Australian founders Eddie Machaalani and Mitchell Harper hired HomeAway chief operating officer and former PayPal Europe boss Brent Bellm as its chief executive officer in June. In his first interview since taking over he said Bigcommerce needed to more carefully target its efforts.

Despite having hundreds of employees, tens of thousands of clients and having raised $US125 million ($176 million), Mr Bellm said the company was still deciding whether to focus on small retailers or the mid-market when he joined.

Bigcommerce has grown rapidly since it finished developing its core software that is used by small to major retailers to build, launch and manage their online stores.

"I joined and it took all of two weeks for the team, unanimously, to agree that the mid-market is the thing we need to change for the world," Mr Bellm said.

"And once we picked mid-market, we were able to decide what the product priorities were, what trade-offs we were willing to make, and it also means suddenly we could see big ideas and opportunities that weren't obvious with a split focus."

Experienced

The former McKinsey & Company consultant specialising in retail and e-commerce, has considerable experience in growth-stage technology companies. After finishing up with the global management consultant giant, he worked as a strategic director for eBay, PayPal and HomeAway before being lured across to Bigcommerce by the opportunity to oversee systems designed for tens of thousands of retail businesses.

Bigcommerce is based in San Francisco, while the majority of engineers and product managers remain in Sydney working alongside the company founders.

Mr Bellm said it would list on a United States exchange as most of its investors are also based in the US.

With an IPO on the horizon, Mr Bellm is also focusing on a series of partnerships with point of sale software companies and clarifying the company's timeline towards profitability.

"At some point every really successful start-up has to go through a transition from being venture funded and growing and spending a lot, into transitioning your economics."

Mr Bellm was appointed shortly before the listings of eBay and PayPal to help manage this transition and says e-commerce companies such as eBay or Bigcommerce do not need to be profitable or even at the break-even point when they list.

But he said they must articulate a timeframe so investors can be confident that profitability is a priority for a company, rather than just growth.

"The rule of thumb is that a software as a service company, to be in that IPO window you want to be plus or minus a hundred million in revenue and you don't have to be break even yet, but you need to have line of sight to being break-even within 12 months," Mr Bellm said.