While I do not believe in the transient nature of new year resolutions, it certainly represents a start of something new and hence a moment to review the past. For me, starting Cartimize with gushing, over-flowing, joyous energy, making mistakes and learning from them only to shelve it later has been a bummer. But the new year brings new changes. 2020 will be the year Cartimize succeeds.
I started Cartimize to make premium ecommerce UX knowledge available for everyone and not just for big companies. With that vision, I saw that Cartimize can be many things. It can be an ecommerce development service provider, a theme developer, a UX auditing and reporting service, a managed e-commerce hosting provider, a completely new ecommerce platform, and many more.
But since I have been working with WooCommerce for the past 8 years and I have experienced first-hand how clunky the default checkout flow is, I wanted to work on it first and then follow the path it takes me on. So, on this first day of this new year, instead of thinking about what the Cartimize brand itself can be, I think I should focus on my current pursuit of WooCommerce checkout and understand what success for that looks like.
I do not see the plugin as just a tool that delivers the best checkout experience for stores but more importantly, a platform for store owners to learn the importance of UX for their store’s performance. The appeal and reach of the plugin are going to be the engine that would drive me to build a community of store owners from whom I can learn how best to share my learnings. I’m thinking of ways to maximize that reach once the plugin is ready.
Since I do not believe in paid acquisition of users (we haven’t spent a dollar on marketing our products till now) and rely solely on users spreading the word because of the value they get, the marketing of the plugin will be a community-driven effort. If a product is not worth talking about, it’s not worth using.
So, in my mind, as I see it here and now, success for the WooCommerce checkout plugin will be —
Satisfied users inviting their fellow store owners to give it a shot, thereby building an energetic and respectful community of people learning from each other and growing in the process.
🙂