SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
28 Year Old Female Entrepreneur Making 100k's Product Images Better for $2 Each, EP 270: Holly Cardew
09 Jun 2016
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base. You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have.
Chapter 2: What inspired Holly to start Pixc after her corporate job?
I'm now at $20,000 per top. Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000-unit soul mark. And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. Okay, Top Tribe, every Monday I give one of you a hundred bucks to invest in your idea and to get to the top. To enter, subscribe to the podcast on iTunes now and then text the word Nathan to 33444 to prove that you subscribed.
Last week's winner was Dr. Paul Vasquez with My Ads Nation. And he currently is working a full-time job and is dying to get out. Good morning, Top Tribe. You are listening to episode 270. Coming up tomorrow morning, you're going to hear from Xander Adel. He is killing that annoying, we missed you sticky note that the UPS always puts on your door when they try and deliver a package.
He's raised $3 million and already has his team size up to 10. Okay, top tribe. Good morning. Good morning. You're going to enjoy our guest today. Her name is Holly Cardew and she's the founder of pixie.com, which helps e-commerce stores optimize their product images to ultimately increase their online sales and allow the store owners to focus on running their business.
Holly has a background in e-commerce, online marketing, outsourcing, and graphic design. She's worked with businesses in Australia and internationally to build their online presence through online marketing. In fact, folks, in 2016, Holly was listed as a Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia Emerging Entrepreneur to Watch in the e-commerce and retail space. Holly, are you ready to take us to the top?
yes i am thanks for having me nathan i'm excited that you're here so first things first tell us a bit about um pixie was this your first thing out of university uh or were you at corporate
I actually, out of university, I only did first year, but I actually jumped into a corporate job over in London. And then I did that for about 18 months. It was in actually in events and running, um, and on like the online members. Um, but what I did was after that is I actually built online stores, a marketplace. I tried to build an e-card website.
I tried multiple, um, businesses online before Pixie actually.
And so what, uh, tell us what Pixie does and how you make money.
Yeah, sure. So Pixie is at the moment a online image optimization platform that allows e-commerce sellers and merchants to upload their product photos. And we have them edited and optimized for every platform within 24 hours. We sell credit image packages. So at the moment, if you're a business, you can pre-purchase, you know, 200 images, 300 images, etc.
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Chapter 3: How does Pixc's image optimization service work?
Uh, within, within just the three week period of December, it was 70.
Wow. Okay. So that's, that's, and I imagine it's higher than that after since the three weeks have passed.
Yeah. I mean, yes, definitely. And so if you actually look at the numbers, it was 400 signed up for a trial. So about just under, so 40% and then, uh, 70 converted to paid. So which is 17% conversion rate on the trial to pay, which is quite good.
That's amazing.
You definitely can increase that, but I guess being December, you know, retails down, people are busy on holiday. So that,
also you know is a key factor and was this long form article one that they posted on their own blog is that how it worked they posted on their own blog they shared it in the Shopify community forums so we look at channels like Facebook groups we're B2B platform primarily so we're looking at merchants who are hanging out on Facebook groups hanging out on forums wanting to expand their business wanting to optimize their processes and so that's where that was shared and why the affiliate do this how do you incentivize them
So we paid them a 20% commission, our affiliates, for the first year of that customer. They are actually a Shopify store owner themselves. They're extremely passionate about helping others and I think that's what we are at the end of the day. So they actually reached out to us and we happened to be building our affiliate program at that stage.
So he said, like, can I please, I really want to write an article about what you're doing because I've used you and it was great and really helped my business. And so I said, yep, sure, you can be the first one. It went from there.
So now we're looking to partner with like digital agencies and web developers who build e-commerce stores and essentially integrate our application into the store itself. So when the store owner goes to run their store, they have an easy way to process their product images.
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Chapter 4: What funding strategy did Holly use to grow Pixc?
So a lot of people, if you have a thousand images, it's not, it's not economical or like possible to quickly hire that many designers and manage them. Um, or you could do it in house or there are photo editing companies, um, in say India, but they don't have the integrations and they're not necessarily optimizing for the platform. They're just doing your photo editing.
Got it. So how do you how do you take this business from where it is now and grow it to the point where you're doing 5, 10, 20 million dollars per year?
Yeah, sure. So we've definitely done the numbers. I mean, on eBay alone, there's like millions of images uploaded a day. So I think it's really about building out different platform integrations, building out our partnership channels.
So with developers and web agencies, which actually I was at the Shopify development conference for the past two days, there were a ton of businesses who we can partner with. The other one is to offer other services. So really look at the other services that our current merchants need. So they don't just need photo editing. They need product descriptions. They need pricing.
They need to be able to list multi-channel. You know, there's all sorts of other services that we can offer once we crack this corner of the segment.
Very, very cool. Holly, if people, and just top tribes so you know, we'll link to Holly's website, everything in the show notes at NathanLatka.com forward slash the top 270. Again, forward slash the top 270. Holly, if people want to connect with you personally online and watch as you kind of build this into the empire you want to build it into, where can they connect with you online?
Sure. So I'm on pretty much every platform going from, I even signed up to Snapchat, LinkedIn, Twitter, I'm Holly CCC on Twitter. And I've actually also started blogging on medium lately because I feel that I, that I have a different point of view in terms of, I may have not raised like large amounts of capital.
That's not my key skillset, but I've definitely hired over 200 people in, um, you know, multiple countries. So I understand building out a distributed team.
How many team members did you say you had?
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Chapter 5: How does Pixc generate revenue and what are its costs?
Number two, Holly, is there a CEO that you're following or studying right now?
Who am I following or studying? Well, you know who I'm really curious about but I haven't found any information on? Who? It's Ben Chestnut from MailChimp.
Yeah, he is, you know, I have reached out to him many times. Super reclusive.
Yeah. And I'm like, he has millions and millions of SMEs using his platform. Yep. So what is his story? So him and the other one is Toby from Shopify. So I saw him speak recently at the Shopify conference and that was really interesting. And he's really into virtual reality, which is where I want to take Pixie. Like how do we get virtual reality into commerce? But that's a whole nother story.
Hey, that's the billion dollar idea, right?
Yeah, exactly.
I love it.
So I'm definitely interested in where he's going and what he's doing and how he's really built the company up.
Okay, Holly, number three, is there a favorite online tool you have, like FreshBooks?
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