How we built and sold our SaaS for 7 digits - AMA

It was our first startup experience. 3 years down the road, we sold Nextsale.

*Nextsale is a conversion optimization platform that helps online store owners create social proof and grow Email/SMS lists via targeted widgets.

Here below I split down the main subjects from the beginning to exit👇

How did it all start?

While working in the eCommerce ecosystem for almost 10 years, my co-founders Vusal and Taleh, found out that conversion optimization was painful for merchants. That was the main trigger on how they come up with the idea to build Nextsale.

The aim was to create nice designed on-page widgets which are vital for online shops to engage potential buyers and increase product sales.

We’ve launched Nextsale beta in March 2019 in the Shopify App Store as a social proof app. Within a month we’ve been featured by Shopify to the Staff Picks section, this drove a big amount of traffic that helped us to get the first 1,000 installs.

In the early period, we launched in the Product Hunt, BetaList, and got a few feedbacks.

Since the launching of the beta version I’ve started to talk with merchants, listened to their comments, and how they manage the store and conversions. Everything that they've mentioned I’ve captured in the backlog files that were discussed periodically with the team to implement and put further roadmap of the product.

Being customer-centric and continuously talking to customers and implementing their requests pushed us to add a few more widgets to the platform like popups to grab email and SMS numbers, and sign-up bars with countdown timers. We’ve become a complete set of conversion widgets under one roof of Nextsale app.

In short, we made a product, found a product-market-fit, and got traction. Then, we continued product development and sped up user acquisition.

Growth

After getting into Shopify App Store, we integrated with WordPress, then developed Nextsale for custom sites, and became available on BigCommerce Apps Marketplace. This helped us to be available for as many merchants as possible on the most popular eCommerce platforms.

Getting customers may be hard, but keeping customers is harder. What helped us to keep the churn rate as low as possible - at 5%, is being always in touch with our customers, listening to their concerns even before they become our customers. I would try to be in contact with the customers from the very beginning of the installation to them being our long-term customers.

If there was a technical issue or need for custom solutions, Vusal would solve and develop in the shortest possible time to keep our customers satisfied.

As mentioned above, I had a backlog file, where I put every suggestion, feedbacks, complaints, and rough ideas. Then, I’d share the file with the team periodically to discuss, prioritize the tasks, and work on the made points.

Drafting plans and packages and finding the most optimal pricing for each plan was an actual challenge. With continuous competitor research and reflecting on the customers’ feedback, we switched from impression-based plans to monthly unique visitors which was the turning point in our conversions and plan upgrades. Plus, we gave the option for an annual subscription with a discount and announced it with a newsletter, and we succeeded in increasing the number of annual subscriptions.

Afterwards.. We worked on the in-app user journey, made it easy to reach the “aha moment” (for us it was creating a campaign), and reduced the time and clicks that take to create Nextsale campaigns. We brainstormed, and Taleh created ready-to-publish campaign templates that are backed with the most used tools and settings. All these improvements made it possible to launch a campaign within 3 clicks which contributed to the stickiness of our app.

There are more than 1.7M merchants on Shopify. This pool of huge opportunities resulted in most of our installations coming from Shopify App Store. For this, our marketing manager - Goran Ćulibrk focused more on the optimization of Shopify App Store alongside the other marketing activities.

We didn’t put much money on paid ads (PPC, Facebook, etc.), we had ads campaigns running but only for a short period of time. Most of our installations happened organically on each eCommerce platform’s marketplace. For a quick note, we realized that Facebook ads aren't effective for SaaS.

Also, I was trying to get as many reviews as possible on each marketplace. We have reached 300 total reviews with an average rating of 5.0 star at the end of this October on Shopify App Store. All the Shopify app page optimizations, getting continuous reviews, product development contributed to be selected to the Staff Picks.

Since we became available on Shopify App Store, we have been selected to the staff picks two times - where each time we were featured on the App Store’s homepage for 7 days.

Me and Goran, we were always keeping an eye on our Shopify competitors from the SASI, The Shopify App Store Index.

Meanwhile, Narmina - our content manager was on the SEO, blog, and social media content side and writing guest posts to grow organic traffic and visibility.

First, we were publishing one article per week for almost 2 years, then we gave a break to writing and started polishing and optimizing the articles based on the Ahrefs insights and top search queries on the Search Console. Our articles got to rank on the first page of SERP for many keywords. We’ve subscribed Ahrefs’s plan for only one month for getting insight, keyword research, and tracking.

What we’ve learned: always listen and work on the feedback and never ever think that your product is perfect or the development is done. Be open to changes and give customers what they want, and deliver value to them by being in contact with them.

Events, accelerations..

Nextsale is backed by NCA, SUP, 500 Startups accelerator programs.

In Q4 of 2019 and Q1 of 2020, we participated in TechCrunch and Shopify Pursuit Amsterdam events and 500Georgia accelerator program.

Left to right: Taleh, Vusal, and me, in the TechCrunch Disrupt event in Berlin.

Key benefits: participating in such events helped us share ideas, enlarge our network, meet with potential partners, attend workshops, and exchange valuable knowledge.

Building a team

When we first started, we were a team of 11. Then we squeezed down the number to 5 to increase the team’s efficiency and continued as a team of 5 til the end.

Nextsale has 3 co-founders: Vusal Orujov - lead engineer, Taleh Karimli - product designer, and me, Orkhan Hajiyev - growth hacker.

The Nextsale team is consist of an engineer, UI/UX designer, head of growth, digital marketer, and content manager. We all are passionate about the mission to help online businesses grow faster.

Goran, Taleh, me, Vusal, and Narmina.

Way to exit

When the Covid 19 pandemic started, we got a boom in interest for our product due to the tremendous increase in eCommerce businesses. Since 2020, we have been getting lots of offers on selling Nextsale.

At that time, we were on the MicroAcquire platform, a marketplace for selling startups. Now it was time to consider the offers and make the best decision.

Here we are. We sold Nextsale for 7 figures.

We’ve gone all the processes online over zoom due to the pandemic. And, it’s our final exit scene:

See how the full acquisition process went on MicroAcquire with Orkhan’s interview with Andrew Gazdecki (Founder and CEO of MicroAcquire):
Check the full interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRo7as9L-wo

What’s next?

Update: When I wrote this piece a year ago, we were in the process of building Uvodo as a self-hosted and headless eCommerce platform. However, after a year of development and gathering valuable customer feedback, we made a strategic pivot. Presently, we’ve launched Uvodo (Hosted) as the world's easiest eCommerce platform. For further information, you can read about it in our From Pivot to Success post.

To be continued…

Any questions?