InstaHippo finds a new Home

The story of how we built and sold our first SaaS app 🦛

The website: www.instahippo.io

InstaHippo is product that was conceived and built by us. It was sold to Onclick Solutions LLC, USA in an all-cash deal in Jan 2022.

What is InstaHippo?

The TL;DR version
InstaHippo is an Instagram-style Stories widget for your e-Commerce (Shopify) Website.

The Longer version
It’s a SaaS tool that enables e-Commerce Websites in the following ways:

  • Give a full-screen immersive shopping experience

  • A generic tool to add experiences of products, testimonials, events, news, and more

  • Mix-and-match videos, photos, and text in creative ways to offer compelling narratives for shoppers to buy your products

  • Ability to add 100s of media without affecting the length and context of the page

  • All the content on InstaHippo are SEO friendly

  • Understanding user behavior/interests with in-built analytics

  • All the above without any development effort for the store owner - just pure plug and play.

🚀 InstaHippo is now used by hundreds of businesses in 12+ countries.

My Journey

The past

I vividly remember, it was just 6 years ago when running Wlend (with the cool Wlend team) at 91Springboard (a co-working space). I didn’t even know what an IDE was. It was there that I became friends with Shashank (Founder of Pushowl). He inspired me a great deal to begin my software journey. The startups, founders, and other awesome folks I've known over the years have provided such an invigorating environment. Add to that my amazingly supportive life partner, Swetha - well, you’ve got a great recipe for some cool things to happen.

In building meaningful products - I found my true calling. Given that I wasn’t even a designer or a developer a few years ago - to now building and selling my first SaaS - it feels...erm..soul-filling.

In the last few months of InstaHippo, before the sale, Karma joined as a Co-founder. He modernized our tech stack and optimized InstaHippo for scale. Now, our dynamic duo is ready to kick some asphalt.

The current

I have had a good break and now itching to build some awesome products. I’ve also begun working on a cool project with an even cooler dude. We’re exploring Programmatic SEO (the one where you create a few thousand pages programmatically). More on this soon.

I’m also supporting some of Tessel's amazing old clients and mostly limit myself to working on a few interesting projects. I’m also actively hunting for business/product ideas with Karma.

The Future

Life’s never about one person or thing - it’s what I love to call the “emergent property” (a term borrowed from Complexity Science). I love to lead the journey with some amazing people, have wonderful conversations, and build amazing things together.

Love to quote Nassim Taleb here: "Progress is almost never linear. Ups and downs and bursts."

PS: If you are running /part of an eCommerce company with yearly revenues of over $1M USD, we might be building something useful for you. Would love to connect! For others - I'm always up for some good conversations. Find me here: Twitter, LinkedIn

- Vivek

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Email: vivek@tessel.tech, Phone: +91 9980474224