Today we’d like to introduce you to Paul Byrne.
Razoyo came to life in 2009 when its founder, Paul Byrne, abruptly left a job he was unhappy in. He had no plan and no prospects, just a desire to change.
Drawing on his background in marketing, Paul began executing email campaigns for his prior employer, but, this time, as a distributor and business partner rather than an employee. Within a year they were looking to create a new web store and gave Paul the opportunity to build and operate it.
Paul chose to build the store on a platform offered by a large ecommerce corporation and, within a few months was their largest merchant in the Dallas area. They saw Paul’s innovative approach to feature development and asked him to put together a team to answer their pre-sales phone calls starting in January of 2011.
This led Paul to hire Jason Boslow to manage the pre-sales support team. Pleased with this new operation, this large client began to outsource more and more operations to the fledgling company and Razoyo was born. Razoyo soon began using its knowledge to help small online merchants to grow their businesses through data design, web design and web development.
In January 2012, Paul’s son William, who had been working part time, graduated from college and decided to join the team as a web developer.
William, whose degree was in Radio-Television-Film had taught himself web development while in college and enjoyed it so much he decided to make a career of it rather than pursuing a future in RTF. William turned out to be exceptionally talented in commerce software development and began Razoyo’s Magento customization practice.
In 2015, Jason and William joined Paul as partners in the company and formed the company’s management council that directs Razoyo’s business today.
Razoyo’s practice grew from 3 software developers in the early days to 11 developers plus Project Management, help desk and design staff today. Recognized for technology and process innovation in the Small and Medium Business commerce software community in the US and beyond, Razoyo now offers software development services for Magento, the world’s leading ecommerce platform, Oro Commerce, a leading open source Business-to-Business Customer Relationship and Management software platform and Commerce platform, and fully customized, ground-up web application development.
Support
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
Some of the biggest struggles included:
Becoming a credible software development company. None of the partners had a background in software development or electronic commerce and no contacts in that industry. Early projects were completed on razor-thin margins just to build a reputation.
Magento’s launch of Magento 2 and discontinuation of Magento 1. In 2016, the Razoyo development team had to start over and learn from the ground up. Early on, Magento 2 was full of bugs that had to be corrected by Razoyo for its clients.
The original office location for Razoyo was purchased by a new landlord who, just before renewing the lease, decided to back out of the deal and renegotiate pricing. That gave Razoyo a limited time to find a new place and the team ending up in temporary quarters for several months that became known as the ‘refugee camp.’ The refugee camp was strung with temporary network cables and everyone was crammed into a few small rooms.
The growing complexity of running a larger development team. As projects became larger and more complex and more developers were touching the code, Razoyo had to learn how to manage what is known as ‘dev ops’ or development operations, to allow them to deploy new code on commerce web sites seamlessly. William, with no prior knowledge of dev ops created a system from scratch while Paul focused on developing automated testing tools. The result was a leap forward in quality and consistency of results.
So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the Razoyo story. Tell us more about the business.
We specialize in designing, developing, enhancing and maintaining commerce technology including web stores, cross-platform service connections, POS systems and multi-channel, connected shopping experiences for small and medium sized businesses.
Because we are known for solving difficult design problems efficiently, we have been awarded many contracts where other developers had tried and failed and are proud to continue to serve those clients.
We were one of the first developers to launch web sites using the new Magento 2 platform. In fact, our developers submitted code to the community that has since been incorporated in the Magento core.
Oro Commerce, known for being extremely picky in its choice of partners, tapped out Razoyo to be in its first round of partners to develop and customize on their platform.
The thing the sets us apart is our size of client. Razoyo is passionate about serving small and medium-sized businesses. Most of our competitors have too much overhead to take on the size of build that we execute and choose to focus on large, enterprise deployments. We pride ourselves in bringing the level of customization, quality and performance the only large corporations can afford to medium and small clients.
Because of Paul’s background in marketing (former PepsiCo), Razoyo is able to offer a level of business, branding and strategic consulting that most small development firms simply do not have the background for.
Has luck played a meaningful role in your life and business?
All businesses are built on luck. We’ve had our share of good luck which usually comes in the form of making an unexpectedly helpful personal connection.
I have been blessed to meet a lot of people who, for whatever reason, believed in me. I was born into a good family that taught me to work hard to achieve my goals. I luckily met an amazing woman who has been my partner in life and supported me through good times and bad.
Every company gets some degree of good and bad luck and I don’t think we’ve had more or less than our fair share. However, without that initial luck that gave us the space we needed to build a business in the first place, Razoyo never would have come to be.
Contact Info:
- Address: 6053 Main Street, Suite 235
The Colony, TX 75056 - Website: www.razoyo.com
- Phone: 877-240-2351
- Email: sales@razoyo.com
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