enable businesses to grow?
What was immensely important for the business was hiring the right people right from the beginning. We hired team members that we could trust with responsibility right from the start in order to scale ourselves as founders (which is very challenging) and also with whom it’s a lot of fun to work.
Looking back, is there anything you would have done differently in your entrepreneurial journey with Alaiko?
The initial stages of scaling our team and operations coincided with the beginning of COVID-19 – this was a double-edged sword. On the one hand, we benefited from the strong growth of the e-commerce market. At the same time, we had to quickly learn how to deal with peaks in shipping volumes and prepare ourselves accordingly (e.g. due to promotions by our customers), really putting our operational and server capacities to the test.
As far as the team is concerned, we at Alaiko are proud of our company culture, which relies heavily on personal relationships between colleagues. Having to send our team to work from home because of the lockdown is something I would have liked to have avoided, especially during our starting phase.
What key lessons have you learned about growing a business in a competitive market?
Especially in a competitive market, it is extremely important to always keep an eye on market developments and anticipate them early on as well. This allows the company to pivot and adapt. Choosing a market that is big enough for several companies to grow in also is important. And last but not least – and this might sound strange: Talk to your competitors. Competing doesn’t mean you can’t get along – that’s important as competitive markets may consolidate eventually.
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve received as an entrepreneur, and how has it guided you?
There is a great quote: “Get uncomfortably close to your audience”. And that is what matters. This is the only way to develop a product that meets the needs of your target group. And that’s the only way to make it better and better: with constant feedback from your customers.
Based on your own experiences, could you identify the top three factors you believe are essential for a startup to thrive in today’s competitive landscape?
- Now more important than ever: it is very important to balance growth and cost efficiency while scaling your business.
- Don’t be afraid to make tough decisions to increase focus on your main growth levers.
- Don’t be discouraged by pushbacks – that’s just something that comes with building a start-up and working in a competitive market.
