How We Grew Our Marketing SaaS to $2M/Month [Update]
This is a follow up story for StoreYa. If you're interested in reading how they got started, published almost 5 years ago, check it out here.
Hello again! Remind us who you are and what business you started.
Hi, my name is Eyal Reich and I'm StoreYa's co-founder and COO, along with Yariv Dror, the CEO (and my brother:) and Pasha Zaft, the CTO.
StoreYa offers a suite of marketing and advertising apps that help SMBs increase sales, leads, and social following. We support more than 500,000 online sellers from 186 countries. We also integrate with 30 eCommerce platforms such as Shopify, Magento, Woocommerce, etc.
Our flagship product is called Traffic Booster. With it, we automate Google Ads using our unique AI technology. We take the burden off our clients' shoulders and get the right customers at the right time for the right cost.
We use the entire arsenal that Google has to offer from Pmax, dynamic search ads, customized search ads, remarketing, dynamic remarketing, shopping, smart shopping, smart display ads, and YouTube ads.
In addition to Google ads, we manage growth and remarketing campaigns on Facebook and Instagram for a lot of our clients.
We're a Premium Google partner, one of only 500 Google resellers around the world, we won the 2022 Google Acquisition Performance award, and we're a PayPal exclusive advertising partner.
We launched StoreYa 12 years ago, with the idea of building a valid business, one with a strong business model behind it. As opposed to many startups that pursue their dream and don't think about how to make money in the early stages, we didn't want to be dependent on fundraising, we wanted to reach the profitability stage as soon as possible. We raised a seed round of ~$900K when we first started and for the past 9 years, we've been profitable, generating an average of $2M MRR.
The power of AI is endless, it will change our world, and our focus is to keep up with the power of AI and utilize it for our needs and the different apps we offer.
Tell us about what you’ve been up to. Has the business been growing?
Since we last talked StoreYa keeps growing, supporting more than 500,000 merchants.
We developed a couple of totally free new apps that add a lot of value to our merchants and serve StoreYa mainly as lead gen for the Traffic Booster.
The two new apps are called Benchmark Hero and Product Description Wizard.
Benchmark Hero - a free site audit allowing you to compare your online store to thousands of large stores, pinpointing what you can easily do to improve your store today + an image optimizer that allows you to optimize all of the images on your site in a click of a button.
Product Description Wizard - with its advanced algorithms and natural language processing capabilities, the app saves time and effort for online merchants by generating high-quality product descriptions quickly and accurately, freeing up valuable time for other important tasks.
We put a lot of focus on getting clients from the Shopify app store. It’s a great acquisition channel for us.
These two apps appear at the top results when you search for AI, ChatGPT, SEO, or image optimizer, which generates a high number of installs per day.
Product Description Wizard:
Benchmark Hero:
What have been your biggest challenges in the last year?
We are fortunate enough to have amazing team members and we do our very best to keep them happy at all times. It's crucial for us that they will wake up with a smile on their face and have passion for their work. So the challenges we face are more on the technology/ innovation side of things.
Shopify's app store:
With over 8,000 apps available on Shopify, our challenge lies in differentiation and visibility. Creating an app that offers unique features or addresses specific merchant needs.
Competition is fierce, requiring thorough market research, innovative functionalities, intuitive interfaces, and effective marketing strategies to gain attention among merchants seeking solutions. Moreover, ensuring the app's continuous value, updates, and support is crucial to retaining users and standing out in this highly competitive ecosystem.
Google Ads Updates:
Google Ads frequently evolves its tools and features. Staying updated is challenging as we need to adapt to new campaign structures, strategies, and skill sets regularly. These rapid changes demand continuous learning and adjustments to leverage new functionalities effectively.
Introduction of Google Analytics 4 (GA4):
Google replaced Universal Analytics with GA4. The challenge lies in the transition process, as businesses need to adapt to a new analytics paradigm. Migrating from Universal Analytics to GA4 requires a learning curve, potential data reconfiguration, and adjustments in reporting methods.
Building a company takes a lot of time. You need to have enough passion that you'll wake up every morning and grind all day and all night to get everything done.
What have been your biggest lessons learned in the last year?
This was not an easy year for the world economy. More startups shut down than ever before.
I’ll mention three important things, these were lessons we learned over time, not specifically this year.
1) Staying lean and focusing on core operations:
Amidst economic uncertainties, maintaining lean operations becomes imperative. Prioritizing essential business functions while minimizing unnecessary expenses and diversions helps navigate volatile market conditions.
2) A strong business Model:
The year reiterated the importance of a strong business model. Crafting a clear value proposition, diversifying revenue streams, understanding customer segments, and managing costs became pivotal.
3) Act fast:
The need for rapid decision-making and responsiveness to market changes heightened. Acting fast enabled us to create one of the most popular AI related marketing apps.
If you launched a product and it’s perfect, you launched it too slow and you lost the market.
What’s in the plans for the upcoming year, and the next 5 years?
StoreYa’s focus for many years has been AI in advertising. With the power of AI, we manage to optimize tens of thousands of ad campaigns. But this is just the beginning as this field evolves.
In the past year we launched the Product Description Wizard, this app integrates with Shopify and ChatGPT. It creates high-converting, compelling product descriptions in a click-of-a-button.
In the future, we will add the option to create product titles, blog posts, and ad texts.
The power of AI is endless, it will change our world, and our focus is to keep up with the power of AI and utilize it for our needs and the different apps we offer.
We will also keep the focus on acquiring the same target audience which is small business owners. We take pride in helping a small business owner put food on the table.
What’s the best thing you read in the last year?
Here are three things I recommend:
- Book: The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers Hardcover - by Ben Horowitz
- Podcast: Pivot by Kara Swisher and NYU Professor Scott Galloway
- YouTube channel: Noah Kagan, has fun educational interviews with experienced entrepreneurs
Advice for other entrepreneurs who might be struggling to grow their business?
You need to ask yourself, “Am I passionate enough to do this for the next 10 years?”
Building a company takes a lot of time. You need to have enough passion that you'll wake up every morning and grind all day and all night to get everything done.
You need to have the right partners with you, the ones that will run a marathon with you and not a sprint.
Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?
Yes! We have team members in Tel-Aviv, Berlin, and Silicon Valley, and we’re always looking to add great people to our team. The open positions are listed in our jobs section on our site.
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.
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