How We Built A MillIon Dollar Ecommerce Platform [India]
Hello! Who are you, and what business did you start?
My name is Saurav Pathak, the Chief Product Officer of Bagisto.
Bagisto is an open-source e-commerce platform built on Laravel and offers more than just e-commerce. The platform also features great post-commerce solutions.
The user can build marketplaces, point-of-sale (PoS) solutions, progressive Web apps (PWA), and drop ship solutions using Bagisto.
The platform is highly scalable and flexible and can be customized by developers working on the Laravel framework. Any small, medium or enterprise merchant can easily use Bagisto to build its e-commerce platform.
Developers and freelancers can use Bagisto to develop their customized e-commerce solution and deliver it to their clients quickly.
In the last 4 years, we have generated revenue worth $1M with $350k ARR the past two years.
We currently have more than 70K downloads, about 5k GitHub stars, around 5000 community members worldwide, and more than 150 contributors who regularly contribute to Bagisto to enhance its features.
What's your backstory, and how did you come up with the idea?
I have almost 7 years of experience in domains ranging from fintech to eCommerce in SaaS and the OpenSource tech stack.
Open-source e-commerce already has many big players like Magento, WooCommerce, OpenCart, etc.
Webkul has been working for the past 10 years on almost all major e-commerce platforms, and we found a huge gap between demand and supply regarding platform-driven e-commerce solutions.
Today if anyone needs to start eCommerce using any framework available, they either need to write code from scratch or learn a new platform and adapt to that. If somebody needs to work on Magento, they must learn Magento first and similarly.
The very idea that anyone working on any MVC framework architecture can develop their e-commerce system led us to work on Bagisto.
So, someone who has worked on a popular MVC architecture platform such as Laravel can easily use Bagisto and develop a custom solution.
Also, most frameworks today do not make use of recent technologies. But the world is moving towards headless architecture and progressive Web apps (PWAs).
In a country like India, there are still places where the Internet does not function properly. PWAs can have a big impact as they offer offline functionality to both small and medium merchants. We believe these technologies should be at the core of e-commerce
When our project was listed on Laravel news, traffic suddenly spiked up a lot, and in one year, we started getting people on the website.
Take us through the process of designing, prototyping, and release of your initial version.
At first, we launched the initial version of the product as MVP on 31st October 2018.
The initial version had the basic features of e-commerce, which were required to create an eCommerce website. One of the biggest challenges that we faced at the start was choosing the right technology to build this open-source ecommerce project. We were looking for a tech stack that has got a good community around the world, is easy to adopt, and has the minimum resource allocation cost. There we many good tech stack available but finally we decided to go ahead with the PHP framework; Laravel.
The open-source community matters a lot to us, as until and unless new users adapt to our platform, we cannot grow as a framework.
At the start, none of the merchants were taking us seriously. It’s a mindset that questions how can an open source platform that comes from India scale. And then people complain that the country has not produced a Google, Microsoft, or any great open-source platform like Magento. The reason is that even though we have the skillsets, no one is giving big projects a try, and that’s why no great open-source projects are coming from India.
We, too, made a lot of mistakes when we first built our open-source project. But we kept trying to update the code and released new versions, and then the development community slowly started contributing to our platform. For every query that we got, we tried to provide dedicated support, irrespective of whether the developer was a noob or experienced in his or her work. Live support on the platform is something we made the most use of live support on the platform, and the feedback helped us.
Soon after release, we started doing content marketing around the product and sharing the link on other platforms like the product hunt, Betapage, and so on. The listing does help us to get a few eyeballs at the initial stages, which further helped the product rankings on SERP pages.
Our main goal at the start was to keep things very simple so the merchants and developers can use them to create their online store.
After a few months of launch, we started getting active attraction from the community looking to explore the option of using open-source eCommerce platforms.
We slowly started getting feedback from that time, and issues were raised on the GitHub repository. This helped us a lot in rectifying the problems and led us to build some features that our community was looking forward to having at the starting days.
So initially, as the project was open source, it was available for free, and we did not put any paid extension on the app for the first six months.
However, after a few months of launch, precisely you can say 7-8 months, the very first extension of the store and the multi-vendor Marketplace launched at a very low cost, like $149.
We got a few customers then, and from that, we started building some traction both on the paid module and the open-source Bagisto version.
From there, we started our journey to capitalize on open source and get some financial Independence with the help of the open-source Tech stack.
Running an open-source project from India on a bootstrap model and generating more than 1 million dollars in revenue is a huge success.
Describe the process of launching the business and attracting your first customer
So initially, we found our product as open source and listed it on various websites like product hunt and Betapage so we could get more eyes on the project.
We also started promoting the product through content marketing strategies such as creating video tutorials. The video tutorials illustrate how to use the product and what is the best way to use it.
Our project was bootstrapped from the very start. We have always believed in giving back to the community and never had the idea of monetizing at all.
But as we started getting good traction on the website, we started thinking about developing some ideas around the open-source project to provide a more personalized experience.
In the very first year, we saw little traction. But when our project was listed on Laravel news, traffic suddenly spiked up a lot, and in one year, we started getting people on the website.
From there, I think the daily users increased from 100 to 300 daily on the website.
There are several things that we tried for the growth of the project. The first thing to note is that our project is open-source software.
So it’s not like a traditional system where you offer an application as paid service, and customers just come and pay for that. It’s more like you are giving away a freely available project to download and use. Developers can download and install it on their servers and use the project.
In the initial stage, our primary goal was to keep getting more traffic and promote it among the developer community so they could use the software and customize it as per their requirement.
After one year, Bagisto was featured on the Laravel news website, and suddenly, we started getting traction. We published our first paid module based on community feedback, and soon we started getting some paying customers, prompting us to build more extensions.
So as part of monetization, we began distributing licenses for paid modules, giving priority support, and offering customization services if anyone is looking to build their E-Commerce and is looking for specific customization, so we’re also going to provide that as well.
How are you doing today, and what does the future look like?
Well, indeed we are profitable as of now.
Running an open-source project from India on a bootstrap model and generating more than 1 million dollars in revenue is a huge success.
Facts and numbers speak for themselves. Right now, we have more than 5000+ GitHub stars, 70000 plus downloads, a 200k user base, and built a community of 5,000+ members worldwide.
Going forward, our most important goal is to keep optimizing the system for faster releases, integrating new domains, including Web3 & AI/ML tech stack, and supporting our ambassadors around the globe.
Bagisto has also been showcased and invited to be a part of conferences & podcasts hosted by Github, Opensource India, and Open Source Startup Podcast, to name a few.
Bagisto Featured at GitHub Satellite India 2021
This year, we also received more PR as part of the Oktoberfest event than ever before. This indeed indicates the participation and activeness of the community in the open-source repository
Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?
Throughout our journey, we have learned one thing that has helped us keep moving forward; patience & being humble.
It is not an everyday scenario that an open-source project starts getting traction from the very start.
We are grateful for the community that adopted it, and even we started doing some financial business. We have always believed that beggars cannot be choosers.
So going by that fact, we have been able to support the businesses, whatever the size; small, medium, & large scale Enterprise.
Apart from that, we have been very supportive of the people who are looking for help. We have introduced free support options where developers can directly take help from us, and we don’t charge a single penny.
In addition, we have also been supporting our community worldwide by sponsoring them with goodies and helping them financially, and conducting conferences and meetings in their respective area.
What platform/tools do you use for your business?
We try to use most of the in-house tools we developed as part of our organization.
We are very keen to develop tools for general purposes like managing the chat system with the community members we have developed our internal chat system; chatwhizz.
Similarly to manage the task and tickets of customers, we use an open-source helpdesk solution developed on Symphony language, which is UV desk, to manage customer details, we make use of our own ERP solution that we developed on ODOO framework.
Every tool is excellent in its purpose, but I like the chat system with the way it offers interaction with our customers. We can even create a live group with the customer and do any audio and video conferencing whenever we want, and it works perfectly fine on mobile and the web.
What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?
My inspiration comes from my real-life experience. In the initial days when I graduated from college, I was a part of a startup that I started with my friends.
It, however, went differently than we thought, but I learned a lot of things about getting started and the things to be done afterward.
Later on, I joined my current company Webkul, 5 years back, and I was inspired by its 10 years journey since when it was started by its founders, Vipin Sahu, Prakash Sahu, and Vinay Yadav.
I have always found my inspiration in their journey, how they started and how they have been doing it over the years.
This helped me a lot when I joined the company and started working on different projects like help desk solutions, product information management systems, booking services, etc to name a few.
While working on all these projects, I get a good experience of customers’ behavior and how to take an application from zero to one, marketing strategies that we can follow which will help in those applications.
So I can say it's a combination of all these real-life experiences from which I inherited a lot that helped me in getting things started.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?
The most important thing that I learned and want to share with other entrepreneurs is you need to have patience and perseverance.
When you start something, it is okay if it won't take off from the very first stage. It might take time for the project to get started. But the only thing that keeps you going is to be patient and try to find positivity in small things.
I'll give an example, in the very first year when we started Bagisto, we still needed to have financial plans or a roadmap on how things will go on and how long we can strive.
The small thing that motivates us is whenever a new download happens. We consider it positive when a user finds our application useful and proceeds to download it.
Similarly, there are other things like whenever we get one more star on the GitHub repository, when we keep getting queries on our forums and when we see that people are mentioning the project on social media.
These things may not contribute a lot to financial well-being, but they are important in that they give positive aspects of the project.
Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?
Yes, we are hiring a Laravel Developer as a Developer Advocate who has a good sound of Laravel technology and can act as a bridge between the customers and Bagisto to achieve the customer requirements.
You can drop a mail at hr@webkul.com.
Where can we go to learn more?
If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!
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