How David Wright and Melanie Alder founded Pattern: And integrated data and e-commerce.

• Author: Wright, David

TEN YEARS AGO, my friend's wife made $2 million selling girl's headbands online. When I asked them how they did it, my friend said, "Dave, in the digital world, [selling] is just a data game." His comment really resonated with me, as my background is in data science and data management, and I wondered if there was a way to make my friend's e-commerce strategy even better. Of course, I didn't have my own brand at the time; otherwise, I would've started out by selling my own products, but I knew I could apply a similar strategy by selling products for existing companies.

My co-founder Melanie Alder and I met in college, and we took this idea and launched our company, iServe (Pattern), in the living room of her Lehi house in 2013. After an investment of $50,000 each (a lofty investment at the time!), we started out re-selling refrigerator magnets and other small products on Amazon. Mel ran the business largely by herself for the first two years because I was still working at my previous job. I would work on the company in the evenings, but she carried the load. She was the one that came up with the idea to focus on magnets, and I served on the tech side of the whole operation.

People often ask me why we focused on magnets, and I tell them that there was no magic in the magnets; we just needed something we knew would sell. When you think of our solution, it's a tech solution, so the product doesn't matter other than that. It needs to be of high quality if you want to be successful. If you start doing the mathematical equations behind the scenes, high-quality products do much better than low-quality ones. Outside of that, it didn't matter if it was a shovel or a magnet. We just needed people to give us a chance.

Our goal at the time was to help move the needle for different brands by creating an e-commerce accelerator that helps brands optimize sales on different marketplaces, including Amazon. It was an idea that I thought would be pretty game-changing from a tech perspective. In the beginning, we would reach out to different companies via cold calls to see if we could help them reach consumers, but none of them wanted our help because we had no track record at the time.

For some of those initial cold calls, Mel was just trying to find companies that were willing to take a chance on us. Eventually, we gained some traction and started growing brands from $3 million to $26 million, and now those same brands are worth a whole lot more than that...