The Product Upload Story - 0 to 20 Paying Users in 6 Weeks

About me

As a software engineer, I love building products that solve problems which people around me have. I think there's too many tech companies out there doing things that are abstract or just to make a quick buck. Whilst it's important to feed your family, I think it's more important to build things that matter.

The problem I noticed

The inspiration for Product Upload came from watching my Mum working on her online store. Every fortnight she spends hours copying products from her suppliers' websites into her Wix store. Manually finding them, screenshotting the images, copying the descriptions, prices, names, and important info and then pasting them into Wix.

This sparked an idea, but I didn't do anything about it for a few months. Then my wife started her own online store and I saw her doing the same thing. She was more high tech and used a spreadsheet in the process too but the process was still tedious and time-consuming.

After seeing 2 of 2 people I know running online stores doing the same thing I realised surely this is a problem that everyone working with suppliers in their online store face.

So then I started coding…

I started by building a basic website, which used some pretty rudimentary scraping techniques to copy products from a few websites. I showed it to my Mum and she loved it. She was able to copy products in seconds instead of hours.

I then started building a more robust version of the tool, which could copy products from any website. I added a bunch of features like image selection, automatic SEO optimisation, and a bunch of more advanced features.

Now, 6 weeks since launch

I have over 20 paying subscribers, official apps on both the Wix and Shopify app stores and I’m growing by about 10 users a week. Product Upload is one of those products that people genuinely seem to love and I’m stoked!

The future shape of Product Upload

I feel like I've only scratched the surface of what Product Upload is capable of. There's a real disconnect between stores and their suppliers which leads to a lot of manual work which distracts from the core business of running a store.

Not only do I see Product Upload becoming better and better at copying products, but I also hope to be able to more deeply integrate with suppliers and stores to make the whole process much more enjoyable for both parties.

Follow the Product Upload journey by visiting my website

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