Sellix was launched out of BETA back in May 2020, the company launched with a mission — a mission to build the future of digital eCommerce — and roughly two years later, they have been able to construct a powerful platform that allows anyone, anywhere to spin up their own digital business without a single line of code.
Sellix hosts and manages every blockchain and cryptocurrency node that is available to merchants. They have 8 (eight) blockchains hosted on dedicated servers through our partner, AWS, along with any and all additional instances to control wallets and clients
From payments to fraud prevention to customization to hosting to feedback, and tickets, Sellix wanted to build out the entire experience of a business that’s interested in selling digital products online. All with small steps to provide a quantum leap for businesses and their customers.
Below we talk to Sellix’s extremely young co-founder about the ups and downs of starting a fairly large Digital company.
E-Crypto News interview with Daniele Servadei
Danielle’s story is interesting and inspirational; the questions cover the following themes;
- Get to know Daniele Servadei
- Surviving the crypto winter
- Sellix-University balance
- Evolution of the Sellix idea
Get to know Daniele Servadei
You have an inspirational story; how did your upbringing influence you, and how much effect has it had on your career so far?
As far as my upbringing is concerned, Quite honestly, going to school in Italy did almost nothing for me. My school was pretty behind in everything tech-related and did not help whatsoever in preparing me for future jobs. The best two influences for me were my dad, who was a software engineer and helped me learn programming languages such as C++ and Python (completely different languages, but I tried both). He started teaching me when I was 13.
The second best influence was the company that I started working for when I was 16, Soluzioni Futura, which formed me in both backend development and solutions architecture (through AWS). Both influences helped me start my own company.
Leading a startup is an opportunity that few people experience; what type of leader are you, and how has the experience been?
I believe that you cannot have a great startup without a great team behind it. You need to have a person in charge of the different sides of the business (customer service, devops, management, marketing) and have really good firms behind you for PR, marketing and legal to follow regulations.
I have a technical background, so I work daily with our developers on both our applications (website, mobile app, api) and our cryptocurrency infrastructure. Even though my role is to organize things all around, it would be a waste not to help our guys with their job since I have the means to.
With the other cofounder, I try to do our best to help the company grow whilst also keeping the best team environment.
The experience has been really fulfilling but also exhausting and stressful sometimes. It’s incredibly hard to join this completely new world without prior knowledge. From learning how to organize people to then having to join calls with lawyers to be sure to follow current laws and regulations both in the crypto world and generally on ecommerce.
How would you explain your company and solution to a 60-year-old baker with limited crypto exposure?
Our goal is to enable virtually anyone to accept cryptocurrencies with ease. You do not have to have any coding knowledge, you do not need to handle anything regarding payments. We do not need your wallet, simply input an address and we send a payout to it. We abstract everything for our merchants.
Taking into consideration all of this, the way I’d explain it to anyone not familiar with our solution, is what we do is connect your customers with you, providing everything you might need. From the platform (which would be like your in-person bakery) to the payment methods (what you have in your bakery is credit cards and cash). We offer credit cards, PayPal, cryptocurrencies and more than 30 other payment methods your customers can choose from. We also offer the lowest fees in the industry and payouts within 24 hours.
Surviving the Crypto Winter
The last year has been tumultuous for the crypto industry; how has the Sellix team managed to survive the crypto winter?
Two things mainly. One, our goal was never to be only a cryptocurrency platform, we wanted to be the best digital goods SaaS ecommerce platform out there whilst at the same time bringing the crypto world to new customers who would be able to access it otherwise. Two, we only support cryptocurrencies we believe in, cryptocurrencies we have a stake in and cryptos that are widely used with innovative blockchain solutions.
How does Sellix plan to survive and continue growing if the situation persists?
We plan on leveraging our SaaS solution whilst at the same time preparing for the new bull run.
Sellix-University Balance
You’re about to start a degree; how will being a student affect your commitment to Sellix?
Sellix is and always will come first. I’m continuing my studies to increase my knowledge in the computer science industry whilst at the same time meeting like-minded people that can for sure improve the things I know. However, my time will always be dedicated to Sellix, which is the priority.
You’re not going to be the average student; how do you see your student experience playing out?
Unfortunately, the vast majority of Italian universities are really, really bad for CS courses. They do not prepare students for the job industry that is out there nor to new solutions, cloud companies like AWS and Azure or simply development on any of the most used languages out there. It is very unfortunate. However, what I’m aiming to do is attend whilst also helping the students there, and, if they have something special, hire them for Sellix as developers, should we find ones with the right knowledge and desire to work.
Considering what you’ve done and achieved, why is a university degree important to you?
Nowadays, having a degree seems like the most important thing in the world. You’re judged based on that and some opportunities are locked behind it. I have no idea what I will be doing in the next 10, 20 or 30 years and I’d hate to be held back by not having a degree.
Evolution of the Sellix Idea
What are some of the barriers plaguing e-commerce and crypto online payments?
What we see from competitors is that they do not focus on digital products and use third party platforms to accept cryptos instead of developing and deploying their own solution. This is absolutely the worst idea I can think of: we should not centralize crypto payment offerings into the big threes of crypto exchanges, but instead work on a decentralized infrastructure with automatized smart contracts like we do. Merchants should have full access to their wallets and payouts.
With over 200,000 businesses registered, Sellix has shown strong performance; how much room for growth do you reckon the business has?
The room for growth in the digital space is almost infinite. It’s a multi billion dollar business yearly and ecommerce is only growing.
How can we expect the industry to grow amid the global economic downturn?
That is an interesting question, no one can say for sure. We will have to see how that pans out whilst trying our best to keep our team and offer modern solutions to businesses, helping them through this downturn.
