With that in mind, we’re all looking forward to attending the Institute of Financial Operations’ Fusion event in Nashville Texas from May 13th to 17th.

You can find us on Booth #222, where we’ll be ready and waiting to tell you all about Tradeshift, how to get started with it in your business and how the power of the network opens the door to advanced features like Instant Payments.

We’ll also be giving away a set of Bose headphones – we know how important it is for those in the financial sector to get the soundtrack right when really cracking on with work.

In their words:

“Fusion is our premiere event with 1,700+ attendees and five days of breakout sessions, thought-leader sessions, keynotes, and networking opportunities covering the full spectrum of financial operations, including AP, AR, automation, and procure-to-pay and ECM. Peer-driven learning featuring some of the brightest minds in the industry provides you with the insight, inspiration, and know-how to turn ideas into ROI.

The exhibit hall is packed with technology and solution providers ready to share their expertise. Fusion empowers the financial operations professional with personal attention, customized programming, and the ability to really connect with other attendees and speakers.”

Look forward to seeing you soon! 

We’re inviting Tradeshift users and other small businesses to a meetup in our brand spanking new office for beers and pizza. You’ll meet other small businesses and meet fellow Tradeshifters.

We’re all about free online invoicing and an are on a mission to network power businesses. Sounds interesting? Then we hope to see you. Simply register here.

#ShiftHappens

With that in mind, this weekend we’ll be at the International Supply Management Conference and Educational Exhibit (ISM) in Baltimore. It’s the Institute for Supply Management’s 97th annual conference and remains the place to be seen in the industry.

We’ll be out in force and the team will be demoing all the latest Tradeshift products including CloudScan and Instant Payments. Let us know if you’re going to be in the area and tweet or come and see us at stand 1016.

We’re also going to be giving away a set of Bose headphones – so if all of this has sounded pretty good to you so far, just imagine the treat for your ears if you bring those home too…

But what exactly is Tradeshift’s business model and how does a free B2B business network make money? And more importantly, how does it help your business model?

1. Create a network and experience that people want to use

Think about Apple’s App Store, Skype or Facebook. These are all tools that people take pleasure in using because they generate enormous value.

At Tradeshift, we want to connect every company on earth and help them do business more easily. The value of that network has the potential to be an order of magnitude more efficient and useful than the systems that went before it – just look at solutions like Tradeshift Instant Payments and how that solves cash flow problems or Tradeshift CloudScan and its ability to make 100% paperless e-invoicing a reality for all.

But once the network is complete, it also opens the door for anyone to make apps that run across the network and make peoples’ lives better in the same way. See a problem with the ways businesses interact? Solve it through Tradeshift.

The second aspect of this is that people will only share Tradeshift and encourage those they work with to adopt it if they are truly delighted by their experience using it. Most business software today is horribly broken and it’s time to change that – what comes next?

So if we want to build this network and help bring its value to the world, we have to make the best damn tool you’re ever going to see. Not just one that makes your life easier but one that makes you want to change the world with us.

This is a key first step in our business model.

2. Help Enterprises hit the ground running with Tradeshift

When you’re a growing supplier, setting up Tradeshift is very, very easy. Click here and see for yourself.

But if you’re an enterprise like the NHS and Kuehne + Nagel who has to handle hundreds of thousands of suppliers through Tradeshift, we can offer a helping hand through our knowledge of the system and experience helping others get up and running with their own partners.

Many other solutions revolving around charging the suppliers, we don’t get that and don’t agree with it. For suppliers, Tradeshift will provide free e-invoicing forever.

We believe e-invoicing has always suffered because current providers make e-invoicing platforms expensive or complicated to use. Our business model will only work if Tradeshift works for you, your business and your suppliers. Getting them onboard is crucial for us and it’s crucial for you too.

3. Provide added value

So, as you have seen, we have shaken up the entire invoicing world by offering free invoicing. But free never made anyone any money! We know that, as great as Tradeshift is, larger companies with complex financing systems will want to tap into the power of Tradeshift and integrate it into workflows and processes.

And we’re delighted that companies want to do this. Because we’ve made it so easy for larger businesses to get all their suppliers using Tradeshift, if they then want further functionality then we merely charge them a small flat rate fee to access our cloud platform. Unlike many of our competitors we don’t charge you on a per-transaction basis. We don’t charge set up fees either, and we don’t believe in making things complicated.

Another way we can add value to bigger companies is by offering access to our open APIs. We already have a number of apps – some free, some at a small cost – that allow you to add extra functionality. We’d also encourage you to build your own apps or get us to build custom, bespoke apps for your company too.

Helping you helps us all

So hopefully this gives you a bit more insight into how our business model works. We don’t believe in the tactic used by many other startups where you get something free for a while and then have to charge for it.

We believe in giving you a great free service and then, when you realise how awesome it is, giving you the option to add extra value at a small cost.

And it seems to be a business model that is working. Not only are we attracting more and more investors for Tradeshift, we are seeing businesses flocking to use the service.

We are hiring more and more employees and expanding our offices so that we can continue to innovate and provide all our customers – new and old – with the very best product that serves all their needs.

If you have any ideas for future services or features, I’d really encourage you to get in touch.

In the following video our CCO Christian Hjorth explains more about the Tradeshift Business Model.

I find it ironic that we are currently obsessed with how we pay for goods. Take for example Square, Google Wallet, Mobile, NFC, etc. when paying probably is one of the most efficient infrastructures created by man. Sure we can shave off some margins and very good businesses can be built on those models, but it’s hardly disruptive.

I believe strongly that REAL innovation will come from big data, or rather the transparency of BIG data.

To explain briefly: The biggest problem in the world today is not HOW we pay, but that so few companies have access to the capital they need to grow their business. If they could grow, they would they could hire more people and generally the whole economy would be a lot better off. In the end, shaving a small amount of the cost of credit cards for small business are not going to be much a difference, most companies actually do business with other (larger) companies and these companies tend to pay as late as possible to conserve their cashflow. At the same time, these smaller companies can’t get any credit in the bank, as the banks model of risk and understanding real business is at best poor and typically non-existent, which is why small business get offered two types of credit – none or expensive. This is a vicious cycle hurting most companies, the economy and even the larger companies as the credit cost on their suppliers ultimately come back to them as more expensive goods.

This is where transparency comes in, the reason for this mess is the lack of transparency in financial transactions, the seller doesn’t know when the buyer have accepted or paid their invoice, the buyer doesn’t have any means to offer a transparent process towards their suppliers (even when it’s in their interest, since this reduces phone calls, mistakes and ultimately help their suppliers). If the small companies had this information, they could prove to their bank (or other more progressive 3rd party funding options) that their invoice was in fact accepted by that Fortune 500, in turn reducing the risk heavily on that individual transaction and giving them access to credit at much more reasonable rates.

That’s why we at Tradeshift put transparency into the core of our platform, we encourage buyers and sellers to exchange not just business documents, like invoices, but also their status, is it received, accepted or paid. And at the same time we work with platform partners allowing us to offer finance options to these suppliers, such as Tradeshift Instant Payments. We believe that this is just the beginning of the revolution that will happen in finance as big data and transparency will revolutionize what really matters, the availability and cost of money.

It always seems to go missing or there is no response to your endless emails chasing for payment. You then end up spending time on the phone instead of doing real business.

To solve these problems, we created Tradeshift Instant Approval, which makes it much easier to always get a response to every invoice you send.

With this new feature, you can send an invoice to anyone, regardless if they are on the Tradeshift network or not, and you will be able to receive a response and an approval instantly.

Anyone can accept or reject your invoice straight away as well as make comments. This will provide you with all the benefits of Tradeshift, regardless if your connections are using Tradeshift or not – making life easier for everyone.

So start sending invoices to anyone and enjoy the benefits of immediate communication and instant approval.

The facts

Full name: Christophe Seerup Nagy
Job title: Business Development Global Accounts
Employee no.: 44
Employed since: May 2011

Meet Christophe Nagy, Business Development Global Accounts at Tradeshift. Christophe is French as you might be able to tell from his accent. He is part of a growing business development and sales team here at Tradeshift.

Christophe has been travelling a lot as a part of his job. However, his focus is now more on prospecting from Denmark and working closely with his colleague Lionel who is located in France. But in fact travel has always been a big part of Christophe’s life.

He has a background in paramedics and used to work in the Alps in the winter seasons before he went on to study sales. That brought him to Ireland where he worked for three years and in that period met the Danish girl who is now his wife. After they had both travelled even more together, they decided to settle in Denmark.

In his spare time Christophe likes to relax with his wife and family. He’s a nature guy that loves walks in the forest and the outdoor life. He does spend a fair amount of time indoors too, though. “My wife would say I’m pretty much on the internet… very often,” Christophe laughs.

Finally, Christophe explains what drives him: “That’s what I like, to help a startup get a foot in the ground.” He goes on: “That’s why I liked the idea to come over to Tradeshift and help the company grow.”

For enterprises like Kuehne+Nagel, which manage around 8 million invoices every year, Tradeshift presents an excellent way to deal with its entire supplier infrastructure in an ordered and consistent manner. And because Tradeshift is free for all suppliers, uptake in order of magnitude is higher than alternative solutions.

Jon Abrahamson, Senior Vice President of Kuehne +Nagel, said, “Like numerous other enterprises we have the vision of an automated invoicing flow and Tradeshift represents the best possibility to date of moving in that direction. When you consider that some of our suppliers send many thousands of documents to us every year, we could hardly charge them on per item basis. Tradeshift turns the whole approach on its head, with very good results.”

]]> http://tradeshift.com/blog/kuehne-nagel-selects-tradeshift/feed/ 0 http://tradeshift.com/blog/why-business-software-is-crap-watch-the-techcrunch-tv-interview/ http://tradeshift.com/blog/why-business-software-is-crap-watch-the-techcrunch-tv-interview/#comments Tue, 20 Mar 2012 22:33:55 +0000 Renette Youssef http://tradeshift.com/?p=4199 More »]]> “Think a young Viking version of Marc Benioff” says Andrew Keen from TechCrunch TV.

Earlier this month, Christian Lanng, CEO of Tradeshift appeared on TechCrunch TV and spoke about why he moved from Denmark to Silicon Valley, how Tradeshift is using distributed data to solve core problems and most importantly, why he thinks “Current Business Software is Crap”.

Every day, more and more amazing companies start using Tradeshift and we thought it was about time to share some of their stories with you. On this blog, we’re going to be introducing you to some of those businesses out there seeing the benefits of our platform and sharing their experience in a way that hopefully shows you a better way of doing business.

The first company we’ll be looking at is a Copenhagen-based mobile coffee company called Kaffekværnen – that’s the Danish for “the coffee grinder”.

Kaffekværnen started out in 2006 and has built its business around the idea that a good cup of coffee should be every person’s right. They figured that by serving the coffee from small mopeds, they would be able to reach anyone anywhere – and as a company founded in Copenhagen, I think we can attest for the value and effect of that concept first hand!

The company has focused everything on the highest quality of coffee and other hot drinks. But importantly, its founders have also stuck to their guns ideologically and committed to using 100% ecological and fair-trade coffee. This also extends to their CO2 footprint – they work closely with Andersen Bakery who gets its electricity from a wind turbine.

Kaffekværnen mainly visits large companies on a daily schedule and come to serve coffee at all kinds of events. It’s an excellent first company to talk about too since they were actually among the first users of Tradeshift after meeting one of our co-founders while we at Tradeshift were still working out of a garage.

Since they powered us with their coffee early on, it’s only appropriate that Tradeshift now powers the way they work with other businesses! Tradeshift allows Kaffekværnen to access their invoices from anywhere and they are especially happy about the ease of use and the fact that it is free.

Morten Colstrup from Kaffekværnen