ShopWindow
Social first e-commerce platform.
When the COVID hit, ShopWindow decided to focus on the self-service front, as the ease of use and setup speed of ShopWindow can be of real help for businesses going digital unavoidably over night.
ShopWindow abandons by now the enterprise front: sales cycles would take too long, even more given the uncertainty the COVID introduced globally. We take from there the good ideas and the interest Worldline has shown in our concept.
Last but not least, I had a decision to take: find a sales co-founder or find a technical co-founder, handing over technical stuff and me pivoting to sales? I went with the second: apart from not having a lot of money to pay a decent professional, no one is going to transmit the knowledge and the passion about the project as the founder!
After going through some candidates during the last months and discarding them, I had a good idea of what I wanted, what I didn't want and the type of chemistry ShopWindow + me need for this to work.
Luckily, I found Robert, I couldn't think of a better technical co-founder for ShopWindow!
Direct out reach, some interest came through the website, followed the conversations and the first users came in on the self-service front.
Additionally, ShopWindow got a proposal from a big payment infrastructure company (Worldline) in Europe on the Enterprise front.
ShopWindow is beginning to build some presence online and that means that the project is beginning to reach people and new ideas come up.
Like this I got contacted by a firm interested to roll out the concept across Africa.
Unbanked people are majority in Africa, but Mobile Money enables commerce (on and offline) using their phone balance as an e-Wallet. Supporting this payment method was a must for the platform to really reach everyone there!
It is integrated now and I am excited to see there are possibilities ahead in such an interesting market as Africa! 🤘
Researched, talked with first early adopters, built prototypes that solved problems just to get feedback, saw some common pain points and decided to jump into development.
As I imagined, this was a whole project, where I had most of the expertise I needed (the hardest one to acquire, backend and API), but not all of it: UI/UX, legal paperwork, website development, marketing, promotion, copy writing...
Nothing you cannot do with time, effort and some Fiverr for the design parts where I honestly suck... lol
Let's see what is to come, but I definitely wanted to share this big milestone with the community and the podcast, who have been of great support throughout the process!
Check the result here, I would be happy to know what you think of it!
Cheers everyone!
One man band falls short... One man orchestra would be better!
Feeling proud seeing things working as expected: discipline and effort paid off!
Finishing a couple of show off videos and ready to share with the community!
Funny note: https://twitter.com/fcarriedos/status/1184092762762858496
Brush frontend skills + templates + awesome drop in services + Fiverr + plenty of time to refine the message to deliver = Expressive informative website!
Our attention span is now <4seconds on average, so animations, expressive images and videos are fundamental nowadays!
My personal mistake: don't make it too long, when you think message is delivered, you are done!
The creature: https://messengersell.com
Some of our closest early adopters told us they would really like to have @MessengerSell live, because they already need it!!!
Exciting but challenging, we are still working on stuff that needs our attention and testing everything live required some time...
Luckily, similarly to staging environment, the deployment happened smoothly, some $1 test transactions to ensure payments flow properly... Et Voilà! We are live!
Thanks to our early adopters for trusting us, you guys rock! 🤘😝
This has recalled me sooo much of moving out... XD When you just thought you were done, you spot another bunch of things to do...
Luckily experience and discipline have paid off and deploying into staging environment worked as expected! 🤘😝
Aside from this, technically speaking the project remains manageable by a reeeeeeally small team! 💪
While MessengerSell aims to be a great companion for existing tools and platforms, we wanted it to be self-contain.
The reason behind this ☝️is that we want to support even the newest newbies (or new-commerce as we like to call them, XD). We really think that the same way social networks made easier to the whole world to approach the Internet for publishing and for sharing, they might help people going into e-commerce.
We would love being the platform for these guys ☝️
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