Flowster Hits $10k MRR After eCommerce Brand Hits $3.1m In Amazon Sales
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What led to the creation of Flowster and its connection to eCommerce?
It was at breakeven for the longest time until we hired the VP of marketing and I gave her a marketing budget. And now we're going to be burning through a fairly decent amount of cash. But thanks to the historical sales of my web's product, I have a reasonably decent war chest of cash and can fund it for long enough to get our unit economics on the new target audience figured out. You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latka. Now, if you're hearing this, it means you're not currently on our subscriber feed. To subscribe, go to getlatka.com. When you subscribe, you won't hear ads like this one. You'll get the full interviews. Right now, you're only hearing partial interviews. And you'll get interviews three weeks earlier from founders, thinkers, and people I find interesting.
Like Eric Wan, 18 months before he took Zoom public. We got to grow faster. Minimum is 100% over the past several years.
How did Trent document processes to scale his eCommerce business?
Or bootstrap founders like Vivek of QuestionPro. When I started the company, it was not cool to raise. Or Looker CEO Frank Behan before Google acquired his company for $2.6 billion. We want to see a real pervasive data culture, and then the rest flows behind that. If you'd like to subscribe, go to getlatka.com. There, you'll find a private RSS feed that you can add to your favorite podcast listening tool, along with other subscriber-only content.
What was the revenue of Trent's eCommerce business when it made the Inc. 5000 list?
Now look, I never want money to be the reason you can't listen to episodes. On the checkout page, you'll see an option to request free access. I grant 100% of those requests, no questions asked. Hello, everyone.
What strategies did Trent use to leverage virtual assistants in his business?
My guest today is Trent Deersmid. He's a serial entrepreneur, husband and father. In addition to hosting the Bright Ideas e-commerce podcast, he's the founder of Flowster.app, a business workflow management application used by thousands of e-commerce businesses around the globe. In 2019, his e-commerce business ranked 254th on the Inc. 5000. All right, Trent, you ready to take us to the top? You betcha. Let's go for it. So just to be clear, are you also running an e-commerce business and you use Flowster to grow it? Correct. The e-commerce business was the one that was created first, and then there's a story of how one led to the other, but the short version is that one did lead to the other, and Flowster was created and released to the public in fall of 2018, and the e-commerce business was created in the summer of 16.
Okay, so let's start with summer of 16. What was the e-commerce business? So it's a business that is an Amazon reseller. Nothing particularly unique about it other than the way that we went about it. And the way that I went about it was to take a very process-oriented approach to growth. So we began by documenting every single one of our processes and then we made extensive use of virtual assistants overseas. That resulted in us being able to basically out-hustle our competitors and that's what led to the company being on the Inc. 5000. Okay, so let's start with the headline and then work backwards to the documentation and the VAs. What was revenue when you guys reported to Inc.? 3.1 million, I think it was.
And what year was that revenue? That was 20, well, that was, we got the award in 2019. So whatever, I think that was the three-year number. Okay, and what were you reselling mainly? What was your best-selling product that year? supplements. Supplements. Interesting. Okay. Now let's work backwards. You out-executed with documentation and cheaper overseas VA talent.
How does Flowster assist eCommerce businesses today?
Why were you so good at documentation? For someone listening right now that wants to get good at documentation for hiring VAs, what would you recommend? So not my first rodeo. I built and sold a company before. And very early on in my first journey, I read Michael Gerber's book, The E-Myth, and I was immediately intoxicated with The idea of documenting processes and delegating because my primary driver, Nathan, is I don't live to work. I work to live. I'm an entrepreneur first and foremost to design a lifestyle that I want. And that lifestyle means that I don't want to be bogged down in minutia every single day, day after day to run my company.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What led to the creation of Flowster and its connection to eCommerce?
0:00–1:01
2
How did Trent document processes to scale his eCommerce business?
1:01–1:30
3
What was the revenue of Trent's eCommerce business when it made the Inc. 5000 list?
1:30–1:45
4
What strategies did Trent use to leverage virtual assistants in his business?
1:45–3:39
5
How does Flowster assist eCommerce businesses today?
3:39–5:51
6
What pricing model does Flowster currently use and how is it changing?
5:51–7:54
7
What are the customer acquisition costs associated with Flowster?
7:54–9:11
8
What insights does Trent share about the future of his business and market trends?
9:11–26:01
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