How we built and sold a startup 🙌

In 2019, one of our product managers, Wesley, had an idea.

His roommate was the founder and CEO of a women’s vitamin subscription service.

But, she had been handling all of the customer service herself, and spent every night catching up on an endless barrage of customer support tickets.

Wesley quickly realized why:

Her customers had almost no ability to manage their subscriptions!

She’d lost agency over her time, because customers lacked agency over their orders.

Wesley wanted to help out.

And since he’d worked with messaging bots before, he figured he could use them to automate the process.

He pitched the AE Studio team on a framework that would allow customers to manage their orders in real time through a simple SMS chat.

This eventually became ElectricSMS — our first-ever Skunkworks project!

This platform allowed customers to skip, revise, renew, and reschedule their orders (and change account information like shipping addresses) purely through texting.

And as the cherry on top, it pre-emptively asked customers to confirm that they want their next delivery before billing them — all without having to log into a website, or contact support.

Many companies believe that giving customers this kind of control over their purchases will lead to decreased revenue and retention.

But Wesley disagreed, saying:

“If we treat people well, and we build technology that allows people the transparency and the ability to act on where their money’s going, they’re going to have a longer relationship with the brands that they’re purchasing from.”

And he was right!

We helped Wesley close his roommate as his first customer.

And within two years, ElectricSMS helped 22,000 unique users and processed over $25 million in revenue for 56 merchants.

The app saved customers and merchants thousands of hours. Churn rates dropped, and retention rates and customer lifetime value increased across the board.

(And Wesley’s roommate could finally get some sleep! 😌)

In 2021...

We got a call from ReCharge about a possible acquisition!

As an industry leader in the e-commerce subscription management space (working with 15,000+ brands and 50 million+ subscribers), they shared our vision and saw large-scale potential in ElectricSMS.

Not long after, ReCharge acquired ElectricSMS and made it their own.

We were equal parts thrilled and humbled — it was the first time we’d created a product internally and sold it, for a very tidy profit.

But the most exciting part? It validated our model.

It proved that agency-increasing software, our commitment to empowering people to develop their ideas, and taking the long-term view works.

Since then, we’ve significantly scaled up our Skunkworks team, where we’ve developed tons of other cool projects that are growing fast, and generating serious revenue 🙌

We’ll talk more about what we’re up to on that front soon.

In the meantime…

If you’re interested in hiring one of our teams for an upcoming project, or have a tough technical challenge on your hands that you’d like us to take a look at:

You can get in touch with us here.

AE Studio Bytes will be back with more case studies and tech industry insights every Tuesday and Thursday!