local matters.

This is what we live by.
This is why we do what we do.

A Little About Us

We don't just talk about small businesses; we've lived it. Growing up as the children of small business entrepreneurs, we witnessed firsthand the incredible journey of running a small business—the highs, the lows, and everything in between. We intimately understand the beauty that comes with these operations, as well as the numerous challenges that can burden small business owners unnecessarily. Drawing from our personal experiences, we embarked on a mission to develop a platform that empowers small business owners by fostering transparency, enhancing cost efficiency, and bringing the dream of freedom closer to reality. This endeavor is driven by our genuine passion to support and uplift the backbone of our economy—the small business community.

I'd like to hear the full "TedSpot Hypothesis".

It seems like there is a pervasive narrative these days about the efficacy of small and medium-sized businesses in the face of larger corporations; the claim is that these companies benefit from the luxury of having economies of scale and have the resources to make competition from smaller businesses next to impossible. As compelling as this logic might seem, this company was founded on the firm belief that this logic is flawed.

Our reasoning is simple and just as equally compelling as its counterpart:

The only reason big companies have the advantage is because the infrastructure used to keep their edge has not been democratized yet.

(TLDR: We want to democratize it.)

A mega-corporation is often the result of a company pioneering an industry. This affords them the luxury of steadily building out the infrastructure needed to optimize operational costs as they grow. Eventually they get to a point where they have both accumulated a large customer base as well as the operational efficiencies garnered by the established infrastructure in order to offer goods at lesser prices than the average prices of those goods in the market. This is what we call "economies of scale". However, this infrastructure is often privatized and/or offered to competitors as a service with a steep markup. In either case, since the infrastructure is being controlled by the competitor, there is no way for a competing party using this infrastructure to beat them. Though you might be thinking of supply chains as you read this, I invite you to think of infrastructure in a broader context.

Infrastructure is simply the organizational structures needed for a process to be carried out efficiently. While this can indeed take on the traditional form of organizational structures in the real world, infrastructure can also extend to structures living in the digital world, namely software. This is important because software is implicitly easy to disseminate, so if there was a non-biased entity actively working to develop software infrastructure for others to use, this could theoretically create a level playing field for all players in the game in a condensed amount of time. In essence, this will have helped democratize infrastructure. But before we can aim to democratize this infrastructure, we have to dig more deeply into defining what software infrastructure is and how big corporations derive value from it.

The sophisticated software leveraged by larger corporations is predominantly used to facilitate optimal resource allocation efficiently; obtain rich descriptive and predictive information about their business data; increase the speed in which ripe markets can be discovered and explored; and reduce reliance on third parties. It would be ridiculous to say that no great software has been made accessible to smaller businesses in recent years. However, the first important key insight is that one piece of software that helps assist the completion of one specific task (e.g. payroll) is hardly considered infrastructure. Rather, we believe that the reason why mega-corporations are able to maintain their unrelenting hold on their respective markets (especially among big tech companies) is because they use a suite of inter-communicating software to efficiently complete a business process (which involve a collection of disparate tasks). For instance, in the case of delivery logistics, predictive analytics software can help guide company market exploration forecasts (in order to accumulate enough regional customers to mitigate the costs of last-mile delivery) as well as inform the resource allocation algorithms that perform route planning.

But building just one piece of software is capitally intensive, never mind building a suite of software under one cohesive ecosystem that allows for operational efficiency across the board. Our hope is that we can tackle this problem for everyone and begin to bridge this gap by providing businesses with a series of pluggable modules that business operators can use at their own discretion according to their business' needs. Moreover, we want to allow businesses to also be able to plug in software from other vendors that they love and allow it to feed into the platform to power any modules that they might be using under the TedSpot umbrella. In this way, we can incorporate existing great software into our vision of democratized software infrastructure. We've chosen to start with the development of modules that tackle generic business problems (e.g. inventory management) and intend to steadily work our way towards modules that cater to certain niches. So in brief, one half of our mission is to provide small businesses with the lego pieces of software that they can use in harmony to build their business.

Our decision to become a payments provider comes from another key insight related to the aforementioned point of software infrastructure often being used to reduce reliance on third parties. A common software-as-infrastructure theme among bigger players is implementing the [software] rails necessary to make more money on each transaction processed. Succinctly, companies that get big enough often choose to become their own payment processors and are able to reap the benefits of lesser fees in the process by having more ownership of their payments flow. This is not a trivial task by any means, which is why it's often reserved for the biggest of players. But we want to help smaller businesses realize some of these benefits, too. That's why we've chosen to tackle the problem of setting up these rails and now TedSpot operates as a payment processor that aims to allow smaller businesses to reap some of the rewards that come with taking more ownership of the payments flow. We do this by taking up less than what we saved by being involved on a lower level of the payments flow and passing on most of the savings to our customers. In this way, we hope to immediately give local businesses a taste of the benefits that come with the future we envision where vital business infrastructure is more readily available to them.

Up until now this whole discussion has been fairly tactical in nature, so you might be wondering why this is in our "Company" page. It's because this discussion is what this company is all about. It's a team of people that care and think very deeply about this problem and our discussion up until now has been the line of thinking that inspired the inception of TedSpot. And this line of thinking was, in turn, initiated by the grim reality of witnessing family-owned local businesses get crippled seemingly overnight during the ongoing pandemic. We can't help but think that some of this could have been alleviated had there been solid infrastructure in place that could have otherwise helped these local businesses adapt to the accelerated transition to a digital economy. And because we're a team of engineers at heart, we felt somewhat accountable for failing to act sooner in establishing these rails as we saw firsthand the countless number of local family businesses get crushed under the overwhelming pressure. So we decided to do something about it because we finally realized - just like many others - that local matters.