As 3 people without investment "magic button" for the stores did

What happened before that?

The article has no direct links to our product or even its screenshots. Yes, I'm still scared of UFOs.



A little more than a year ago, I talked about the use of the game approach in e-commerce , and in January I showed what this idea turned into and how we were served with Canadian incubators . We didn’t get to the incubator, although we got to the very end. We could join any incubator in Ukraine, but their conditions did not seem very attractive to us. So, we just worked a lot for these 9 months, and at this time, new materials about “gamification” in online trading did not appear on Habré, except, for some reason, that the public was very interested in this material .
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A new beginning

After checking the ideas of the game approach to pricing in the store with random prices and receiving feedback from sellers and customers, we analyzed the behavior of customers and decided to create a mass product for any online retailer. This solution was supposed to be inexpensive, effective, easy to use and beautiful. Like the button "make beautiful", but for sellers.

We decided to move away from the idea of ​​“random prices”, since people could not clearly understand how this works and this wording scared them away. Now we offer to win a random size discount for free. The idea was to keep the customer unsatisfied with the price of goods, inviting him to win a discount. This increases conversion. It was decided to limit the number of attempts to get a new price / discount and offer to get more attempts for “Like” and “Sheira” in social networks. If a visitor has issued a coupon - this is already the lead for the store, which can be turned into a buyer even if he does not use this coupon. We also decided that it would be cool to offer users who took a coupon to use it immediately by filling out a quick order form. For such orders using the coupon, we planned to take a commission of about 3%. In addition, it was planned to monetize the project through paid promotion services and its platform of discount offers, like the bored Groupon, but with occasional discounts and commission 10 times lower. In the end, everything turned out quite differently.

Project work

After the test store was closed, we had already written the pricing generation logic, the database, the import of goods, the collection of statistics, the configured servers on DigitalOcean, and quite a lot more. And then there was enough PHP + MySQL, and now suffices. Later we will move some of the functions to node.js and nginx. Everything was originally built on services, so that later it was possible to spread functions across different servers (admin panel — your server, button / clicks — your server, mail — your server, directory — your server), and to reduce development time, suitable ready-made solutions. For example, PHP-Daemon was used to track the queue of letters (and other tasks). We write the letter to the database, he finds it and sends it via Mandrill.

But, we did not have a beautiful design. Design of everything: the widget itself, the project presentation for investors, the landing page. In total, 5 people worked on this problem in turn for 3 months. The presentation even hung in the Trending in Social Media section of the main SlideShare, and one of the venture funds paid special attention to the project because of it.



Contractors and employees violated deadlines 4 times. During this time, I managed to work in a startup incubator for a couple of months, reject several offers of pre-seed investment and apply for free participation in all relevant conferences. Our SRT, meanwhile, wrote a RESTful API (Luracast Restler), screwed up localization and implemented a basic admin panel for partner stores (Laravel).

We started connecting stores and solved a whole bunch of problems for them:

• We raise conversions by holding customers to whom the discount is important.
• We generate leads (contact potential customers) as soon as someone gets a coupon
• We make sales as soon as the coupon is used.
• We are increasing the partner's fan base and the number of mentions in social networks.
• We improve the interactivity of the partner site and raise it in the results of search results.
• We create an informational and advertising occasion.

We worked and worked, and even implemented service integration in offline stores through a QR code or a short link on the price tag of the product when clicked on which the mobile browser opened the game with this product from this seller so that the customer could win a discount and buy the product on the spot , along the way, telling friends about him on Facebook and Twitter.

But, as it turned out, it was not enough to take a 3% commission from each transaction. We still had the option of monetization through our own site, because for some sites, 3% is a penny, compared to any competing solution. There were also additional paid services, such as the inclusion of partner offers in an email newsletter or the collection and sale of data. Doubts came to an end, when the spouse of our service station and part-time “bizdev” in a large advertising company showed us the specific mechanics of monetization through the very anonymous data on customer preferences. But, for this data there should be VERY much, so one more thing was added to our advantages:

• We do it all for FREE.

Button Distribution and Current Status

Now we were sure that we would connect thousands of stores in the first six months! After all, we are cool and free! But no. There are dozens of interested stores, but inserting just two lines of code into your website and transferring a list of promotional items (or giving a link to the yandex market feed) turned out to be too difficult for many. Probably every SaaS faced this. The problem of integration. Maybe customers just want us to hack their website and set everything up by ourselves? I dont know.

But then we got lucky. We became semi-finalists of their Founder Games and received free admissions and a demo table for a startup at the Webit Congress in Istanbul. It was not as cool as it was described by their website, and we decided not to go to a party with girls from FTV, we were preparing for a demo day. But, we found about a dozen interested investors (out of 400 declared) and many potential partners who wish to establish our button, among which, for example, Turkcell.

Now we are preparing to participate in IDCEE 2014 (free of charge, as selected at the startup competition) and are negotiating with partners and investors. We have to find $ 500K of investment, hire 15 people and in six months or a year build a new global discount service with an unusual way of monetization.

Do not be afraid, use ready-made solutions, create value for your product, you will succeed!