What's New: Pietra wants to launch your product line
(from the latest issue of the Indie Hackers newsletter)
Pietra raised $15 million to help creators launch their own product lines:
- Pietra helps creators and influencers quickly launch product lines from start to finish. Its goal? To launch 1 million creator product lines in the next 5 years.
- 41% of workers across the globe are considering leaving their current employer this year. Use "The Great Resignation" to your advantage with these startup trends on Kernal.
- Valerian Saliou hit $4.5 million in annual revenue with his customer support product, Crisp. He's got more support agents than engineers, and customer referrals have become his top acquisition channel.
Want to share something with over 80,000 indie hackers? Submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter. —Channing
🔖 Pietra Wants to Launch Your Product Line
from the Indie Economy newsletter by Bobby Burch
Product platform Pietra has raised $15M to pursue its goal of helping 1M creators launch their own product lines in the next five years. For founders, this means new opportunities to build around new products, or launch a product line of your own!
Pietra primer
Pietra 101: Pietra helps creators and influencers quickly launch product lines from start to finish. Pietra's services include sourcing, warehousing, fulfillment, and e-commerce. About 20K creators now use Pietra to create product lines in consumer categories including CBD, candles, jewelry, apparel, cosmetics, swimsuits, and more. Pietra cofounder and CEO Ronak Trivedi is a former senior product manager at Uber and program manager at Microsoft. He has big plans for the platform:
Historically, only top creators or established corporations have had access to the resources that could bring an idea to life. Pietra aims to democratize this access by enabling a single creator to launch the next best-selling product line, while maintaining creative and financial control of their brand.
The round: Pietra’s $15M Series A round was led by Founders Fund, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm with over $6B in capital under management. There was also participation from Andreessen Horowitz, TQ Ventures, and Abstract Ventures. Pietra previously raised $4M in 2019. It plans to use the funds to grow its team, expand its platform, and boost its supplier marketplace.
Pietra reports that its revenue has grown 210% from January–April 2021. Its latest round helped the company hit a $75M valuation.
Calling all products
Speedy launch: Launching a product line is notoriously tricky, and it can take a ton of time, resources, and efforts to navigate the global supply chain landscape. Pietra wants to condense the complex process of sourcing, manufacturing, quality assurance, warehousing, and fulfillment down to just a few weeks. Users can choose from a network of suppliers and test samples, manage e-commerce, and store and ship products.
Pietra perks: The company also offers related services like custom packaging, product photography, and even inventory financing to make business creation more accessible to creators. If you use Pietra for assembly, storage, and fulfillment, the company will help you with Instagram Shopping, your website, thank you notes, and email list tools.
Pricing: Pietra’s prices vary quite a bit depending on your needs, the number of products that you offer, and the services that you use. In general, most of its services are based on a per-unit price model. Pietra also collects a 5% + $1 fee on each purchase if the product is sold on Pietra Marketplace or a connected sales channel.
The road ahead: Pietra has set a goal to launch 1M creator-owned product lines in the next five years.
VCs really want creators: Pietra is among the latest beneficiaries of venture capital’s appetite for the blossoming creator economy. The creator economy has attracted more than $2B in startup investments in 2021 alone, according to The Information. Tucker Schreiber, cofounder of content editing platform Combo, recently told the New York Times that he fielded 5-10 inbound emails daily for a couple of weeks straight from investors.
Creator startup funding: Other creator economy startups that raised funding in the last few months include: Creator bank Karat Financial ($26M raised), creator monetizing platform PearPop ($16M), live stream platform Happs ($4.7M), and creator financial tool Spore ($1M).
Do you plan to launch a product line in 2021? Share your thoughts below.
Discuss this story, or subscribe to Indie Economy for more.
📰 In the News
from the Volv newsletter by Priyanka Vazirani
🚀 Square is launching a Bitcoin focused DeFi business.
☀️ Greenland has suspended oil exploration due to climate change.
💸 The UK will invest $15M to warn young investors about crypto.
🎶 The Weeknd has invested in a company that sells personalized songs.
🧠 A paralyzed man's brain waves were turned into sentences, a medical first.
Check out Volv for more 9-second news digests.
💡 Startup Ideas on Kernal
from Startup Ideas on Kernal by Joel Hansen
41% of workers across the globe are considering leaving their current employer this year, according to Morning Brew. Here's how founders can use this to their advantage.
The new resume
The trend: Let's be honest. We're all tired of LinkedIn notifications. COVID-19 proved that hiring can be done entirely remotely, and VCs are tweeting that you can find much better talent on Twitter than you can at Harvard job fairs (we agree):
To top it off, 41% of workers globally are considering leaving their current employer this year. It's the highest level of quitting seen in the last 20 years. But don't get too down. Harley FinkelStein, president of Shopify, offered some consolation:
The opportunity: With quitting soon to hit an all-time high, remote work surging across the globe, and the creator economy growing like a weed, there's going to be a whole new wave of sourcing startup talent. The question is, how will they get hired?
The traditional in-person interview process has been radically transformed. With decentralized offices as the norm, new platforms, new playbooks for recruitment and hiring, and new tools will be needed. Founders looking to get in on this trend can learn more here.
Featured startup ideas
Here are this week's top five startup ideas that you can help build:
Tiger Woods Masterclass for Golfers
Subscription warranty organizer app
Smarter restaurant QR codes by Tobi Lutke
Want to test out Kernal, or share a startup idea to get featured in next week’s issue? Sign up here or drop me a line at [email protected].
Discuss this story, or subscribe to Startup Ideas on Kernal for more ideas.
🌐 Best Around the Web: Posts Submitted to Indie Hackers This Week
🗓 The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up every day. Posted by Courtland Allen.
💵 Best ways to earn passive income from your experience? Posted by Divya Rajendran.
🦠 COVID-19 killed our multimillion dollar startup. Posted by Adonic.
🧐 What keeps you from working on your ideas? Posted by Dylan Strijker.
⏲ 30 users and $1.5K within 15 hours of launch! Posted by Viraj Chhajed.
🤖 Facebook ads: is it all bots? Posted by Andrew Powers.
Want a shout-out in next week's Best of Indie Hackers? Submit an article or link post on Indie Hackers whenever you come across something you think other indie hackers will enjoy.
💰 Founder Valerian Saliou Hit $4M ARR With Crisp
Hello! I'm Valerian Saliou, cofounder and CTO at Crisp. Crisp is a customer support SaaS that sells a unified customer support product to customers worldwide (200K+ users!). We provide a chatbox, emailing, a helpdesk, and a CRM, as well as a ton of integrations (Messenger, Telegram, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc.).
My cofounder Baptiste Jamin and I started Crisp in mid-2015. We bootstrapped a free product for one year before switching to a paid model. When we switched over to paid, we launched simple unlimited-usage plans at $25 per month and $95 per month.
We were remote from day one and never raised a cent of venture money. We quickly grew to ramen-profitability before scaling to $4.5M ARR. We are now a 14 person globally-distributed team, with headquarters in France.
AMA!
Why didn't you charge during the first year?
Building the more advanced features that people are willing to pay for takes so much time and effort. We wanted to get the messaging right first, then build the paid features. Plus, handling all the billing, VAT, and company structure required once you start charging can really cause you to lose focus. All we needed was to build a great messaging-first product. We've always built iteratively, improving day-by-day and releasing huge features every six months.
We were able to not charge that first year because we were students deriving revenue from working part-time at other companies. We woke up crazy early in the morning, worked on Crisp, then went to work for the day. When we got back home, we coded until 11 PM. It's part of the hustle! Having time constraints at the start is really a good thing because you only have so much time to execute on your startup every day, so you have to spend that time wisely.
Why did you decide to go with unlimited-usage plans?
Unlimited plans are easier to sell when you start with a limited team and a specific market that's used to such plans. Though we have high limits in place to ensure those unlimited plans are not abused, if you go over the limit, we can always increase them. Only 1% of our paid users will ever hit those limits, though (mostly larger companies).
How much time did you initially spend on customer support?
We did it ourselves about 10% of the time. It grew to an unmanageable scale, so we hired a lot of customer support agents. We have more support agents than engineers at the moment, and it's super busy all day.
How do you differentiate?
We differentiate mainly through our attention to detail: We maintain an Apple-grade product and make sure it loads fast everywhere in the world. Quick story: I was on the other side of the Atlantic not long ago, and Crisp felt as fast as it is in Europe (where our core servers are located).
We also serve the SMB market that's been overlooked by our main competitors who went up-market, and now charge outrageous prices.
What were your biggest technical challenges?
Our biggest technical challenges can be attributed to our API and chatbox. On the API side, we receive 1B+ HTTP requests every month on it; it's used by both our integrations and our users, who go through our apps for messaging purposes. We built a dedicated caching system that greatly reduces calls to the API workers.
On the chatbox side, since 1% of websites using us bring a ton of traffic, we made sure to implement a wide range of automatic safety limits that put the chatbox into high-traffic mode for those websites (it's a spectrum; there are multiple high-traffic modes depending on how big the website is). It disables automatic WebSocket connections, for instance. That means a lot of code logic in all our systems is dedicated to handling those special cases.
What's your most effective customer acquisition channel?
Early on, we used Quora as an acquisition channel. We've added some paid ads in the mix (Google and Facebook), but unfortunately I don't have any data to share on that end. We also built our own affiliate system for people to refer customers to Crisp and make money, and this has proven effective as well.
Today, we don't have one single acquisition channel, but many smaller ones put together.
Discuss this story.
🐦 The Tweetmaster's Pick
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Special thanks to Jay Avery for editing this issue, to Nathalie Zwimpfer for the illustrations, and to Bobby Burch, Priyanka Vazirani, Joel Hansen, and Valerian Saliou for contributing posts. —Channing
