Serial entrepreneur Chad Rubin is no stranger to the e-commerce ecosystem. He is an Amazon e-commerce OG, having started one of the first private label brands on Amazon and founding several companies to solve crucial pain points for e-commerce merchants.
Skubana, The Prosper Show and Sellers Choice are a few of the companies he’s created since 2009. Chad is now passionately building his newest venture Profasee, currently in beta. The business is a dynamic pricing platform that enables Amazon brands to predict the perfect price for every product at each precise moment.
But what led Chad into the world of e-commerce? His journey in entrepreneurship started after an (un)fortunate layoff from Wall Street. Chad calls it the moment he “stubbed his toe.” It was the event that turned a seemingly negative and life-altering situation into an opportunity.
Finding Passion in Problems
After being laid off from Wall Street, Chad still needed to pay his rent, so he decided to start helping his parents with selling their vacuum store products online. “I was like, oh, we’re just reselling; why don’t we start our own brand?” he says. While his parents weren’t too interested in the prospect, Chad saw it through. He began selling his own vacuum filters, which would then expand into selling coffee filters and air filters as he identified more opportunities in the space.
“Then I stubbed my toe again, as we started to scale and sell across many channels,” he says. He noticed there was not a strongly established community for Amazon sellers at the time, a pain point that launched the idea behind his first company, Skubana, and then the Prosper Show.
Skubana was founded to help sellers empower their e-commerce businesses by integrating all their sales channels and other logistics into a single platform while using finely detailed analytics to provide the best forecast for business success. 3PL Central acquired the company in 2021.
The idea of the Prosper Show was to help Amazon sellers improve their business efficiency and connect them with service providers in the Amazon ecosystem. Together, these ideas helped address Chad’s own concern with more effective output and having an established community.
Now, with Profasee, the focus is on sustained profitability. “I think we just finished an era of growth at all costs, and now there’s a shift, and we’re at the center of that – the focus is on sustained profitability and growth.” He believes a crucial element that’s missing is the pricing aspect, specifically dynamic pricing. “Amazon is this dynamic platform that’s changing every second. So, in a perfect world, brands would be optimizing their pricing on a daily basis, but it’s too time-consuming, it’s too arduous for sellers to keep pace,” he says. What happens instead is that sellers do nothing. But Chad believes pricing should never be static. “It should be dynamic all the time. And the one platform that pricing is acceptable to change on is Amazon,” he says.
The questions that Profasee is addressing are crucial to a seller and solve the pricing pain point.
“Are we mispricing our products? And is there an opportunity to dynamically adjust price automatically to maximize profit?” Chad says. These are the challenges he’s solving.
Building from Previous Mistakes
“I’ve learned a lot from my mistakes in the past and my previous companies, and I’m applying that framework to this company…” Chad mentions when discussing his work building Profasee, “it’s just been really fun to build.”
When discussing his previous business Skubana, Chad states, “It took seven years from inception to sale, and it was beautiful, and along that journey, I’ve had highs and lows.” The mistakes and low points of that journey have helped him build the framework he uses to form Profasee. One of the most important ideas for Chad was making sure that his values are embedded in the company. “I think any business is a reflection of who people are that are at the top running it,” he says.
Chad also values the idea of being a single founder. “I wanted to run everything, have a say in everything.” These desires are now built into the framework that he uses to guide him in building his current venture.
How Does Profasee Help E-commerce Brands?
At its core, Profasee seeks to drive more profit for sellers with a dynamic pricing system. The current feedback on the platform has been outstanding. Chad notes that they have a hundred people on their waiting list and that beta users have seen a 10-12% increase in profit.
While the practical application is undoubtedly a draw for customers, some credit at least must go to Chad’s marketing approach to the brand. Profasee uses algorithms to make the best analyses and predictions for sellers and how they should price their products on the market. In the branding for Profasee, it is noted that it acts almost as a “crystal ball”, and you can see into the future and be enlightened with knowledge.
It’s a catchy and appealing approach that is sure to make the company stick in the minds of potential customers. The branding all comes from Chad himself.
“I put a lot of love into it,” he says. “I think it comes from having done this many times. You learn a ton from your mistakes.”
What Does the Future Hold for Chad Rubin and Profasee?
Listening to Chad, you get a feeling of how passionate he is about his work in the e-commerce space and the drive he has to move the industry forward. With Profasee as his current focus, he has found yet another avenue to offer more success and especially profitability for sellers. Chad notes how challenging the goal is but also reasons that this idea is well supported in other industries.
“If Uber has surge pricing and Expedia has dynamic pricing and global hedge funds and proprietary trading desks where they come in and out of positions on Amazon or in the stock market, there’s no difference for Amazon.” This is where Chad saw the opportunity for a new seller solution, and with his background in e-commerce and the success he has found, there isn’t much reason to doubt that this newest venture will be a success.
If you’re a seller yourself or just interested in learning about SaaS approaches in e-commerce, check out Profasee. Since this business is early on in development, there is an excellent opportunity to observe the process of scaling and growth or become an initial adopter.
