How Do I Start a SaaS Company?

Solving Order Tracking With Parcel Panel

My decision to start ParcelPanel came from a previous experience where I wanted to track an order I had made but could not do this conveniently. I had to contact the merchant online repeatedly, but their response speed was slow.

Although I eventually got my order, I realized e-commerce merchants were at a loss on how to help their clients, hence my decision to partner with my co-founder and start ParcelPanel. Our app allows customers to enter their order tracking code and know where it is‌. E-commerce merchants can focus on other aspects of running their business in the meantime.

Coworking Retreat Sparks Solution

We started our company during a summer coworking retreat in Barcelona. It happened on the rooftop terrace of the apartment we rented and those five minutes changed our lives. I was complaining to my two co-founders about how I spend 35+ hours each week recruiting writers, sending them tests, interviewing, and getting back to them with feedback.

I spent so much time recruiting that I had very little energy left over to do my duties as the Director of Operations in our marketing agency. My now co-founders and I were brainstorming about automation we could do to make this process easier, but couldn’t find anything that would fit our needs.

So we made it! One year and 100 annual customers later, turns out I wasn’t the only one who spent every waking moment hiring writers!

Simplifying Wholesale Business in Candid

Candid is a platform that helps any brand or retailer build, grow, and run their wholesale business online. It was built to simplify and digitalize wholesale business infrastructure, to help both sides of the market, providing a universal wholesale management platform to help companies ranging from fledgling boutiques to generational brands to move wholesale online.

Candid’s wholesale order, payment, and logistics management platform provide an ideal ecosystem to buy, sell, and pay for wholesale. For a decade, Founder and CEO Avery Bloom had built an apparel brand with his wife, designing and manufacturing apparel for women and kids in their factory.

As they grew, they hit a wall for both brand and store as wholesale was going to ruin them. While their e-commerce business thrived with strong tech and tooling to support it, for wholesale, they were left cobbling together a dozen pieces of software just to keep everything straight. Candid was built to fix this.

From Internal Solution to SaaS Product

We couldn’t find a solution with proper integrations with all our internal systems and processes. While we developed the solution for ourselves, we realized it looked like proper software to get out to the market and develop as a SaaS. One year later, CartFox has 100+ paying customers already.