CarrierWave
Package monitoring for merchants.
It finally happened, I reached Ramen profitability on this project!
It's just over 2 years since I wrote the first code.
Though I haven't put too much time into it. All told, I've maybe spent 4 months on it in the past 2 years.
Maybe now that is has enough revenue to pay the bills, I can spend more time on it and improve it with some new features and improve the marketing too (can't forget the marketing).
Currently, it only has a handful of clients. The good news is there's lots of room for growth. And I really like B2B, it's much easier to get one >$100/mo subscription than 10 B2C @$10/mo.
Onward.
I refactored the code to use a 3rd-party to get tracking data instead of using my own adapter code. This way it supports way more carriers (20+) and it's less integration code to write and support.
This change forced me to adjust the pricing model a bit. Since I now have costs associated to each shipment, I modified the fees to be usage-based (for larger merchants).
Started trialing the new code-base today, and will see if it works well. Fingers crossed.
Got the first paying customer today. At the highest level too $200/mo.
Now the race is on to find more customers and reach ramen profitability.
Part of the agreement with the customer is to build a new integration with an OMS, so I'm starting work on that too.
It was a quiet launch, but it felt good to finally put the site out there and go live.
I did start getting a few inbound leads a couple days later, but definitely marketing is something that needs work.
There is a lot of integration work to do, each prospect uses different software. In time, I hope to integrate with all the major e-com software platforms.
Began testing with real data. Many issues to work on, but the concept works and is finding problems (which is what it was designed to do)
In the first batch, it located a few shipments that were marked "label printed" but were never received by the carrier.
Started working on the project after having several discussions about fulfillment problems with a few merchants.
Most carriers provide tracking numbers, but there isn't an easy way to monitor them in bulk. It seems tracking was designed for consumers that track one package at time. Whereas merchants want to track thousands at a time.
2 Comments
Congrats, that's so awesome!
Thanks Phillip