How Nikita Created Claspo to Fill a Gap in the Market

In this interview, Claspo co-founder Nikita Korchevskyi shares how the business originated out of need. He also shares how the company has grown through SEO and organic search, and how they’ve started to move into paid advertising as well.

How much revenue and profit does the business generate?

Claspo is still in its startup phase and striving to achieve profitability. Our primary objective for the current year is to attain an annual revenue milestone of $150,000.

Tell us about yourself and your business.

I hold degrees in Management and Organizational Administration, as well as Information Systems and Technologies, from Simon Kuznets Kharkiv National University of Economics. Before establishing Claspo, I spent 8 years at one of Ukraine’s leading digital agencies, renowned for its work with the country’s top 10 e-commerce projects.

During my tenure at the agency, I delved deeply into the problems of user data collection and building repeat purchases. I often found myself wishing for a tool like Claspo, an effective yet intuitive and budget-friendly widget builder, that would have helped me solve both of those problems. But Claspo didn’t exist then, so, together with Dmitry Kudrenko, we decided to create it ourselves.

As a company founded by marketers for marketers, we’re committed to addressing their typical pain points through Claspo and its continually evolving functionality.

How does your business make money?

Claspo is a SaaS with a freemium business model. We offer a free lifetime subscription plan alongside four paid subscription options tailored to businesses of varying sizes and budgets, including monthly and annual subscriptions. We also welcome users to contact us to craft individual plans that align with their unique business requirements. 

What was your inspiration for starting the business?

As head of email marketing, my focus was on growing email subscribers and enhancing customer profiles. Implementing website widgets was crucial for these tasks, yet I struggled to find a tool that fully met our needs. Some lacked essential features, like extensive integration options or flexible customization. Meanwhile, those with a decent toolkit came with a hefty price tag comparable to developing our own solution. 

This led to the birth of Claspo—a widget platform offering limitless customization and integration with popular market platforms. Claspo fills the market gap, providing a balance between functionality and affordability, catering to freelance marketers, solopreneurs, and small startups.

How and when did you launch the business?

Since 2021, I’ve been developing Claspo. When I first conceived the idea, I pitched it to the agency where I served as head of email marketing. Thankfully, they were open to it, having experience in transforming proprietary technologies into autonomous projects.

With their support, I formed a small team of ten, mainly comprising agency staff. Together, we mapped out the app’s vision and design. When creating the MVP, our approach was to establish a sturdy foundation, allowing us to swiftly incorporate new features to meet evolving client needs and market trends. As a result, Claspo’s initial design has remained largely unchanged since its MVP phase. We’ve maintained this approach to ensure agility in responding to our clients’ demands and the dynamic market landscape.

How is Claspo funded? 

Claspo is a bootstrapped business that grows without relying on external investments.

How did you find your first few clients or customers?

With the support of our partner companies, we established an initial customer base. To further expand our reach, we centered our strategy on driving organic traffic by creating valuable and relevant content on our blog. In essence, we placed our bets on the idea that potential clients would find us through search engines on their own.

While this approach has evolved and grown in scale over time, it continues to yield positive outcomes for us. Currently, we’ve entered a phase of stable growth, experiencing a remarkable 25% month-on-month increase in organic traffic.

What was your first year in business like?

My team and I collaborated on product development and design. Between May and July 2021, we successfully crafted a prototype, which underwent rigorous testing with clients from our partner project, the eSputnik ESP system. With the feedback from early adopters, we refined the prototype and finished the MVP by February 2022. 

However, during this period, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine necessitated a shift in our priorities toward ensuring the safety of all team members. So, the official release was delayed until March 2022.

What strategies did you use to grow the business?

Since our launch, we’ve heavily relied on organic channels, and they’ve consistently delivered positive results. However, as time progressed, we noticed a plateau in growth momentum and explored alternative strategies to scale our business further.

We identified specific campaigns that demonstrate excellent performance in terms of acquisition cost, and we’re actively scaling them. Currently, our focus areas showing promising performance include:

• PPC Advertising: This encompasses paid advertising across Google and various social networks.
• Co-marketing: Partnership with products we integrate with, leveraging collaborative efforts to expand our reach.
• Influencer Marketing: We partner with industry experts on LinkedIn to create collaborative content and enhance our brand visibility and credibility.
• PR Campaigns: We strategically bolster our presence in thematic media outlets to attract targeted attention.

What was the biggest challenge you had to overcome?

Our primary challenge was to develop a product that bridges the gap between high-priced enterprise tools and those with limited functionality, creating an optimal solution that would cater to a broad audience. With Claspo now being used by 500 brands across various industries worldwide and garnering 1,000 new registrations and 50,000 monthly website visits, we can say that this challenge was successfully overcome.

Our next challenge lies in scaling up our business and expanding our client base. Accepting it, we’ve entered an experimentation phase, where we’re actively testing major marketing hypotheses to optimize our sales funnel and enhance user retention.

What have been the most significant keys to your business’ success?

Claspo is a solution born out of firsthand experiences, understanding the common challenges faced by marketers, e-commerce representatives, and business owners. That’s why we knew exactly what our product needed to offer and which features it should include to meet their needs.

Our platform is designed to be user-friendly from the get-go, requiring zero coding or design skills. Thanks to our intuitive drag-and-drop editor and extensive library of over 700 templates, users can dive straight in without any learning curve.

Claspo also prioritizes user experience on websites, recognizing its crucial role in driving conversions. Our builder includes a dedicated settings section to ensure our widgets don’t annoy visitors or make them leave the website. So, we dispel stereotypes about widgets and alleviate common concerns associated with them.

Tell us about your team.

Originally, Claspo’s team included employees from the agency I previously worked for. While some have transitioned to permanent roles with us, others continue to lend their expertise as needed. As our business expanded, our workload increased, and our ambitious plans took shape, our team has seen significant growth. Currently, Claspo boasts a team of 28 professionals across the development, product management, and marketing departments.

Since our team members are in different countries, we’ve adopted a remote work format. Despite the geographical differences, regular online meetings and a well-established workflow ensure that we remain aligned and consistently pursue our goals.

What is the most important lesson you’ve learned growing the business?

Three valuable lessons come to mind:

• Investing in public relations can be pivotal. Once you’ve built a solid organic reach, leveraging brand search can exponentially boost customer inflow.
• When developing a B2B product, it’s essential to empathize with the needs and challenges of your customers’ customers. By understanding their pain points, you can uncover valuable insights with minimal effort and time.
• It’s essential to differentiate your product by showcasing its unique features and benefits. Clearly defining your niche in the market reinforces your brand’s identity and strengthens your competitive edge.

What separates your business from your competitors?

Claspo places a strong emphasis on simplicity and exceptional user experience on the website. With our vast library containing 700 pre-designed templates catering to 36 different use cases, the process of creating widgets is streamlined to just a few minutes.

Besides, our triggering section features smart pre-set display rules, effectively preventing widgets from overlapping or appearing simultaneously. Thus, we save our users from errors and ensure that their website visitors are not inconvenienced or annoyed.

Finally, we make it easier for online platforms to go global. Claspo widgets can automatically adapt to the language settings of the visitor’s browser or the language chosen on the website, making it effortless for businesses to cater to an international audience.

What advice do you have for other entrepreneurs?

Start thinking about marketing from the get-go, even if your product isn’t fully developed yet. It’s beneficial to initiate a marketing strategy before the MVP release. When your product launches, try to gather early adopters who can test it. Although we initially had a customer base established through our partners, we overlooked the plan of attracting external users and had to adjust our approach swiftly to foster growth.

What are your future plans for the business?

In the upcoming year, our plans include:

• Expanding our educational content.
• Establishing official partnerships with the ESP and CRM systems we integrate with.
• Testing significant marketing hypotheses to refine our sales funnel and enhance user retention strategies.
• Achieving a target of $150,000 in annual revenue.

Looking ahead, our goal is to reach a break-even point within the next two years as we continue to grow and develop Claspo.

What are some of your favorite books, blogs, podcasts, or YouTube channels?

I have found two books to be incredibly helpful. The first one is ‘Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution‘ by Uri Levine, who is the co-founder of Waze. The second book that has been insightful for me is ‘Predictably Irrational‘ by Dan Ariely.