A year ago we onboarded our first customer to the Blueprint platform. It's been 12 months packed full of wins, tough moments and a hell of a lot of learnings!
We caught up with our COO & Co-Founder Rory to break down the top 4 things he's learnt form building an eCommerce software in 2021:
Get cosy with your buyer
There is no substitute for feedback from the people you are building for. You can have the best engineering team in the world, but if you don't know whose problems you're solving and why, you're up the proverbial creek sans paddle.
Part way through this year I realised we didn't have enough of this insight. Which had to change, ASAP. Since, our team has spoken to 100s of the Shopify merchants we're trying to help. And every chat is gold dust for us.
Getting into the nitty gritty of what's keeping them up at night, where their bleeding neck issues are, really brings clarity to our product strategy, and ultimately makes Blueprint a better software.
P.S. A massive shout out to all those incredible eCom Leads, Marketing Managers and Founders who've taken the time to chat to us this year - we couldn't do what we do without you! 🙌
Leverage the power of the tech ecosystem
eCommerce is an industry where the tech used is pretty universal across most stores. And sure enough, when we asked brands what they had in their stack, the same names kept coming up.
Shopify for web hosting. Klaviyo for email. Gorgias and Zendesk for CX. ReCharge, Bold and Smartrr for subscriptions. It quickly became clear that working alongside these amazing platforms could only improve our own offering.
We put a ton of work into figuring out how we interact with existing tech tools, meaning Blueprint now fits seamlessly into the eCom stack with no-code integrations.
Solve big problems
A year ago, Blueprint was a great way for brands to move customers from first to second order via text. And it still is! But we very quickly realised that wasn't enough.
The feedback we gathered suggested that the ability to flexibly manage subscriptions and provide great CX is really important to merchants. If we weren't solving for them, we weren't an important product.
Fast forward to today, and thanks to a renewed focus, our brands are now enabling their customers to skip and delay subscription orders, and offering laser fast support - all via SMS.
The easier, the better
Around Q2 we built a cross-sell tool which enabled merchants to increase the average LTV of their customers via SMS.
Sounds great in theory. But we quickly found brands wanted more support and guidance on how to get the best out of the feature in practice.
So we changed it. Only this time, added a recommendation engine which number crunches Shopify data, and tells merchants the right cross-sell flows to send to the right customers at the right time.
Brands can set it up in one-click from the Blueprint dashboard, and the whole thing is automated - meaning it's super easy for brands to start driving LTV from day one.
What's coming in 2022
We're building the world's best customer experience tool for eCommerce, and 2022 is set to be a big year on that journey. Here's where our product focus will be next year as we build our platform:
- Empower stores to better understand their customers
- Make it quicker and easier for buyers to interact with brands
- Build more loyal customers, and ultimately, revenue for our merchants
To learn more about how Blueprint drives CX & retention for eCommerce stores via SMS & WhatsApp, check out our help centre.
