Nulisec
European B2B marketplace
We have just added our marketplace to Product Hunt! If you like what we're doing and want to support our project, please consider upvoting our project, so that it can get to more people :)
Thank you for your support and Happy new year 2020!
Nulisec was incredibly lucky to get a chance to attend one of the biggest Tech conference - TechCrunch
We had our own little stand and we have met a lot of great people, our potential investors and partners!
It took us 1 year and 3 months to process 1000 orders on our marketplace, but we made it!
If you're curious, the average order value on our platform was 1.1k EUR, and we have generated more than 1200k EUR in total for all of our partners.
We had 1300 registered users on that day, and 149 stores on the platform.
Since the beginning, our team has been bootstrapping. We funded the project ourselves and worked from a small office. At times, there were 5 people in a 15 meters squared office.
Despite the space limitations and less comfy working conditions, we have a lot of good memories working here too. We have been able to develop and launch 2 projects from here, had countless meetings with many partners, and last but not least, fun.
But it's time to move on!
We have moved to a new Co-Working space, called Prague Innovation Center, or Innocrystal. It's about 10 minutes away from the previous place. And it looks awesome!
Since releasing our Marketplace 1.0, the product was at this time pretty much stable. So, we were thinking what next...
Well, in September when we started working on our Marketplace 1.0, we have made a few key decisions to save time. The first one was to minimize the use of any Javascript. And since none of our team members are UI/UX designers, we have bought a template from Envato to use for our marketplace.
The result is that now we have a usable product, but with an average user experience and no visual identity. It was time to do something about this.
So, we have hired an external Web Design company. They have made us a new logo, graphical manual, and designed a future look of our app.
For this new project, I have decided to use a different tech stack. I selected Nuxt.js framework, because we were already familiar with Vue.js, and instead of Bootstrap we used Tailwind CSS.
We started building a new frontend for our application, with PWA capabilities and our own Nulisec design. This is what would later become Nulisec Marketplace 2.0
I have worked days and nights on this new project, and because we had our 5 Online Stores running in production, I also had to maintain and give support to our existing customers.
But then, 6 months have passed and we have finally developed the first version of our platform, Nulisec Marketplace! It had only the basic functionalities, but most importantly, it could be connected to the B2B stores we have implemented in the past!
This means that on the first day of our launch, there will already be 5 stores, filled with products and pictures.
We used Laravel Spark as a foundation for this project.
Since launching our first B2B online store, we have launched 4 more stores by April. That's one store per month! We have found our customers, made some profit, that's good, no?
Well, not really. We've found out that the stores we have created, were abandoned. Put simply, our customers didn't know how to use them and maintain them. And that's really sad, because a store is supposed to have updated products, nice pictures, and generate orders. None of that was happening.
We had to do a lot of manual work for each of the stores we created. Taking pictures, editing them, uploading them, and even processing their orders! That was not sustainable.
After a long internal discussion we have decided to not create any more independent stores. Instead, we will create a platform where we will merge all of our B2B stores together. This way, we can build our own brand, propagate the whole platform, and all members of that platform would benefit from the features the platform provides.
And that's how the idea of Nulisec Marketplace was born!
After 3 months we have finished and released the first version of our B2B store. While everyone was celebrating the new years eve, I remember myself fixing bugs, doing finishing touches and deploying the project to production servers.
The store that we launched on this day is called PTT Global, a wholesale store from Prague with focus on toiletries, and in fact, it's still running since that day.
Our team decided that one developer is not enough, if Nulisec is to be a technological company. We decided to expand our team.
After several meetings and received assignments, we have found a candidate from Serbia. His name is Bojan and he was the perfect match.
Bojan saw the potential in Nulisec, and identified himself with our values - Friendship, Leadership, Integrity, Be of Service. After the initial meeting we knew that he had the same DNA as Nulisec.
It took 6 weeks, but I'm finally done building the minimum viable product of our Online Store. I called it Skytrade E-Commerce.
I worked on it 8 hours a day, 7 days a week. Since I was the only programmer in the team, I had to build the product myself.
My framework of choice for the backend was Laravel, even though I worked with Symfony in my previous job. For frontend I used Vue.js and I used bootstrap as the CSS framework.
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