PayKickstart: Bootstrapping a SaaS from Zero to $1 Million ARR

Mark Thompson is the co-founder of PayKickstart, a shopping cart and affiliate management platform for online businesses.

Mark got started as an entrepreneur in 2009 by selling online training and coaching products. A couple of years later he started getting into building and selling software products.

Over the next few years, he built a dozen different software products (most of which failed). But a couple of them did well and generated some decent revenue for him.

But one thing that he noticed when selling these products was how there wasn't a really good shopping cart solution. He always felt that he was leaving money on the table.

He and co-founder Matt tried different shopping cart products, but none of them met their expectations and gave them the flexibility to sell products the way that they wanted.

So eventually they decided to build their own shopping cart solution. And once they started using their new internal shopping cart, their revenue started to skyrocket.

Before they knew it, they had colleagues and partners asking how they could get the same checkout experience for their products.

That was the aha moment when PayKickstart was born. Today the company is to exceed $1 million in annual recurring revenue and is continuing to grow at a fast rate.

But the founders also had their fair share of challenges along the way. For example, they wanted to build a product that had a lot of functionality and flexibility.

But that resulted in a big customer churn problem for them because after signing up, many customers were overwhelmed and confused about how to use the product.

So they also had to figure out how to find the right balance between flexibility and a simple to use product. They also had to figure out a better onboarding process.

We talk about how they've grown the business so quickly, the importance of being focused and how they went about solving their churn problem.