How We Built A $1.5K/Month SMS Marketing SaaS With Just A Plain PHP Tech Stack
Hello! Who are you, and what business did you start?
Hello Starter Story! I started an eCommerce business first, with a 5K EUR investment inherited by my grandma. I first tried to sell sunglasses on aftermarket online marketplaces and realized it could be a perfect business.
Fast forward to today, we have created several brands (Layoners sunglasses, SMania valuable items for everyday use, Mazzaci tanning jam, and Megasstic women’s clothing). Our primary customers are coming from Generation Y and Generation Z.
But that is not all. We realized that more and more investment is going into advertising; there is quite some competition in EU eCommerce markets, so in 2022, we decided to take an internal solution for maximizing sales and turn it into a SaaS solution for eCommerce store owners. This has been the birth of CartFox.io, the SMS Marketing and cart abandonment recovery solution for every eCommerce business, big or small.
Last several years, we made 150M+ EUR with our leading eCommerce brands, but with CartFox, we still have to break even; we are doing $1.5K a month of profit if we are not counting the salaries into the equation. With salaries included, we are at a slight loss, but hopefully, this will become our flagship product in a year or two.
Focus on relationships, not just profit. Relationships matter most, be it in the team or with the customers.
What's your backstory, and how did you develop the idea?
As I said earlier in our interview, I have started the eCommerce business with 5K EUR inherited by grandma. When starting, I partnered with the online advertising agency and split the profit with them, 50% for each of us. Today, our in-house media buyers are doing 50M+ EUR in yearly turnover. We have branches in Slovenia, Romania, and Serbia.
When starting our latest project CartFox, we took what we needed as a growing eCommerce business to elevate the conversion rate and recover abandoned carts. Also, we needed a solution for SMS Marketing campaigns personalized for each customer.
It doesn’t matter where the products are made, but the quality is the most important factor when it comes to choosing the right product to sell.
While we integrated the answer with our systems, we realized there is more benefit and reward than work to integrate with several other eCommerce CMS-es, such as WooCommerce, Shopify, PrestaShop, and Magento. We had to diversify our business out of eCommerce, but doing what we knew how to do well. CartFox was the answer to that.
Take us through the process of building the first version of your product.
We have started with a meeting with our development and engineering team, looking at what is possible. Luckily, we have some high-end in-house developers who know the ins and outs of many platforms. The work has been started, and fast forward several months, and we had the first MVP solution coded and designed.
The tech stack we used was plain PHP, without any framework. Our team has the knowledge and experience to write high-performance PHP code on their own. We have implemented all the features we needed for our eCommerce shops.
As we have eCommerce operations in-house, it was a good starting point for implementing what we needed. Later on, we started onboarding other eCommerce stores to our platform, mainly because they were based in Slovenia, as we are.
Describe the process of launching the business.
When the MVP was ready, we contacted local and regional eCommerce store owners via LinkedIn and other social media channels. It was a lot of hustling, and we still do it successfully today. We are doing our best to be results-oriented and want to help our customers to be more successful and profitable at the end of the day.
Our target customers are small to medium-sized eCommerce businesses. We onboard them to our demo, and usually, it is a no-brainer to start using our product after the demo. The closing process is mainly done by a demo version of our product.
Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?
Regular communication with customers is the key to success in our experience. It is crucial to help customers succeed in every way possible while using or configuring our app. Our first customers were ourselves, with our eCommerce brands. Later on, we pitched our solution to other shops from Slovenia, where we are based.
We have tried several channels, with several of the others left out to try. Cold outreach worked best for now, but it is important to be genuinely helpful at every step of the customer journey. We have also tried some Google Ads and Meta Ads but have failed.
While for our eCommerce brands, the advertising channels work well; they need to be fixed for CartFox. So we have to get where our customers are. We probably won’t ever use Google Ads or Meta for CartFox ever again, because it didn’t work out well.
This takes us to another method of acquiring customers and forming relationships; conferences. We have attended Balkans eCommerce Summit in Sofia, and we are constantly looking for meetings, mainly in Europe, where our customers are and where they hang out.
How are you doing today, and what does the future look like?
While our eCommerce business is profitable, our SaaS solution, CartFox, has yet to break even. We are constantly looking for people needing our solution and figuring out how to onboard them with the best possible experience. While there are many ways to get things done, we are sure we are on the right track to get profitable with our software solution.
Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?
The most important lesson is: Focus on relationships, not just profit. Relationships matter most, be it in the team or with the customers. The profit comes second and is a natural byproduct of beautiful synergy and honest relationships, helping each other succeed.
What platform/tools do you use for your business?
We have integrated with several platforms, such as WooCommerce, Shopify, Magento, and PrestaShop, so these are the primary tools where we test our solution.
What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?
I regularly read the Slovenian business newspaper Finance, where I was also presented in an interview before and mentioned several times in their editorial articles. It is my primary go-to resource for ideas and inspiration.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just beginning?
- Be honest with yourself and others.
- Be fair to everyone.
- Do not just chase profit, but focus on relationships.
- Choose quality products to sell. It doesn’t matter where the products are made, but the quality is the most important factor when it comes to choosing the right product to sell.
Where can we go to learn more?
- Website
- YouTube: search for CartFox
- Company website
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