Software as a Service (SaaS) solution for retailers

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Developer podcast, where we work on getting better step by step professionally and personally. Let's get started. Well, hello and welcome back to a new season. We are kicking off season 18, where we are going to go back to a flurry of interviews and keep this another interview filled slash packed season. I wasn't sure we were even going to do another season. It was one of those where we'd sort of run the course on a couple of topics that I'd wanted to cover. I was thinking about them and decided to look back at some of the past seasons and in reviewing some of the stuff from the prior interviews, I realized that this is an area where there's really there's really a lot more that we can we can get into, talk about a lot of different topics and get a lot of different points of view. Funny enough, I don't think anybody's surprised that if you add somebody else to the mix and you're going to get a different point of view and also realize that even though this is a more time consuming slash costly way to build out content for the podcast, just being completely transparent, it does. It takes me more time. effort, but it is far more enjoyable and rewarding. And I decided, you know what, after a couple of interviews, I said, I need to go ahead and do another season and continue moving forward and have really hit the jackpot on several of these interviews. You'll see as we get into the season, there are more than a few where we could do a season just interviewing that person. It was just there's that much content and that that many avenues for us to go down during the conversation. A lot of these were things that were, you know, had a sort of short kind of time target and we ended up running over and still were more than ready to continue to talk through the topics that we covered and many others. So I look forward to going back over these as we're building out the season. And I hope you, if you get just half as much enjoyment out of listening to them as I do, then I think you'll be more than rewarded for your time spent listening to it. We're going to start off the season with Irina Podobnaya. And she is, and I'll let her as we get into it, you know, explain her background, but she's with an organization called Track Mage that she created and we'll talk about it and how it came about and what some of their strengths are. And we get into some really good, I think, real world examples of some of the topics that we have covered in past episodes, past seasons, some of the mentor mastermind type presentations that we've done. And it just, I think, reaffirms some of the things that we have talked about as part of becoming a better developer, delivering good solutions for your customers. And so this first episode is really more of a, I guess it's a lot of introductory type stuff to help you get a feel for what Track Mage is, a little bit about Irina and how she fell, as it was, sort of fell into this. But it really wasn't how she looked at her experience and where there were some gaps and where she could step forward and fill those gaps with an organization. And we get into some really good discussions as we go through this about building that organization and addressing customers and where some of the strengths of software as a service, which is what Track Mage does. There'll be links in the show notes. I highly encourage you to check those out. There are also, I guess I sort of warn you, a little bit of heads up. There are multiple useful products that she mentions along the way. And I will throw links to some of those into the show notes. I'm not sure I'll get all of them because there is a wealth of information that she shares through this throughout these episodes, these couple of multi-parts that we're going to go through in our interview with her. So you may want to take notes. If not, it may be something where, you know, sort of note where it's at in the podcast and come back where you do have the ability to write some stuff down and check some of these things out. There are some really interesting tools, really valuable gems that she drops along the way that I was even taking notes as I went through it, have looked back and have started to look a little deeper into a couple of these products because they are the kinds of things that are very useful, but they run a little bit under the radar of most people. So unless you're searching for it, you're not going to find it or you're not going to think about it. Once you understand that there is an alternative to the primary tool you use, this may be something where you say, hey, this is exactly going to scratch the itch that I have. This is actually going to fill a big need that I or my organization have. I've got a little bit long on the preamble. I apologize for that. So let's get into the meat of this and start our conversation with Irena. OK, so we'll get started and want to say thank you for coming on, spending some time talking with Irena Padumnaya, which I apologize if I say it a little slow, but hey, I'm working my way up. I don't always get names right away. She is with a software as a service solution that we will have links to it. It's called TrackMage.com. And I think our focus is going to be really we're going to talk about software as a service today and how she came about it, some of the challenges and some of the things, lessons learned there. I think this will be great for everybody. And hopefully we can walk through some really interesting discussions here. I guess we'll start with if you want to give a little bit of your background and sort of who you are and how you got to, we'll probably work into how you got right into TrackMage, but start with where you were beforehand, sort of the pre-story and then getting into it. All right. Yeah. So I typically introduce myself as a founder of TrackMage, but in this case, I can introduce myself as an IT project manager. So previously I was doing what I'm currently doing for myself. I was doing it for customers. I actually managed the teams of developers and got a lot of predominantly men pulling the software together in the right direction. At some point, I just got envious of my customers and I thought like, what the heck? I can do it myself. I can definitely just build my own software. Oh, I didn't understand what I was getting into. But there are other people who are bearing all the costs and they are definitely handling more than I can see as a project manager. It helps. But then we started doing it for ourselves. We just realized how many different things were costing money, which we were not anticipating, even just the project management tools and other stuff. So how did you get into, that's already going to be some fascinating stuff to talk about right there. How did you get to the concept? And maybe I guess back up a little bit is give us sort of a, maybe that elevator pitch of what TrackMage does. And then how did you get to that as a, hey, here's something that I think would be a great solution to build? Yeah, well, it's a very personal story. So this was a solution that we built up for ourselves initially. So we were living in China for two and a half years and we were running a fulfillment center for other retailers that were all over the world. So we literally were doing something that the Chinese agent or supplier usually does, but we were actually foreigners and we didn't speak Chinese. So it was an interesting endeavor to undertake when we actually had no experience on that side of the business. So what we had though were the skills to develop and the skills to speak English, obviously, and the skills to sell stuff online. So TrackMage helps with handling all the things that happen after the person presses the buy button. So all the post purchase experience. So it helps with shipment tracking. It has capability to inform customers about the shipment status. Also some marketing stuff on the backend, because we discovered that people, when they are seeing those emails about the shipment status, they don't treat them as marketing emails. They treat them as transactional. And that's why the open rates are unheard of, like 60% or more, because it's hard to track right now than a lot of email clients. They are cutting off the pixels. So we don't really know the open rates. But the flipping 60% of what we know is really giving us the data that customers, they don't anticipate that they are going to be sold in an email with information about the shipment that is coming their way. But what we show is, we don't provide the functionality quite the same as Amazon or eBay. So we don't provide the fulfillment capabilities. But we do breach that gap in communication. Even with all those other retailers that use platforms such as Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, or whatever tool they're using, because there are a lot of tools right now in the market that are the typical marketing funnels where the person just literally buys. But on the backend of the tool, you don't have anything. You really don't have any capability to fulfill orders or to keep track. And that's why people start building solutions out of duct tape and Zapier. Like duct tape, Zapier, and let's fulfill orders. And Google's Precious, of course, because that's the primary database tool that all no coders use. And TrackMage just systematizes all this information. So there are dashboards and analytics and all the interesting functionality for the retailers. And there is some functionality that doesn't have like no other system on the market currently has. It's a wholesale shipment tracking functionality where you can see all the shipments on the same page. That was a challenge for us because in China, we had to fulfill orders that had around like 50 boxes that each had a tracking number. And we had to track those on a single page. And can you imagine maybe just sending like 50 emails to one customer about like shipment statuses? So that's why we had to develop a page where all the shipments were displayed on the same unified way. So that's like the brief history into and a little bit more technical than I usually go. But I think this is going to fly on this podcast. So from that, that's really interesting. So you've got a lot of different integrations that are built in as part because you've got all these different shippers. You've got all these. You've got a lot of different things that you're sort of centralizing to give them to give a value to your customers. So how did you I guess a little bit just as more personal curiosity a little bit is how did you grow that? Did you start with just like one or two specific vendors and integrations and you've just like been building ever since? Or is there something where you had a like a minimal that you said we're going to have 10 different things we integrate with and then we're able to build from there? So originally, when we started the integration with carriers, so we just picked the top five like UPS, FedEx, DHL, I mean, USPS and the fifth one, I always forget. It was probably PostNL just because of frequency that the Chinese suppliers were using it. And then we also had integrated the post tracking services that AliExpress suppliers use. It's very like it's a very specific platform. I'm not going to showcase because everyone is going to build it. But yeah, so yeah, but since we've been in China and we know what tools the AliExpress suppliers actually use, we were able to integrate with those directly, which actually required a little bit of dancing around the firewall and some of those like because like Chinese software is a thing of its own. It's very... How to say that? Like the coding standards are not quite the same. So it's very hard to work with. But I guess like nothing compares to USPS or UPS because like they are, their API is tough to integrate with, like really tough. But there are so many tools we've actually integrated with them because they have this incredible shipment volume. So like a lot of retailers, they're using UPS. That's why we couldn't bypass integrating with them. So with all of these integrations, did you end up... This is going to get a little bit into design kind of thing, but you sort of have without giving away your secret sauce or anything, but do you sort of have an internal way that you view packages and shipings and stuff like that, and then you translate out to the integrations or do you sort of find a way to merge all of the different ways that... Because I know every shipper is close to the same, but they've got a little bit of different stuff they track. Right. Like in terms of architecture, we have unified shipment statuses for all the shipments in the platform. And what we do is we do just mapping. For each carrier, we have the mapping that literally says... Some carriers may say, I don't know, delivering, and we just map it to in transit. The other carrier says, I don't know, en route, and then it's also in transit. So on the platform, everyone is seeing the same unified statuses. This is the same status. These are the same statuses that we send through API as well. It doesn't require for the customers to literally just provide credentials for each carrier because we handle all that for them. So it doesn't matter which carrier you use, TrackMate is going to recognize it and then give you the standard statuses that are only a handful of those. I don't know. No info, in transit, available for pickup, delivered. These are the primary four. And then everything else comes as a special case because there are certain statuses that only appear in situations where there was some kind of error or there was some kind of customs hold because those statuses, they are handled very differently by different carriers. Sometimes the carriers don't even have a status for that. They just provide this information as a checkpoint. And in the checkpoint, you see like, oh, it's on customs. Why haven't you notified me? I need to pay some fees to just get the package. That's the idea. Yeah, actually, the biggest challenge was localization because for localization, we had to translate all those different checkpoints. And that needs to happen very fast and on the go. And we had to integrate like at first, we integrated the Google Translate. And then it became very costly. We went to Microsoft Translation Services. This one is OK, but we are not using it on any staging environments or for testing just for the customers, just like for you guys. Yeah. Keep it as cost as low as possible for that. Yeah. So how did you and this can be interesting because you have a software as a solution, a SaaS solution that you've built and particularly where some of these other tools, I think some of your competitors go because some of them, it's more of a like either it's a like an installed application or a plugin that goes in somewhere or something. How did you maybe talk about where you where you went, how you got into SaaS as being the sort of the platform that you want to use to deliver this? Well, originally, I haven't even considered creating some desktop application because it's extremely inconvenient for the customer to have to install something like, yes, I understand that you're saving on resources, but look at the cost of support, it's some supporting it because every time you release a new version, like all the customers, they have to update. But what if you need to change something like how do you maintain backwards compatibility? So it's only on the surface. It appears to be like saving resources or like server capacity. But on the real like in the real world, it's not like that. You have to maintain like seven different versions because you have like your enterprise customer on the I don't know, like version four and you're already on version seven. And you have to, I don't know, like roll out and upgrade, even send your engineers to their company like let's not get into that. Like that's why software as a service was always like the browser based solution. And we were considering also developing a mobile app. At some point, we're going to develop it for inventory management because that seems to be a challenge as well for quite a few customers because like that's the typical case where you have your home office or home warehouse where you have to accept the inventory to the warehouse and you just don't have the solution and all the solutions they cost an arm and a leg. So that's why we have something like a bare bones inventory management functionality in mind that we can introduce to the market. So there is something for small businesses that they can use and they don't have to learn how to use. And that seems like a good spot for us to pause for now. We're going to dive right back into this conversation in the next episode and continue talking with Irina about her product and some of the challenges and some of the, you know, some of the decisions that were made behind the scenes as they were creating this this platform and figuring out the best way to deliver a solution to their customers. But also we're going to get into some of the challenges they they found along the way, you know, basically talking to customers of their product, how to use it better, how to improve and enhance what they have provided and how that approach is sometimes very systemic or systematic, I would say. And you sort of just it almost comes up to counting one, two, three as you look at how they use it and where some improvements can be made and then follow through. And amazingly, sometimes it's that simple. It's not some dark art, but something where it's really just a matter of communicating with your customers, getting some good feedback and then using that to improve your application. I think you've heard enough of me this episode, though. So we'll wrap this one up and we'll come back and we'll focus more on the conversation with Irina next time around. But as always, go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Noor podcast. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, anywhere that you can find podcasts. We are there. And remember, just a little bit of effort every day ends up adding into great momentum and great success. Hi, this is Rob from Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Noor podcast. We're excited to be on Alexa now. You can enable us by simply saying, Alexa, enable Building Better Developers. 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