Building for the Underdogs: How Bevz is Revolutionizing Convenience Store Operations and Empowering Mom-and-Pop Retailers
I had the pleasure of interviewing Jason Vego, the CEO & Co-founder of Bevz, a company that is transforming the snack and drink industry by providing the first-ever SaaS platform for convenience stores. Bevz is transforming the 150k+ stores across the nation with the technology, data, support, and network they need to manage and grow their business.
Thank you so much for joining us!
What motivated you to launch your startup?
I’ve always been in love with vertical software — helping a very specific customer base solve a major problem, with a solution customized to their unique needs. My first startup was a software platform for dog groomers, which failed. So why convenience stores? These stores fascinate me because they are everywhere (152k in the U.S. and 1.2M globally), even small stores typically do about $1M in revenue every year, and they’re basically immune to market conditions like recessions or the pandemic, yet they’ve been completely overlooked by modern tech. When I dug into the problem and opportunity, I found that stores are losing hundreds of thousands of dollars every year because they mismanage their inventory and lose out on sales in-store and online. A store has 5k-10k unique SKUs and no effective way to track that inventory. So, I teamed up with some incredible people and set out to solve this problem.
What is it that excites you about what you’re building?
The impact to mom and pop retailers. We’re helping a thousand stores (and one day tens of thousands of stores) not just stay alive, but grow. We’re seeing an immediate impact when we sign up a store, especially those that had no online presence when we met them. I believe that without a strong vertical software solution like Bevz, many of these stores are going to go out of business in the next 5 years, and we’re on a mission to make sure that doesn’t happen.
What has been your biggest challenge when growing your startup?
Scaling without compromising the customer experience. As we grew fast, we made mistakes and we didn’t allocate the necessary resources and attention to the onboarding and day-to-day experience of the customer. Honestly, we took on customers who weren’t the right fit, and didn’t properly onboard several stores, which quickly led to churn. And when we make mistakes like that, we have to get leaner, move roles around, and let people go. It’s terrible. That’s on me as the CEO and it’s hard to forgive myself for the mistakes I’ve made, or didn’t prevent, that led to people losing their jobs. But, every month and every year, we learn, get better, and create new opportunities for our employees and customers.
What are your future plans for your startup?
Bevz is evolving into a true operating system for convenience stores. In 2025, we’ll build several additional integrations that facilitate how stores purchase, stock, and sell inventory. With this data, we can automate store operations, use AI to adjust pricing to boost sales and increase margins for stores, and predict trends in the market. And when we do that, it’s not only going to be a game-changer for convenience stores, it’s going to drastically change how small and large brands like Pepsi and Anheuser-Busch make decisions and sell to retailers.
If you had to share, “words of wisdom,” with a Founder who’s about to start their own startup, what would they be?
Be brutally honest about what’s working and what’s not, to yourself and your team. It’s easy to get caught up in the hype or hang onto a strategy that used to work, but your job is to evolve constantly. Don’t be afraid to pivot, restructure, or walk away from things that aren’t serving the mission anymore. Also, hire slow, fire fast, and surround yourself with good people that you highly respect, that are smarter than you in at least one area of the business. Startups are really, really hard. You’ll have to push through rejection, fatigue, and uncertainty. But if you build something people need, stay close to the customer, and don’t run out of money, you’ll change an industry, and maybe even the world.
How can our readers follow you on social media?
Find me on LinkedIn. Unfortunately I’m not cool enough to be active on any other social media channels.
