Leonardo Ávila, 22, is well aware of the difficulties entrepreneurs deal with stock inventory, package orders and manage delivery logistics. The young man from Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, owned a college clothing brand that served athletics and schools throughout Brazil. “THE company grew a lot until it became difficult to continue due to the stock and delivery problem. It got to the point where it couldn’t grow anymore,” he says. At the start of the pandemic, when college athletics stopped placing orders, the company ended up going bankrupt.

Thinking about what other businesses could start, Ávila remembered the concept of dropshipping, a model in which the merchant receives the customer’s order in the virtual store and forwards the purchase order to the supplier, and decided to to create a e-commerce of beauty products. When their entrepreneurial friends found out, they went looking for help implementing the model in their businesses.

It was then that Ávila saw another opportunity: helping people interested in working in the dropshipping system. In August 2020, she officially launched the olympiads, a startup that connects merchants to suppliers. In 2021, the company, which also has Lucas Arruda as its founder, earned BRL 20.5 million. Henrique Meireles, Matheus Mattar and Guima Oliveira have also been partners since February this year.

Currently, the startup has 106 employees, more than 40,000 customers around the world and 300 suppliers.

“The beginning was very simple. My customers filled out a form with all the orders placed that day, and I was responsible for talking to the suppliers and placing the orders,” says Ávila, who realized it would be difficult to scale the business. by doing everything manually, and it would be necessary to create technology to automate the process.

“I hired a programmer to develop a platform and after three months we launched it in December 2020,” says the entrepreneur. “The first week we had a thousand people using the product.”

However, internal disagreements caused the programmer to shut down and take the platform off the air in February 2021.

This is the moment when the entrepreneur decides to reinvent the trade and offer a new product to customers. “One of their desires was to have a more professional e-commerce, so we developed a service to create this store from scratch”, explains Ávila. During this time, they started developing the dropshipping login platform from scratch, which was launched again in May.

The business boom came in August 2021, when Olympos partnered with Shopify, a Canadian e-commerce platform, where it inserted a sales page. “We attract a lot of customers. From November to December, we opened 27,000 stores per month, compared to 500 previously,” explains Ávila. “It was very strong growth.”

In early 2022, the startup acquired Scripe, an artificial intelligence platform specializing in copywriting. The goal was to help Olympos customers improve their marketing and therefore increase their sales.

For this year, the entrepreneur hopes to create another product that will increase traffic on customer websites. “We want to be a 360º solution to help at all times,” he says. The goal is to earn 53 million reais in 2022.

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