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Alexey's journey building a digital commerce tool for educators

Alexey's journey building a digital commerce tool for educators

Jakob Jelling
October 16, 2024

Meet Alexey Kramin.

Alexey Kramin is 30 years old. He grew up in a beautiful small town in the south of Russia called Stavropol.

He is a big fan of snowboarding and video games - but hasn’t played anything for the last couple of years.

Alexey has a tech background, and he always wanted to be a developer. So right after finishing his uni and mandatory military service, he got a job as a full-stack developer.

This story is gonna focus on his startup Marketsy.ai. A platform that helps you wrap your knowledge into courses with AI and monetize it effortlessly.

Photo of a young man smiling. He is wearing a hat and sunglasses. He has a beard and is wearing a purple shirt.

Alexey Kramin - Co-founder of Marketsy.ai

The story told by Alexey Kramin

From 9-5 to entrepreneur

When working as a full-stack developer I had a small dream of becoming a business partner in the company.

It was a consulting company that offered software development to small startups, so it was an amazing opportunity for me to learn how startup works from inside. I was in touch with founders directly, saw how they made decisions and set priorities.

On the other hand I was also always interested in doing something creative, and in 2022 I got the opportunity. Actually, my life changed drastically.

I moved to a foreign country (Turkey), and switched from a full time developer position to a full time marketer. This is how I became an entrepreneur. I co-founded a start-up with my business partner Igor Boky.

What is my product?

It took some time till we figured out our current product’s goals, and they are still pretty flexible as we’re testing new ideas every week, if not daily.

Everything started from Fleexy. It’s a foundation for quick launch of marketplaces, service or products. We had a couple of customers who were small startups. They got their marketplaces, managed to acquire first customers and even received their first investment interest.

Meanwhile, OpenAI had just blown the industry. I saw an AI landing page generator and showed to Igor. This was an ah-ha moment.

We already had some experience in building ecommerce from previous projects and Fleexy, so we had decided to create a full e-commerce website generator based on AI.

Since then we had already pivoted a few times from e-commerce generator for everything to a storefront for experienced creators who sell their content and digital products.

So if there is a one-liner needed for our product it would be:

“A storefront for experienced creators in minutes.”

Ohh - I almost forgot to say how it’s called Marketsy.ai.

Screenshot of a webpage. In the top left corner it says marketsy.ai. It has a phto of a young woman paintning. The primary text on the page says: "Sell Your Digital Products here"

The Marketsy.ai homepage

Building Marketsy.ai

Another ah-ha moment happened somewhere in the beginning of July, 2023. The first commit was pushed to GitHub.

On July 30th we got our first feedback (examples below) which was mindblowing. People were amazed by the idea and our first clutchy MVP (Minimum Viable Product). So we put everything on stake and sped up not to lose momentum.

Launching

We consider our official launch on the September 1st 2023, when we had a Product Hunt launch.

It also blew our traffic and we managed to win the 1st Product of the Day trophy that day. It was our first win. I even sacrificed my growing X account that day because it was banned forever for too many direct messages.

But it was worth it.

Yeah - customers!

Product Hunt just blew our traffic so got more that 2500 new accounts during September 2023. It took us about a few hours to gain the first 100 users.

First 100 customers is a more interesting question. I think the main booster of customers gain was our launch on AppSumo.

It brought us about 3k new users and about 100 paying customers. Some of them were lifetime purchasers and some were subscribers. But the overall number were above 100. If we speak about the timeline it took us about 5 months from official launch to cross this line.

The business model

We've decided to move away from the traditional business model where the platform takes a revenue cut from each sale. Instead, we offer two tiers of monthly subscriptions: $14.9/month and $49/month.

They differ in the number of admin users per store, available storage, and the amount of AI coins added to your account each month. Additionally, the higher tier includes access to our API, no-code automations (via Zapier), and webhooks, giving creators more flexibility and the ability to integrate with other tools they use.

We even tried a lifetime-only tier, but it brought us just one paid customer. Moreover, she signed up using an affiliate link. So, for us, it was an unsuccessful experiment. Maybe the timing was off, or the offer wasn't very appealing, but the fact is, it just didn’t work for us at that time.

We also offer add-ons to increase the number of stores, members, storage capacity, and AI credits.

These days, we have about 5k+ visitors and 550 - 1000 new registrations monthly. We experimented a lot with our pricing, so we have different numbers of trial subscriptions and churn rate from one month to another. But the average number is about 50 new trial subscriptions per month.

We’ve updated our pricing model just recently, so we are looking forward to seeing how many customers will convert into paying ones.

Marketing struggle

I have a tech background and started doing full time marketing just one year ago. So it’s a great challenge for me. I can say that I’ve learnt a lot during this period, but the main struggles are;

Reaching the right audience
Getting feedback from customers

Reaching the right audience

The audience problem has roots in my social media “bubble” where I post the majority of marketing content.

The most of the people there are indie makers like me, but not the target audience I’m trying to reach. We’ve already tried niching down and reaching more specific audience such as Notion template creators, but we are still in the process of search of the perfect fit.

At the moment we have an idea to niching down even further and target specific content creators by the niche they occupy. For example: cookery course creators, or female self-development coaches.

Getting feedback from customers

The feedback issue might be connected to the audience. Even though there are many users creating accounts on Marketsy.ai every month only a handful of them reply to emails we send them or ask anything appropriate in the support chat where we can interact with them and get some additional feedback.

We also launched a discord community with over 120 members already to interact with creators more.

When we pivoted to the digital products niche, we didn’t realised that this is still a red ocean with high competition, so we had to stand out of other players such as Gumroad or Payhip. So it’s still a rollercoaster

Marketing initiatives

We’ve tried out so many different initiatives marketing wise. Just to name a few …

Free tools

We've created a Gumroad Fee Calculator, that allows to compare how much you're going to pay to each platform for usage depending on your income.

Another free tool is the product's description analyzer. It uses AI to read the product's description page and suggests improvements to sell better.

Affiliate marketing

We an affiliate program offering 30% commission to our affiliates. The whole system is built on top of FirstPromoter where we can track all the affiliate traffic and manage payouts.

We have 122 affiliate promoters so far. The best working affiliate content was made by the following creators:

I once posted on X about my learnings on affiliate marketing.

Social media marketing

I do post quite a lot from my own account on X to promote marketsy. A few examples below:

On YouTube we post videos with tutorials and promos. A few examples below.

I also post on TikTok sharing my learnings on content creationa and selling.

@marketsyai
Who is your target audience? Many creators are biased about whether their courses or products are useful for anyone. It might be so, hypot... See more

@marketsyai
Stop procrastinating and start monetizing your expertise. Every hobby might become a source of income if you are passionate enough about i... See more

@marketsyai
Social media is full of "simple" manuals about starting your online courses business. But the hard truth is that it is anything but easy. ... See more

@marketsyai
SEO is harsh 😈 But we're working hard to tackle it for our merchants #ecommerce #dropshipping #affiliatemarketing #onlinestore #etsy #shop... See more

Other than that we have tried out:

Paid ads
Offering lifetime deals on various platforms
Product Hunt
Applying for listing on various AI tool directories
Cold outreach

All this marketing was bootstrapped as we are a bootstrapped team without external funding.

The best working tools so far turned out to be:

Product Hunt
Social media posts
Affiliate marketing

On the other hand paid ads were total waste of money. You have to be a professional to set up Google Ads properly. And even with the advices from a pro, you have to spend a lot to just calibrate your campaign.

We got some views from content for kids, from not relevant countries. When we thought that we’ve set everything properly, it surprised us another way.

Moreover, right now I believe that running paid campaigns should be a booster of your traffic, but not the resource till you find you PMF (Product Market fFit). Otherwise you can attract as many people as possible, but still will not be able to understand who your actual customers are and why.