INSIGHT: CrazyLister's journey from zero to 1 million ARR in two years
Posted: Tue Dec 03, 2024 9:19 am
Most of the funding was used to build our technical team: developers, QA engineers, designer, and VP of Product. Later we activated paid acquisition on Google. Today we spend ~$20k per month, this spending pays off in revenue from customers within 1.5 months.
How did you come up with this idea?
Growing our first company, an e-commerce business, from zero to $4.5 million in annual sales, we felt the pain firsthand.
How long did you work on it before launching it? When did you see your first dollar?
I got the first dollar about half a year after the first line of code was written.
Who are your oman phone number library customers? What is their target market?
Retailers selling in markets
Are you profitable? If not, when do you think you will get there?
As soon as we reached profitability in June 2017, we returned to negative cash flow to accelerate growth.
How did you get your first 100 clients?
Facebook groups and content marketing.
What are the top 2-3 distribution channels that are working best for you? Which channel didn’t work for you?
AdWords CAC:LTV 1:6
Content Marketing & SEO = 70% growth
You’ve now brought on a Facebook Acquisition Expert.
As for channels that didn't work for us, we haven't managed to run a successful affiliate program yet. We haven't managed to run a successful referral program, similar to Dropboxe's. We've failed miserably with banner placement.
Tell us 2-3 growth challenges you’ve encountered recently (and if you have a strategy, how to solve them).
Challenges we’re having with customer support – we need to serve customers 24/7, customer support experts in Israel are not enough, so we also hired in Brazil.
Challenges in transferring knowledge to new customer support experts who are not physically present in our offices. How to build a scalable process between customer support and the technical team? Prioritizing bugs and features, etc. When you’re small, customer support can go to the nearby room and talk to developers – as we scale, this is becoming a challenge. We’re building processes that will be sustainable for 50-100 customer support experts.
Some of the tasks aren’t worth doing in-house. What do you outsource?
We use an agency for SEO – we’re just getting started, let’s see how it goes. We felt like we needed an SEO expert – it’s a complicated and ever-changing space with a lot of conflicting opinions. We had too many questions and too few answers. Is our site fast enough? What should we put in robots.txt? How to use canonicals, no index, is our blog post SEO optimized enough? Why are we ranking low for certain keywords?
Tell us what was the biggest mistake you made while building and promoting your product and what you learned from it.
Not having a tech co-founder from day one. We were two business partners in a SaaS company. It caused a lot of pain and wasted resources. Some of the challenges of not having a tech co-founder:
How do you interview, assess, and hire developers?
How do you decide which technology to build the product on?
How can you assess if the estimates given by developers are realistic?
If you were to start CrazyLister today, what would you do differently?
Migrating to the US. Israel is more about cyber than e-commerce
It was VERY difficult to get off the ground in Israel with an e-commerce startup.
If you had moved to the early stage of the US, what would you do differently there?
40% of our customers are in the US. We would have reached more customers faster. We would have reached more partners and platforms faster, and we would have learned faster from these relationships.
It is a big challenge to communicate with customers and partners across the ocean via Skype.
We fly to the US several times a year for strategic meetings and conferences, but at the end of the day, you have to be where your business is.
It would probably have been easier for us to raise funds in the US, where e-commerce is huge.
In Israel, we are the CYBER and deep tech nation. Very few VCs really understand e-commerce.
Where do you see CrazyLister in 5 years?
CrazyLister will become a platform for marketplaces to complement their offering.
Today we already manage around 30 million products from thousands of retailers; we have very valuable data on these products and retailers that is very valuable for marketplaces and platforms. Marketplaces will be able to complement their CrazyLister offering with very precise filters.
How did you come up with this idea?
Growing our first company, an e-commerce business, from zero to $4.5 million in annual sales, we felt the pain firsthand.
How long did you work on it before launching it? When did you see your first dollar?
I got the first dollar about half a year after the first line of code was written.
Who are your oman phone number library customers? What is their target market?
Retailers selling in markets
Are you profitable? If not, when do you think you will get there?
As soon as we reached profitability in June 2017, we returned to negative cash flow to accelerate growth.
How did you get your first 100 clients?
Facebook groups and content marketing.
What are the top 2-3 distribution channels that are working best for you? Which channel didn’t work for you?
AdWords CAC:LTV 1:6
Content Marketing & SEO = 70% growth
You’ve now brought on a Facebook Acquisition Expert.
As for channels that didn't work for us, we haven't managed to run a successful affiliate program yet. We haven't managed to run a successful referral program, similar to Dropboxe's. We've failed miserably with banner placement.
Tell us 2-3 growth challenges you’ve encountered recently (and if you have a strategy, how to solve them).
Challenges we’re having with customer support – we need to serve customers 24/7, customer support experts in Israel are not enough, so we also hired in Brazil.
Challenges in transferring knowledge to new customer support experts who are not physically present in our offices. How to build a scalable process between customer support and the technical team? Prioritizing bugs and features, etc. When you’re small, customer support can go to the nearby room and talk to developers – as we scale, this is becoming a challenge. We’re building processes that will be sustainable for 50-100 customer support experts.
Some of the tasks aren’t worth doing in-house. What do you outsource?
We use an agency for SEO – we’re just getting started, let’s see how it goes. We felt like we needed an SEO expert – it’s a complicated and ever-changing space with a lot of conflicting opinions. We had too many questions and too few answers. Is our site fast enough? What should we put in robots.txt? How to use canonicals, no index, is our blog post SEO optimized enough? Why are we ranking low for certain keywords?
Tell us what was the biggest mistake you made while building and promoting your product and what you learned from it.
Not having a tech co-founder from day one. We were two business partners in a SaaS company. It caused a lot of pain and wasted resources. Some of the challenges of not having a tech co-founder:
How do you interview, assess, and hire developers?
How do you decide which technology to build the product on?
How can you assess if the estimates given by developers are realistic?
If you were to start CrazyLister today, what would you do differently?
Migrating to the US. Israel is more about cyber than e-commerce
It was VERY difficult to get off the ground in Israel with an e-commerce startup.
If you had moved to the early stage of the US, what would you do differently there?
40% of our customers are in the US. We would have reached more customers faster. We would have reached more partners and platforms faster, and we would have learned faster from these relationships.
It is a big challenge to communicate with customers and partners across the ocean via Skype.
We fly to the US several times a year for strategic meetings and conferences, but at the end of the day, you have to be where your business is.
It would probably have been easier for us to raise funds in the US, where e-commerce is huge.
In Israel, we are the CYBER and deep tech nation. Very few VCs really understand e-commerce.
Where do you see CrazyLister in 5 years?
CrazyLister will become a platform for marketplaces to complement their offering.
Today we already manage around 30 million products from thousands of retailers; we have very valuable data on these products and retailers that is very valuable for marketplaces and platforms. Marketplaces will be able to complement their CrazyLister offering with very precise filters.