SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
$1m Ecommerce Agency Spends $200k to Launch Shopify SaaS
21 Jan 2023
Chapter 1: What event is being promoted at the beginning of the episode?
Guys, SaaS Open is our next big event in New York City. March 16th and 17th, we'll have a thousand SaaS leaders all sharing how they built their companies. Our keynotes are Henry Shuck, Marie Martins from Tally.sao, Serby from Symbol, Christopher of DocHub, who had a big exit.
Again, hundreds of speakers, a thousand plus attendees, and we've got folks bringing their entire executive teams because we have stages for founders, heads of product, head of finance and BD, CMOs and CROs, and then people in HR stage. It's going to be special. Prices are increasing every week, so you don't want to wait.
Go to sasopen.com right now to see what the ticket price is and lock in your spot today. Again, that's sasopen.com, March 16th and 17th in New York City. Tickets are almost sold out. You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latka, where I sit down and interview the top SaaS founders, like Eric Wan from Zoom. If you'd like to subscribe, go to getlatka.com.
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Guys, his e-commerce agency, Walter Interactive, hit a million dollars in revenue last year with 15 full-time employees. He now has launched a SaaS company inside of that company. He spun it out. It's called Glotify.com. Think of it almost like the ClickFunnels for e-commerce and Shopify. He's waiting on Shopify's approval of the app. He spent about $200,000 on it so far.
Got 150 free users getting ready to launch pricing publicly, where he's going to charge $100 per month per store. I predict big things for him. We'll see what happens next. Hey folks, my guest today is Mark Allard. He started an e-commerce agency called Walter Interactive in 2014.
He's passionate about helping e-commerce merchants and managers succeed by using data to create clear plans and roadmaps for their marketing teams. He draws inspiration from athletes' data-driven training plans and aims to bring that approach to the digital space, specifically AI-driven growth for Shopify merchants. He's building this at Glowtify.com. Mark, you ready to take us to the top?
Yeah, thank you.
Thanks for the introduction. You bet. Let's start with Walter Interactive, which you founded in 2014. Were you selling your own e-commerce goods or you were an agency helping e-commerce brands?
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Chapter 2: How did Mark Allard grow his e-commerce agency to $1 million in revenue?
So just to be clear, the agency is making all your money right now. Glotify is still free with 150 free users.
Exactly. And the Shopify app is in... in approval by Shopify. So we went through back and forth with all the GDPR compliance. Yeah.
This is very surprising to me because if people go to Glowtify.com, that's G-L-O-W and then T-I-F-Y.com, the site looks like it could be doing 100 million bucks a year in revenue. It's very well put together, very well organized. It looks like you've invested a lot of money building this. Is that accurate?
No, no, no, no. I did... Like 12 months ago, I did exactly what I'm telling all my agency clients to do. I invested a minimum money in the website. I took a WordPress template and I started to write content just to start driving some visitors. So how much money did you invest in the site? Oh, it's a template. I did it myself. So I did. It was like a side project during last Christmas.
So no money. You used a WordPress template and your time.
WordPress template. Yeah. You can inspect the code. I don't remember the name of the template, but the, and I took some hours of the designers to, we've put like 4,000 K on the logo and tried to have a branding like to start because our app was missing some structure. So we invested in the branding.
Yep. Okay. So how many folks today are focused full-time on Glowtify?
So in the Glotify business, there's two developers full-time. And me, I'm the agency owner. So what I did is I opened up a pool of actions. I don't know if the proper word in English, to have some of the key members in Walter Interactive, the key employees, to help me still grow the agency. While me, I can focus on developing the product with the developers on Glotify.
So there's two developers plus you, really three of you guys right now.
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Chapter 3: What inspired the creation of Glotify and its unique approach?
Because with the Shopify app connector, we're going to build some. We already have started the machine learning project. And yeah, so probably this month. If the Shopify app is approved, it's going to be this month for sure.
Very cool. How did you get, I mean, how did you build a Shopify app and get approval? I assume that cost money, right? To investing in engineers.
But it's the same developers. They, they were the, they were the developers in Walt Interactive, which we transferred them to a business.
Yeah. So, so how much are you, I guess that's a good question, right? Is like you, you, how much money have you spent on engineering so far to build the Shopify app, the website, et cetera?
Oh, I don't know if I should be proud, but it's about two full salaries, like maybe 200K. Yep, yep, that's great. But it was supposed to be, like, to be honest... To attract good, high talent in Walter Interactive, because it was like WordPress agency and Shopify agency.
I think that cutting edge project in those frameworks, in these frameworks, it helped me hire people and onboard them in the Walter Interactive team because they can touch that kind of technology.
Yeah, but this isn't just a WordPress template. I mean, when I go to Glotify.com forward slash roadmap view, right? Or a bunch of the other product things you have, OKR framework, goal tracking and automation. These two engineers have built all this in an application, right?
Yes. And I've worked with... Right now, we are trying to hire a full-time product designer because I've found... Like, by chance, someone I love, his design on Dribbble, I contacted him, and finally, I didn't know at the beginning, but he's in Sri Lanka, so it cost nothing.
But right now, we are at a point where we need to revamp, have more clarity, and we are looking for a real product designer with experience in dashboards and
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Chapter 4: What challenges did Mark face while developing the Glotify software?
He co-founded Flinks, which is like a fintech company. So he reinvested with me. So he's like co-owner of the Glotify project.
Okay. So like you put in maybe 200,000 bucks from Glotify. He put in 200K. You own via Walter Interactive 75% and he owns 25%? Of the Glotify. Of Glotify. Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah. That's not the, we can say it like that. Yeah. You can, we can agree on that.
Well, what's accurate.
Okay. So we, he, he, he had put 100K at the start. The project has been already ongoing since when he jumped in with me. So at that point we were at a 100K span and now we are, we reached at 200K.
So you put in money from the agency moving forward.
So right now, the agency is driving the money and investing in Lodify.
Is he active? I mean, is he actively helping build it every day or he's just a financial partner?
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Chapter 5: How does Glotify plan to help Shopify merchants improve their businesses?
All right. Very good, Mark. We're out of time. Let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, what's your favorite book?
Oh, good one. Well, in the past, it was Lance Armstrong right now. And it's funny, I'm reading a book for managing emotions, like dealing with employees and stuff like that. I don't know. I don't remember the name.
Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?
Yeah. Yeah, there's a couple of them. I get really inspired by my partner with his Flinks company. What he did is really amazing. The way he approaches all the challenges is amazing. And all his feedback, it's really amazing.
Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building Glowtify?
Wow. Okay. In the past, I've tried a lot of Jasper, like Jasper.ai. Now, with ChatGDP3, I have a lot of fun because it's scaling out the knowledge really, really quick. And I'm even still learning stuff from the e-commerce industry through that app. In the past five days, I've got so much stuff with ChatGDP3.
It's crazy. Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night? Seven to eight. Seven to eight. Okay. And what's your situation? Married? Single? Kids?
No kids yet. Soon. And we're not married. We're a happy couple since six years now.
That's awesome. Okay. And how old are you? I'm 33. 33. Last question. What's something you wish you knew when you were 20?
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