Cartrabbit is a small company in Coimbatore, India. Small by design, not because we haven’t got round to growing. We make marketing software for online stores. That’s the whole business, and it has been from the start.
We didn’t set out to build ten products. We built one, listened to what people said about it, and built the next.
The first was J2Store, a shopping cart for Joomla. Small market, but a good place to learn what store owners complain about. Mostly they complained about discounts. Setting up a simple offer meant hiring a developer.
So we made Discount Rules for WooCommerce. Now a store owner could set up the offer they had in their head, by themselves, in a few minutes. It spread quickly. It still pays for a lot of what we do.
After that the pattern repeated. A merchant would tell us about something that was costing them sales. If we heard it often enough, we built it. That’s where Retainful, WPLoyalty and UpsellWP came from. When Shopify merchants started asking for the same things, we built Yuko.
We’ve been bootstrapped the whole way. Every product was paid for by the one before it. Nobody outside this company gets a say in what we build next, and we’d like to keep it that way.
Today around 150,000 stores run something we made. Most of them are in the US, UK, Australia and Canada. We’re still in one office.
Each product exists because the one before it taught us what merchants were missing.
Worth saying out loud, because they’re the decisions people ask us about most.
Customers pay us and that’s enough. An investor would want us bigger faster, and bigger faster is how products get worse.
We understand one market. Every product we make is for people selling online, and that’s why our tools fit the way a store actually works.
We hire when there is more work than people, not before. Everyone here can still tell you what they shipped this month.
One office in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu. Everyone works in the same room. Our customers are mostly nine to twelve hours behind us, which we’ve learned to plan around.
Three roles are open right now. All of them talk to customers every day.