When I’m asked who the most important person is to sign up for our product, a bunch of exciting case studies pop into my mind. After 2 years of running Voucherify and over 150 active customers, I especially like to mention the clients who have found our product satisfying enough to roll it out globally and handle more than 300 000 coupon redemptions a month. But I want to put another one in the spotlight, the first one. The one that actually pushed us forward to build the platform.

Photo by Matthew Sleeper on Unsplash

BOOK A TIGER (BAT) is a fast-growing startup founded by Delivery Hero founders Nikita Fahrenholz and Claude Ritter. BAT is building the next generation platform for household services. They started with cleaning services, where they are offering customers a super simple and convenient way to book a trusted cleaner online.

We first met BAT when providing some bespoke software services. They wanted to integrate coupons into their marketing strategy. Because BAT marketing team is experienced in B2C promotions, they knew they needed to use unique coupons from the outset, firstly, to reduce fraud and secondly, most importantly, to improve marketing campaign tracking. At the same time, Matias Bonet, the CTO, didn’t want to invest time in a full-blown marketing solution which offers coupons among other things. He commissioned research to find a lightweight tool which provides developer-friendly building blocks for coupon management - similar to what they had already been using for other business areas like Contentful for CMS or Twilio for SMS.

We couldn’t find any, so we had to implement a simple coupon code generator and validation widget on the BAT website. The solution quickly became unmaintainable; imagine what developers felt when marketers attacked them with countless requests to add, remove, activate, deactivate, edit, expire, and count specific coupons. On top of that, they had been coming up with new business rules, e.g., a coupon is valid only for Berlin or it should be valid only on Thursday. The time spent on coupon management (a non-critical part of the business) had just doubled.

This triggered us to conceive Voucherify - a platform which:

  • gives marketers a dashboard to manage and track their coupon campaigns on their own, and
  • offers an API which enables developers to integrate coupons into the company software infrastructure (CRM, emails, SMS, mobile apps, invoices etc.).

And so, off we went to design the proof of concept for our first SaaS product ever.

It took us some time to develop a platform which justified replacing BAT’s custom coupon solution. However, in the meantime, some other companies approached us, and it seemed that they liked our product. This helped us gather momentum and refine our features.

Eventually, BAT decided to sign up and this is what they said:

In BOOK A TIGER, we needed a platform where we could manage our vouchers through a robust API with a simple client-side integration and where our Marketing Department could create and manage campaigns through a straightforward and functional UI. These requirements were fully met with Voucherify. Along the way, we also discovered new features inside this platform (especially third-party integrations) that additionally help us to make our work easier and our campaigns smarter.

And they’re still one of our happy customers, using the Voucherify coupon campaigns to grow the business globally. One more thing, BOOK A TIGER is a startup itself. As mentioned, it has a very knowledgeable team which offered us (directly and indirectly) a myriad of feedback tips over the course of our cooperation. We’d like to thank them for all the advice, especially the CTO, Matias Bonet.

After a couple of months, we began to notice increased traffic which converted into leads and ultimately into paying subscribers. We crossed the 10 paying customers mark and after the next year, 100. If you’re curious about what helped us get there, we’ve written two posts about it: The marketing stack that got us 5 and 100 customers.

But the marketing strategy has always been tightly related to the product. We had to figure out what it is our customers really want and how the final product should look. So, although Voucherify is self-service software, we have also opened it up for in-person conversations. We were afraid it wasn’t going to scale well, but in hindsight, after literally hundreds of Skype calls, I can admit it was the best thing we could have done.

These conversions shaped Voucherify’s feature set. It became more robust and enterprise-ready too. We’ve rolled out a full promotional toolkit which, apart from coupons, now supports referrals, cart-level discounts, and loyalty points.

At the same time, we haven’t dropped the original idea of creating developer-friendly software. We created the developer hub with numerous guides and examples on how to connect Voucherify to the business infrastructure. The developer-friendly API, thorough documentation and the myriad of plugins to various platforms like MailChimp, Mandrill, Twilio, Magento, WooCommerce, Shopify, Intercom, Unbounce, and more all had one goal - get promotional campaigns up and running regardless of what software tools they’re using to run their business.

This speed and the ease of integration attracted hundreds of small-to-medium companies who cannot afford to build promotional infrastructure in-house. Now, they can easily A/B test their coupon offerings and eventually drive more revenue. And their developers can finally focus on more business-critical tasks.

The bigger names have come as well. The enterprise-grade features like user roles and permissions, export to BI tools, the mobile apps for an offline site, or automated coupon delivery via email, SMS or push notifications convinced Freightos, Verivox, or one of the most prominent letter and parcel delivery companies in Europe amongst others.

Today, at the beginning of 2018, we’re really motivated to help more companies run promotional campaigns. Hopefully, Voucherify will enable them to implement advanced coupon strategies which so far have been the reserve of megacorps with tons of software developers onboard, like Amazon or Zalando.

About Voucherify

Our API-first platform helps developers integrate digital promotions across any marketing channel or customer touchpoint - eventually giving full control over campaigns back to the marketing team. With the user-friendly dashboard, they can create, distribute, and track campaigns with no need for technical knowledge. UI helps them customize campaign features starting from the basic ones like the discount type and expiry date and going up to more complex validation rules based on the order structure and customer profile.