Glorify
Graphic Design tool for E-commerce
This is going to allow us to scale web pages faster for marketing and SEO efforts.
Webflow is a great no-code tool too, but with Framer's latest developments, it makes it much easier for a design-led team to own the web site ecosystem!
Check it out here www.glorify.com. Since moving our organic traffic seems steady, let's hope it does not drop (average 40K to 50K visitors pm).
Also if you want an in depth look at why we switched check out this video:
https://youtu.be/m9Ne7-xmcHI
Of course, it is Black Friday / Cyber Monday time 😅
But still, happy to see some revenue trickle in. Way better than last year, which shows we are going in the right direction product-wise.
Although in the past, when we did lifetime deals we would cross 30X this amount
I guess that's just lifetime deals 🤣
Anyway here is the deal page:
👉 https://blackfriday.glorify.com/
As mentioned in my previous post, the platform we are building is super ambitious. The big goal to sit right between Canva and Adobe for collaborative content creation.
Every year we realize our mistakes in UX implementation and continue to iterate. We've finally come to a place of confidence in some of the nuances in UX, so we're really excited to ship new things. We wished we discovered this last year, but there is no point regretting.
As a founder my personal growth in UX has 10x'd after being proactive about my learning. I truly believe learning and mastering UX and design systems allows you to lead the team to ship a much better product faster! Literally 100x faster. In fact with a strong UX culture you can skip weeks and months of painful handoff docs and loom video explanations for your dev team.
the majority of the design work has been handoff, so while Glorify is being built, we have rallied our team to pursue a new opportunity:
We know we could of saved 100,000s of $$$$ if we had a better UX process. We know for a fact most UX/UI design agencies and freelancers are not kept up to date in terms of Figma's best practices for scalable design.
So we started our new high ticket productized service https://together.design/
We've already hit $4K MRR and got a stream of free plan demo signups with the potential to take our MRR to $16K MRR.
The idea is to stop burning our cash reserves which is depleting fast, and secure just 10 clients to offset our overhead. I pray to god we hit this target soon 🙏🏾
We had an ambitious goal to evolve towards and become the most balanced design tool ever built for professional designers and non designers alike.
The technologies that we started diving into in the beginning of the year were highly advanced. This included a new technology stack to implement an infinite canvas as seen on tools like Figma and Miro.
The journey was arduous to say the least, but we got there. In July we launched a private BETA (close to ALPHA) staged 3.0 version.
It had the infamous infinite canvas, live comments for feedback, smart shapes, pen tool, pencil with thickness simulation, dynamic gradient colors and revamped asset panel experience and so much more.
The tool looked more sophisticated to appeal to professional designers but also was clean and intuitive for non-designers.
It was just the beginning of our evolution.
We only had a few weekly sales, our MRR was fluctuating up and down by between 2 to 3%. So we thought let's double up our pricing and add a bit more value per plan.
It allowed us to increase our revenue spent per customer which was positive. What followed in the next months was a tiny bit of growth, but eventually we did start seeing churn on a lot of our old annual plans which lowered the MRR overall.
So in summary we saw a slight increase followed by a slight dip.
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Thanks for sharing @OmarGlorify - interesting result there. Were you receiving feedback from customers that the pricing was out of whack with the value in your offering?
We tried everything during Black Friday. Super low cost deal, but our product was just not there yet. We have so much work to do. MRR at the time was around $8K.
Conversations with our VC were getting tougher and tougher.
We were still persistent to make things work...
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I think your product is really, really cool. But as I have done e-commerce myself in the past, I could quickly give you my opinion:
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Your offer is too expensive: Almost the same price as the adobe suite and much more expensive than canva. Maybe you should try to lower the price and access your marketing on the tools that canva don't have (Like product mockup for example).
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Develop your twitter! There are a lot of e-tailers / dropshippers on twitter who are looking for tools of this quality. There are many organic strategies that can help you get a lot of customers.
There's a lot of strategy to exploit for your product.
If you want to talk about it don't hesitate.Hope to see you soon!
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Let's talk! Drop me an pm on LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/in/omar-farook-1a9bb612b/
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So now that black friday is coming again - do you have any new ideas? For what it's worth, I wrote this article: 12 Black Friday marketing Ideas ... maybe it can help.
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Thanks Justin let me check it out!
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This was a painful part in our story. Our product crashed and we suddenly realized our code base and infrastructure couldn't handle the user growth or our future plans.
We were very ambitious about what we were going to build. Things like an infinite canvas with full featured video editor. Imagine editing video on Figma! 🤯
All of those plans had to be postponed big time as our entire code base and infrastructure had to be re-written. 😭 The hardest part was telling our new investors.
The app was so slow during this process we lost tonnes of MRR users and had lots of complaints.
Technical side: we essentially had to move to Google Kubernetes and shift our front-end code base from Vue JS to React.
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In hindsight, did the change from vuejs to react really matter? It seems that you swapped one frontend to another, were scalability seemed to have been the underlying issue. Solving that with a scalable solution like k8s should have already been sufficient. Care to explain this choice?
Thanks for sharing so much of your failures, these are by far the best lessons for oneself and others, even though they are painful.
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Thanks! Of course happy to share this stuff to help us all learn.
The scalability was to do with our infrastructure, we needed to move from our old dedicated server with OVH to cloud based. So Google Kubernetes was the way forwards to solve that.
VueJS to React was mroe to do with features. It was the safest option for the features we were building. Remember we have to use HTML5 Canvas libraries to build design tools, so the front-end code framework that interacts with that is super important to build custom features. And many competitors that were able to really customize Canvas libraries to their needs were using React. VueJS had a lot of bottlenecks when it came to customization.
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Also, why is there a server performance issue for a front-end heavy application?
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Our CTO @fahadnabbasi can answer that in detail, but I think that it's still backend heavy with all the file saving scenarios.
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VueJS to React was mroe to do with features
What are some examples of such limitations? As far as I'm aware, they are both pretty similar in performance and the way you write code.
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Again @fahadnabbasi can answer that in detail, but as mentioned the move was purely to introduce a lot of custom code that would allow us to build the features on the HTML5 Canvas library we were using.
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@XCS and @luceos there were a number of reasons behind the switch, the most important switch was the backend Kubernetes and yes it has nothing to do with frontend frameworks . Initially we were not on cloud (funds etc issues) but then we got a lot more users so we decided to switch to the cloud infrastructure as our dedicated server was not able to handle the load.
For the frontend, as @OmarGlorify mentioned in his other article, we kept on adding features on top of our initial application(which was scalable able enough for our current needs and some more features).
We were fine with it as the Google Cloud fixed our users scalability issues.Then we came up with infinite canvas approach, video editing tool, smart shapes/blocks, batch processing and some more cool frontend features. The client side performance also became a key factor as canvas uses a lot of processing on client's machine.
The old vueJS application structure was not good enough to handle all these features while keeping the client end performance good so we had to restructure the app in a way it will handle all these new features as well as future features.We could keep using VueJS and restructure the frontend app but one of the problems we faced was finding good VueJS developers who can work with us long term and are good in canvas as well.
We decided to rewrite the application in reactJS instead of VueJS, so this decision of switching to reactJS was mainly because we can find good reactJS resources quite easily and community support is much more powerful and active in case of react.
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React is fire, yo
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I had the same question. It would be great if you can go into detail on that one. Thanks for sharing!
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Hope those changes are for the better!
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Well our latest build works are efficient as Figma, so I think we're going in the right direction ;)
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After 70 calls with VC's and a few offers. We finally found a VC that was a match for us. Fuel Ventures who led a $2m round, believed that we could realize the ultimate vision we had beyond E-commerce. A collaborative content design tool for everyone that is perfectly balanced and sits perfectly between the 2 industry standards: The complexity of Adobe and simplicity of Canva.
Non designers can get started solo with hardly any learning curve and professional designers can harness full creative freedom. We believe this is what will create seamless collaboration like never seen before.
A big vision driven by all our user conversations and data.
I wrote about the round here:
https://medium.com/glorify/towards-a-glorious-tomorrow-98308c677b6b
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Gratz, Omar. Well done on the persistence!
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Thanks man, still so much to do while we burn every day! Wish us luck ❤️
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Congrats! Had a look and even though I'm not the target audience for your software, it's super cool! :)
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Thanks dude!
Well we're evolving to an all round design tool for non designers and pro designers alike! So anyone could be the target audience, if you need a design tool give it a try :)
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The future of any successful design tool today has been through VC funding. Look a the funding rounds that Canva and Figma have been through to get to where they are. Also this space relies heavily on free organic traffic to sign up to a free plan followed by making huge shifts in user behaviour so that they love your tool. It takes time for users to convert!
We had a PPC agency working with us at the time. We were able to run ads profitably, we probably generated roughly around $30K to $40K on a $10K monthly ad budget. So we decided to keep the deal going until we found VC funding.
After hard work, we managed to get Glorify 2.0 live. In high insight it could've been much better - But that's me being super self critical.
We did a new lifetime deal soft launch in an early adopter community called LTDF. We generated around $30K in revenue.
We then increased the lifetime deal price and went public for Black Friday we generated around $300K in revenue over a 2 month period.
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