When we initially launched Vendrive CRM to the public it was a test – mainly to see how the Amazon seller market would respond to a niche SaaS product. Although we really just built Vendrive for ourselves.

Because our platform was built to solve our own problem, we kept it simple, lean, effective and incredibly easy to use. We didn’t outsource it. We build it ourselves (it really helps that James is a software engineer).

The Secret To Startup Success?

Apparently, startup success, from a product standpoint is steeped in solving your own problems. Which is exactly how this all got started.

As we refined the product, added features, realized what didn’t add value, we realized we had something amazing on our hands, so we shared it on Facebook and that sparked a fire that has been increasing month over month.

To Stay Niche or Not?

Benefits of staying small:

Highly targeted solution
Easier to reach customer base
We’re the customer base – so that’s kind of awesome!

Depending on what kind of SaaS startup you’re building you may or may not want to be super niche. For Vendrive CRM, niche was king. With so many business models, we independently started Wholesale business’ selling on Amazon before we met each other on Instagram (funny how people meet these days). So Vendrive was built to support that.

Growing from a six to a seven and even an eight-figure Amazon business requires some organization, streamlined processes, and systems, but one was missing – hence, Vendrive CRM was created.

We haven’t really done much….

To be honest, we only just started marketing Vendrive CRM and we “launched” months ago. Why? We really didn’t consider it a business. It was just something we created for ourselves. It wasn’t until we reached 50 paid monthly users that we realized it needed more attention.

Hitting 50 users a month is kind of a big deal I recently found out. So yea, that’s pretty cool.

Paul Graham of YC talks a lot about doing things that don’t scale, which is exactly what we’ve started doing. The biggest marketing channel that’s been helping us grow has been managing a Facebook group for Wholesale Amazon sellers. Each week we do “live sourcing” where we show exactly how to acquire new suppliers to grow your business. We also do AMA style Facebook Live events to dive deeper into what’s holding our 1600+ members back from reaching their goals.

You can join our Private Facebook group here.

How are we going to get to 100+ monthly users? By providing more value and helping more users reach the six-figure sales level.

Which leads me to….

What does the future actually hold?

We’ve begun building systems to support our users, to help them grow their own businesses and make sure our product is a massive win for each user. The product has proven to add value and we want to grow our user base. We want to build a community of Amazon sellers who are hustling day in and day out, from all around the world – like globally….

After watching a few of our users grow to six figures in sales plus with our platform, we have some amazing ideas to help even more.

Here’s what you can expect from Vendrive in the near future.

Amazing Content – Content is king, but not for marketing purposes. To make our users experts when it comes to starting and growing their Amazon companies, we’ll be creating even more how-to posts, videos, and even free courses to take you from zero to massive success on Amazon.

Better Solutions – The simple fact is that most software solutions relating to Amazon, that we’ve all been using, isn’t that good. It’s clunky, slow, and completely outsourced. It’s our purpose and mission to solve the biggest problems we all face selling on Amazon with better code, better processes, and ease.

An Ecosystem – You know what’s better than a ton of data? Taking action on that data. Repricers, restocking tools and the like all have amazing amounts of data that you simply cannot leverage because they don’t “talk” together. We’re going to change that. By building tools that actually work together, our users will have a competitive advantage over others.

So far we’ve had to learn a ton of new skills to make sure our users are successful with our platform and it’s only going to get better over time. Thanks for reading.