Our Website Pop-Up Builder Will Hit $150K Annual Revenue By End Of 2024
Hello, I'm Nikita, the founder and CEO of Claspo, an easy-to-use widget builder. Previously, I worked as the head of the retention marketing department in a full-cycle agency for over seven years, where my team implemented more than 200 forms and gamified solutions.
Since September 2021, I've been building Claspo, a product designed to help marketers collect leads and optimize website user journeys. Claspo offers marketers both creativity with its drag-and-drop editor and convenience with a library of over 700 templates. Presently, Claspo is used by more than 500 brands globally, with more than 1000 new registrations per month.
Start thinking about marketing as early as possible. Even if you don't have a finished product yet, begin marketing it before the MVP release.
What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?
I have been studying Computer Science at the university and received a bachelor's diploma. After that, I decided to get a postgraduate degree in Business Administration. The knowledge from this degree later became instrumental when I became a CEO. During my education period, I also worked as a call centre operator and there I improved my communication skills which help me to this day.
One of my first full-time jobs was as a content manager in an eCommerce company and after some time I began taking on more tasks connected to email marketing, which was easy for me since I already had a deep knowledge of HTML.
While working as the head of email marketing, two of our primary tasks were increasing email subscribers and profile enrichment. Website widgets were crucial for this purpose, but the market lacked a tool that met all our requirements. Available tools either lacked integrations with platforms we needed (such as Exponea or Yespo) or didn't allow sophisticated customization.
For instance, gamified widgets could increase conversions by over 7 times, but existing services lacked such functionality. Moreover, cost was a concern—services with good integrations and reasonable customization capabilities had enterprise-level prices, which didn't suit us.
After thoroughly analyzing the market, I realized there was no suitable product in an affordable price range. The cost of enterprise-level products was comparable to the cost of developing our application. That's how the idea for Claspo emerged — a widget constructor with limitless customization, integrated with all popular market platforms, and accessible even to freelance marketers, solopreneurs, and small startups.
When working on a B2B product, consider the needs and pains of your customers' customers. This way, you can gain valuable insights with minimal time and effort.
Take us through the process of building the first version of your product.
First of all, with the idea of a project in mind, I have pitched my agency with the product. As it was not the first time they created some proprietary technology which soon transformed into an autonomous project, my idea received a green light. I have assembled a small team out of the agency's current employees and we began a planning process of how the future app would look like.
The core idea behind Claspo was to create an out-of-the-box solution with zero coding and design skills required, optimized for user experience. Initially, we had a team of ten people working on product development and design.
From May to July 2021, we created a prototype that we tested with clients from our partner project, the eSputnik ESP system. Using feedback from early adopters, we managed to finish the MVP by February 2022.
Unfortunately, this coincided with the beginning of the conflict in Ukraine, so the actual release happened in March after ensuring the safety of all team members.
When creating the MVP, our philosophy was to build a robust "chassis" that allowed us to release new features as quickly and efficiently as possible, adapting to global trends and our clients' needs. Therefore, Claspo's design hasn't undergone significant changes, and the current design is the same as presented in the MVP.
One unique aspect of our product architecture is its ability to be embedded in different systems while allowing us to develop custom components, such as integrating the client's bonus program into our gamification, even if the bonus program is custom-coded. It can also work in other ways; for example, it is possible to integrate Claspo into the client’s CRM, customizing service capabilities for their needs.
Overall I can say that our development process was extremely smooth and things went as planned, mostly because of the incredible skill of the core team that helped me to create the first iteration of Claspo.
Describe the process of launching the business.
We planned to scale the business primarily through organic traffic during the launch. So far, we’ve seen confirmation that organic traffic brings the lion's share of our traffic due to relevant content. Brand awareness also plays a significant role because, from our observations of partner projects, they receive a considerable portion of their traffic through brand searches.
We understood that development through organic traffic is a lengthy process and faced some mistakes along the way, causing a six-month traffic drop. Specifically, we mismanaged the localization of the website and template library. When we released them, our site received a large number of unoptimized pages.
This coincided with Google policy updates and triggered a snowball effect. A series of errors led to a decrease in our search rankings for one quarter. However, upon analyzing the problem, we quickly rectified it, and now we've moved on to a phase of stable growth, with a 25% month-on-month increase in organic traffic.
Another instance from which we learned a valuable lesson was our release on ProductHunt. At the time it was our only idea on how we should communicate our release, as we did not value communications as much as we do now.
Our product quickly became the product of the day, but back then, we didn't have a clear understanding of how to capitalize on these moments of hype, and the only thing we did with that victory was post the news on our website and social media. However, it could have been a great opportunity to connect with journalists or get featured in startup review digests.
But even despite making some rookie mistakes here or there we managed to acquire first paying clients two months after launch and I am proud to add that most of them work with us to this day.
Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?
Currently, we are in the experimentation phase. Organic channels are performing well, but over time, the growth momentum will plateau. That’s why we are looking for other ways to scale our product even more.
We are currently exploring alternative paid channels that can be launched quickly, allowing us to attract a targeted, relevant audience with a customer acquisition cost that we can recoup in 2-3 months (in our case, up to $100 per paying user). Currently, we have 650 active users and 50k website visits monthly.
We have pinpointed some specific campaigns that have excellent performance in terms of acquisition cost, and we are scaling them. We have formulated several hypotheses for this year that we will be working on. At the moment, our focus areas that perform well include:
- PPC Advertising - paid advertising on Google and social networks;
- Co-marketing - partnership activities with products we integrate with;
- Influencer Marketing - partnering with experts on LinkedIn and creating collaborative content;
- PR Campaigns - presence in thematic media.
How are you doing today and what does the future look like?
Currently, our LTV is over $150, with an average check of $30. Out of all active users about 15% are paying ones. All of this equals 25K annual revenue as of now, but assuming our growth rate at this point, we plan to increase this value at least 6 times in 2024. After solving all the main marketing challenges ahead of us, Claspo is rapidly developing from a product and business perspective.
For the next year, we have several plans:
- We plan to become official partners with ESP and CRM systems we integrate with.
- We aim to reach $150K annual revenue by 2024 and achieve break-even in the following two years.
- We plan to develop our educational content.
- We will test major marketing hypotheses to optimize the sales funnel and user retention.
Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?
There are several tips that I internalized while working on Claspo:
Give significant importance to PR. Brand Search is an opportunity to exponentially increase customer inflow once you have developed your organic reach to a good level.
When working on a B2B product, consider the needs and pains of your customers' customers. This way, you can gain valuable insights with minimal time and effort.
Strive to differentiate your product, highlight what sets it apart from competitors, and clearly define the niche you plan to occupy in the market.
What platform/tools do you use for your business?
We have a very conservative suite, such as Calendly and Intercom, which is necessary for every digital business today.
For email marketing, we use our partner, Stripo. As for the server side, we utilize AWS, which is by far the best server hosting provider on the market.
What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?
I'm not a big fan of podcasts. Two books have been really helpful for me.
The first is 'Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution,' by Uri Levine, co-founder of Waze, and the other is Dan Ariely's 'Predictably Irrational.'
Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?
Start thinking about marketing as early as possible. Even if you don't have a finished product yet, begin marketing it before the MVP release.
Try to gather early adopters who will test your product upon release. We already had an existing customer base through our partners but mistakenly lacked a plan to attract external users and had to quickly adapt in order to grow.
Where can we go to learn more?
If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!
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Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
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