We’d like to introduce you to our new in-house developed product, Popsta.
Popsta allows you to quickly create online popup shops for a simple one-off payment. That means there’s no ongoing subscription, hosting or transaction fees.
It allows people who’ve never sold their products online before to get selling simply and quickly while pocketing all of their profits. But even for seasoned online sellers, Popsta can bridge the gap between you and your customers by selling directly to them.
The idea came from seeing traditional brick-and-mortar only stores having to quickly adapt to find other ways of selling their products due to the current climate. We saw a way how we could solve this problem for them quickly and for minimal cost. Though Popsta aims to be impactful beyond the immediate future by removing all of the usual fees associated with selling your products online.
From idea to product
A few months ago I posted a message into our #ideas channel in Slack, “💡 One-click-zero-config-shop”, along with a few thoughts on the technology we could use to prototype the idea. This got the teams attention, so I set out to answer: could we create something that at the click of a button could create a fully functioning shop?
We work with startups a lot at Simpleweb so this was a “put your money where your mouth is” moment. I put a simple deck together to present to the team at the end of the week along with a functioning prototype. Everyone seemed to keen on the idea, it was looking like it had some legs and by Monday morning we had a small team together to get to work on making this a “thing”.
After a few days exploration it turned out the various services I was hoping to leverage and speed things up were not fitting together as I’d hoped. We decided it was a problem worth solving ourselves so we expanded our little internal startup and went about solving it the old fashioned way.
Meanwhile, before we got ahead of ourselves, we used a no-code builder to create a holding page to gather interest and posted our idea up to Product Hunt to help us validate our thinking.
While the tricky technical problems were being worked out we began choosing a name (the hardest part right?), designing a brand and bringing together the user experience. We were dealing with all the challenges our clients as startups face day to day, which is a pretty invaluable experience that will help us as a team to keep improving ourselves.
A weeks few later and we had a fully functioning product together, a little way from being finished but it worked! You could hit that “one-click button” and a brand new shop would be created for you in about 60 seconds.
We took on feedback from the wider Simpleweb team and user tested it getting some positive and constructive feedback. After building that feedback in and few rounds of polish, we had ourselves our “finished” product.
What’s next?
During development we’ve kept track of many really exciting ideas for how to improve and take Popsta further but we took our own advice and made sure to deliver the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) as quickly as possible to validate the market for Popsta.
The plan now is to get some users on board and support the feedback from the launch and if all goes well, we’ll start to work on that long list of ideas we have bubbling.
If you’d like to checkout Popsta please head over to https://popsta.co.uk/.
If you’d like to discuss your startup or project, get in touch with Simpleweb today.
