Eddie Machaalani and the $500 website that kept calling back

Eddie Machaalani’s first web agency lasted five clients. The trouble began after the websites were finished. A phone number needed changing. A sentence needed replacing. The owners called, and the young developer did the work for free. Each little favour made the original sale a little less attractive. A $500 website could acquire a surprisingly long afterlife.

In his recent telling, this was Sydney in 2000. He had hand-coded the pages, uploaded the files and arranged the domains. The customers had bought websites they could admire but could not easily alter. Their dependence on him was excellent evidence that he had delivered only part of what they needed.

That unfinished job would occupy much of his career. Machaalani went on to co-found BigCommerce with Mitchell Harper, help take Australian commerce software into international markets, and eventually return to website building with Zarla. Across those ventures, a small question keeps returning: why should running a business require so much assistance with its website?

The customer wanted the keys

There was a family reason to care. Machaalani’s parents had immigrated from Lebanon to Australia, where small-business ownership helped them establish themselves. He understood that a business could change a family’s prospects. Making its tools easier to use had a practical attraction long before it became a pitch to investors.

He graduated from the University of Technology Sydney in 2000 with a Bachelor of Science in Computing Science. His early work put that education in direct contact with owners who needed useful websites. A technical achievement mattered rather less to them than being able to change tomorrow’s opening hours.

WebEdit Pro, the browser-based editing tool he built, gave clients more control over their pages. The appeal is easy to understand. A shopkeeper should be able to correct a line of text without arranging a small diplomatic mission to the developer.

Harper entered the picture through an online chatroom. Both were working on content-management software; they discovered they lived near each other in Sydney. In a 2011 account, Machaalani recalled releasing their first software in January 2004 and making a sale the following day. A customer had supplied a more useful verdict than applause.

A shopping cart joins the conversation

Their company, Interspire, sold tools for tasks including email marketing and managing website content. These products put them in contact with businesses already trying to do more online. Over time, customers asked for a shopping cart. They disliked the complexity of the available software and wanted the pair to apply their approach to selling.

By October 2008, Machaalani could describe an Interspire cart that let merchants change panels and copy without uploading code. Yet the product still carried a substantial obligation: customers had to arrange the environment in which it ran. Even useful software can arrive with an unadvertised second job.

Asked about the cart’s weakness that month, he pointed to the hosted edition they had yet to release. That admission catches the business at a revealing moment. He could see that installation and hosting belonged inside the problem the company was supposed to solve.

BigCommerce launched in 2009. Moving from licensed software to a hosted subscription service meant the company would take responsibility for more of the machinery. Merchants could concentrate on their stores. The change also gave the founders a different business model, with an ongoing relationship in place of a single software purchase.

For a merchant, the distinction shows up in the middle of an ordinary day. A store needs attention while orders, stock and customers need attention too. Time spent arranging the software has to come from somewhere. Taking hosting into the service gives the vendor more work, but it also makes the offer easier to understand: pay for a store you can use, with fewer preliminary chores.

Teaching people to sell

The founders also had to explain why anyone should pay attention. Their early marketing equipment included a camera, a whiteboard and markers. They made short educational videos about selling online. By November 2011, the videos had accumulated about 800,000 views. For a software company, teaching could double as distribution.

Email followed a similar logic: offer useful material, build an audience, and occasionally make a commercial offer. Search advertising and keyword research supplied other routes to customers. The work involved testing how people actually found and bought the product, rather than expecting the software to introduce itself.

Machaalani’s own writing covered customer profiling, video, email and increasing online sales. Those subjects suggest how broadly he understood the merchant’s task. Opening a store was one stage. Bringing people through its digital door required another set of skills, and the software vendor had an interest in helping owners learn them.

In 2011, BigCommerce raised US$15 million from General Catalyst. The founders had spent time getting to know potential investors before choosing a partner. Access to people who understood expanding software businesses was part of the attraction. Money came with the possibility of useful introductions and experienced counsel.

Recognition followed in Australia. Machaalani and Harper shared the 2012 NSW Pearcey Entrepreneur of the Year award with Jo Burston. The company was also looking further afield: in February 2014, it entered India, reporting 50,000 customers across 65 countries at the time. These were historical milestones in an expanding business, with considerably more at stake than five agency clients.

The first hundred interviews

Growth brought another kind of design problem: building the team. Harper described a pact between the founders to interview their first 100 hires personally. They kept it over two years. Whatever else demanded their time, selecting colleagues remained work they chose to do themselves.

The arithmetic is worth pausing over. A hundred interviews means repeatedly making room for the future company while the present company is asking for attention. The founders were deciding who would serve customers, build products and eventually hire people without them in the room.

Machaalani’s advice to fellow UTS graduates put considerable weight on people, coaching and systems. He recommended learning from businesses that had already solved similar problems and preparing the organisation for more customers and employees before they arrived. His account of entrepreneurship leaves plenty of room for asking someone else how to do the job.

The partnership also outlived their shared executive work. In a 2016 interview, Harper described Machaalani as a close friend and reciprocal adviser. They still exchanged messages and acted as sounding boards while pursuing separate projects. A chatroom acquaintance had become someone to consult when the next decision was difficult.

When the job changed

Eventually, success altered Machaalani’s own working day. He preferred product development, direct customer contact and small teams. Running an organisation of around 300 people had taken him further from that work. Reading Reid Hoffman’s explanation of his own leadership transition helped Machaalani consider a change.

“My passion was working directly with customers”

Eddie Machaalani

In June 2015, Brent Bellm succeeded him as BigCommerce CEO, and Machaalani became executive chairman. Bellm brought experience from PayPal and HomeAway. The transition placed a different executive in charge of the company’s next stage, while its founder moved into another role.

There is something refreshingly practical about that choice. A founder can spend years making a business large enough to change his job beyond recognition. Machaalani acknowledged his preference for the earlier work. He did not have to pretend that every additional layer of management was a personal reward.

BigCommerce began trading publicly on August 5, 2020. It was a consequential marker for a company started in Sydney, but it came five years after the CEO handover. His founding achievement and the leadership that followed belong to the same history, with different people responsible for different chapters.

The phone number problem returns

Machaalani co-founded Zarla with Adam Seabrook in 2019. Its September 2026 relaunch brought him back to a familiar customer: an owner who wants a website without acquiring a collection of technical responsibilities. The new product uses AI to build and edit sites and combines them with tools for enquiries, bookings and invoicing.

The ambition extends beyond producing an attractive page. Zarla is trying to keep the work surrounding that page in one place. A local service business needs an enquiry to become an appointment and eventually a payment. Each handoff is an opportunity for another login, another bill or another lost afternoon.

The September announcement also described connections to outside AI assistants, including Claude and ChatGPT. Those integrations are product capabilities, not proof of a merchant’s commercial success. The more interesting test remains ordinary: can an owner make a necessary change and carry on working?

In his founder’s letter, Machaalani connects Zarla directly to his first agency customers. He wants owners to describe the business, get a site, and request changes in plain language. After years of commerce software, the original irritation still provides a clear brief.

His interests include music production, which he lists on his public community profile. It is a small detail beside the company history, but a welcome one. The person behind the business software also makes room for a different kind of making.

The through line is a customer asking for something modest and discovering how much work stands behind it. A corrected phone number. A cart that runs. A booking that reaches the right place. Machaalani has kept returning to those requests. The first five clients had identified a durable problem, even if their developer had initially mistaken it for a series of favours.