You’re reading an eChai Interview, an insightful and candid conversation with Entrepreneurs — a publication of eChai Ventures.

SocialPilot - Buffer for eCommerce Stores

Jimit has have over a decade of experience as an Web Developer, a Database Administrator, and a Project Manager in a wide variety of business & Ecommerce projects. He has consistently worked with clients in the US, Columbia, Australia, UK and Middle East.

In 2007, he started his own eCommerce web design and open source customization company named Creative Glance Technologies and thus his journey as an entrepreneur begin. Quality work with on time delivery help him to achieve a reputed name among leading web development company. He started mobile apps development for iOS and Android during 2009 and keep their success story running on. He has delivered 300+ web development and 200+ mobile apps during this time.

Here is an insightful and candid conversation - An eChai with Jimit.

How did you come up with the idea of SocialPilot ?

While working with more the 150+ small and medium scale eCommerce store owner at Creative Glance, we found some common problem that they are facing in Social media marketing. Out of 100, 95 store owners are aware about the importance of social media for their business. They know that social media can help them to get more visibility, improve brands and some sort of improve their sales too.

So as soon as they start selling online or launched their eCommerce store, they create their presence by creating their profiles and pages on various social media platform like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and many more but after couple of months, those profile and pages becomes orphan because of less or no activities. The biggest reason for them that social media sharing takes lots of time from their productive/business hours.

We feel that we can have solutions for this and hence we come up with SocialPilot.

What problem are you solving?

For eCommerce store owner, marketing their products on social media is difficult. Some of common problem that they have are

1) Several Products: On an average, eCommerce store owner has 500-1000 products on their store and they want to promote it on Social media. If they target at-least, 10% of their inventory, number is still high for manual social media sharing

2) Multiple Platform: Even if they manage to do this manual social media sharing for 1 platform let's say on Facebook, they need repeat this activities for other platforms too to get meaningful visibility and real social media reach to wider audience.

3) Repetitive Work: As per ideal social media sharing strategies, you need to share and talk about your products and services multiple times a weeks or months (I am not referring i.e. sharing same products 5 times a day). Sharing once is not enough so they need to repeat this social media sharing multiple times.

4) Absence of Skill set: eCommerce store owners are not digital marketing guys. They lack the knowledge writing articulate posts or tweets with proper hashtags to gain more visibility.

We try to solve this problem and improve the efficiency of eCommerce store owner so they can more focus on their core business rather spending time on social media sharing.

How does it work?

1) SocialPilot makes product promotion easy by providing integration of various social media platform like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest etc at one place. So Post once created, can be easily shared across multiple social media platform

2) It can also help them to schedule product promotion for future dates So they do not have to remember which product they need to promote on which date. They can manage their whole months schedule with SocialPilot

3) We also increase the efficiency of by connecting their store with SocialPilot. Whether they have store on marketplace like Etsy, eBay or have their own self hosted/hosted eCommerce store developed in Magento, Opencart, BigCommerce, Shopify and many more , they can easily connect their store with SociaolPilot with few clicks.

Once the connection has been established, we present all of their products so they do not have to manually copy/paste the product content.

4) SocialPilot also try to provide automate tweets and posts based on relevant keywords and hash tags based on their product details.

What is your target market?

Currently we targeting long tail small and medium scale eCommerce store owner.

Our semi-targeted markets are individuals and marketing agencies.

What is your competitive advantage?

People are considering us as a competitor of buffer or hoousuite but that is not true. We are focusing very specific customer segment which is usually ignored by competitors. So we consider this is an advantage for us.

How much time did it take you from conceptualization of SocialPilot to actually launching it in the market ?

We tool around 3 months to develop base platform which can be used by individuals and small business. We launched our first beta in Nov, 2014.

From Nov 2014 to July 2015, we have improve the product in terms of features, UI/UX and Mobile apps.

From July 2015, We have started making this platform more suitable for eCommerce store owner so we start development and marketing. Currently as of Oct 2015, SocialPilot is fully compatible and usable tool for Esty, eBay and BigCommerce store owners.

Tell us more about your team?

Jimit Bagadiya (Co-Founder & Tech Lead) – 12+ years experience in software development. Developed 150+ e-commerce stores and 200+ mobile applications. Great insights in eCommerce development.

Shailesh Mistry (Co-Founder & UI/UX Lead) – 13+ years experience of design, UI/UX. Updated with latest design frameworks.

Tejas Mehta (Mentor) – Mentor & advisor with 10+ years experience in business consulting & business development.

1 PHP Programmer, 1 Android Developer, 1 iOS Developer, 1 Content/Digital Marketer

What is your technology stack?

SocialPilot is developed using LAMP platform and Deploy on AWS Cloud.

How do you plan to market your product? What are your customer acquisition strategies?

We have split our customer acquisition strategies in 3 bucket. Those are

Low CAC: Content Marketing, Social Media Marketing, SEO, Customer Support

Medium CAC: Affiliate Marketing, Channel Partners, Google AdWords, Facebook Ads, Twitter Ads High CAC: Trade Shows, Conferences, Seminars/Workshops

Currently we are using Low CAC bucket till now. We recently have started Affiliate program and offering 30% recurring commissions.

What is the revenue model of SocialPilot ?

It's Freemium model. We have plan starts from $4.99 and $9.99. The difference in pricing are depends on number of social media profile that they connect and number of posts they can share per day.

What do you want to achieve from this? What is your larger goal or vision?

In 2 years of tenure, we want to see ourselves as most advanced social media scheduling tools for eCommerce Store owner having integration with all possible ecommerce platforms. We do not mind if people recognize us as "Buffer for eCommerce Store owner" or "Hootsuite Alternative"

What sort of support and feedback are you looking from the community?

Social media scheduling is now necessary for all if they want to improve branding, visibility and increase engagement. It's integral part of any digital marketing strategies. So community users

  • Who are individuals: We wish them to use SocialPilot and keep suggesting features and provide feedbacks
  • Who are marketing agency : We wish them to use SocialPilot for their clients and help us to get more visibility on internet
  • Who are online seller: We wish them to start using our platform to promote their products

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