When watching a successful entrepreneur on YouTube, what do you do after the video ends? Do you click away to the next compelling thumbnail or ponder for a moment? Do you ever think of contacting the creator just to tell them you liked it?
Kyle Bigley, founder of TxtCart, frequently does the latter – and the resulting connections have paid him back in full. His ability to network helped him become a successful entrepreneur in the dropshipping industry before he’d even graduated from university.
After graduating, Kyle combined his passion for building businesses and connecting with industry experts to develop a Shopify app for SMS messaging called TxtCart. Investing $25,000 of his funds, Kyle spent over three years working late nights in his parent’s basement to bring the app to seven figures in ARR.
Recently, he was able to quit his lucrative project management job in New York City to work on his project full-time.Now, he plans to take TxtCart well beyond $3 million ARR.
Read on to learn Kyle’s secrets for success and why you might want to be a bit more social on social media.
Selling Modified Nerf Guns For Spending Money
Kyle describes himself as a type A personality. If he’s going to do something, he wants to do it the best he can.
For example, most kids upon receiving a Nerf gun as a gift would be content to fire off a couple of rounds at their siblings and parents every few days and leave it at that. Kyle, however, jumped on early YouTube to learn how to modify it for greater firing power, swapping out the springs and barrel and even giving it a custom paint job.
Soon, Kyle ran a small operation buying Nerf guns at Target and Walmart, modifying them, and flipping them on eBay to other enthusiasts for a bit of extra spending money. As school got harder and Kyle grew older, he ended the business but the memories of his brief entrepreneurial success lingered.
With some encouragement from his family, Kyle studied finance and economics at Penn State. The plan was to become an investment banker. Although this career path diverged from his entrepreneurial instincts, he felt he could use it as a stepping stone to do the things he wanted.
“I knew it wasn’t what I wanted to do forever. My plan was to work in investment banking and then go into private equity or do an MBA and start a business by thirty.”
Kyle secured a summer internship at a small PE firm while in college which helped him to obtain five “superday” interviews at prestigious investment banks. Though he never got the call back for the full-time job, he fortunately had a plan B: project management for high-end real estate development. He’d also already pivoted into the hottest industry of the late 2010s, dropshipping.
Five-Figure Monthly Earnings Selling Men’s Accessories
While in his junior year at Penn State, Kyle set up a dropshipping store for men’s accessories like necklaces and rings. At its peak, he earned more than $30,000 a month.
Before university, Kyle had previously connected with a rising star in the ecommerce and dropshipping space on YouTube named Arie Scherson. He’d sent a direct message to Arie a couple of times after viewing his videos on YouTube, which eventually resulted in a friendship. Through Ari, Kyle was brought into an online clique of young entrepreneurs doing dropshipping and ecommerce online who advised him on setting up his own store.
Dropshipping, for those unfamiliar with the term, is the act of sourcing goods from suppliers and then marketing those products to new customers. The dropshipper pays for the marketing while the supplier pays for the shipping and does customer service. The dropshipper takes a small cut so long as the spend from marketing and advertising doesn’t eclipse their profits.
In Kyle’s case, he’d source the goods on Chinese supplier supersite Aliexpress, create an online shop on Shopify, and then use Facebook ads to send customers to the store. Soon he had a healthy business with high monthly sales but it simultaneously caused him to dislike the B2C business model and its cyclical nature.
“I felt there had to be a better model,” he says. “I wanted something that would let me make money while I slept and the only way I knew how was through monthly recurring revenue.”
Kyle sold his dropshipping operation to a buyer in Florida for $50,000. Around that time, Shopify was gaining heaps of attention from developers around the world, so Kyle used his acquisition proceeds to seed the development of a Shopify app.
Breaking Into the World of SaaS Messaging
Kyle and his programmer roommate at Penn State often chatted about building a B2B application but never acted on it. After university, with extra money in his pocket and the prospect of becoming an investment banker fading fast, Kyle was ready to act.
But he didn’t go all in on entrepreneurship immediately. He first took a job as a project manager in New York City and saved money by living with his parents. This provided the safety net he needed to explore using text messaging (SMS) to help with abandoned cart recovery.
Kyle says roughly 70 percent of online shoppers abandon their carts before making a purchase meaning there’s heaps of profit in chasing them down. However, most customers are turned off by endless emails asking them to finish checking out their baskets. Unlike emails, SMS alerts are much more direct and don’t go right to the spam folder.
Kyle’s vision for SMS marketing was a bit more involved than most other businesses materializing at the time. He felt too many SMS businesses opted for impersonal messages that scared off customers just as system emails had. He wanted to create a process that put customers into direct contact with customer service and sales through their phone messaging.
As a non-technical founder, Kyle needed a cofounder. Not knowing any capable devs from his immediate network, he took to his Instagram following. He posted an Instagram story about this new project and asked his audience if they knew anyone who may be interested.
“A guy I knew from social media marketing reached out with a contact of his from high school. From my parents’ basement, I ended up cold-calling this stranger from Washington,” says Kyle.
To Kyle’s surprise, his potential cofounder loved his idea and was looking to pad his resume with some more work – but he wanted to bring his former colleague and college roommate in as well to handle the scope. After a bit of back-and-forth, TxtCart was born.
In about four months, Kyle and his two cofounders had built a working application letting businesses use SMS messages to chat with customers who opted in. This MVP was crude, but it served the addressable market in a new way. Kyle took the company from $0 to over $30,000 MRR in 12 months.
For the first two years of TxtCart, Kyle and his cofounders paid for operations out of pocket with money from their full-time jobs. It was a monastic period of Kyle’s life during which he would work from seven to six as a project manager and then work for another two to four hours every evening on the business. But it would all pay off within two years.
Growing TxtCart
Kyle admits it’s unlikely he could grow TxtCart exactly the same way he did when he started in 2019. He’d launched his Shopify application before the market was saturated by VC-backed apps.
“When we launched, there were no Shopify app store ads,” says Kyle. “We spent a lot of time optimizing our listing and we also got a lot of word of mouth. When app store ads launched, it was a goldmine – they were cheap and easy to use. By December of 2020, we’d made thirty thousand dollars in monthly revenue.”
Even with increased competition from large Shopify apps, Kyle was never worried about losing market share. He believes pursuing quality, interaction-based customer support via SMS keeps him well-positioned and uniquely separated from larger incumbents.
“SMS was never supposed to be a one-direction, no-reply channel,” he says. “You lose the conversational aspect that makes text messages uniquely different from email and other forms of chat. You’re starting to see some of these SMS companies nowadays pivot towards that, but it hasn’t been that way for the last four years.”
Kyle also says that SMS is increasingly difficult for new entrants due to ever-expanding regulations.
“It’s a compliance-driven industry. A lot of regulatory bodies are constantly making rules about SMS marketing. It’s a gatekeeping metric that keeps people out or down.”
As TxtCart’s ARR remained consistent and growing, Kyle quit his job to work on TxtCart full-time. He could now focus on expanding the team, which would come with scorching lessons of its own.
The $40,000 Hiring Mistake
One of Kyle’s greatest skills is connecting with the right people to push his career and business interests forward. But hiring the right people has always been his toughest challenge.
In 2023, Kyle wanted to open up a new revenue stream for TxtCart and elected to bring in sales reps (SDRs) to do it. Using a headhunter agency, he sourced an account executive and two business development representatives to start probing for new clients. To Kyle’s consternation, the new team was unable to convert a single new customer – and it wasn’t even their fault.
“The product wasn’t mature enough to make that initiative work,” says Kyle. “Our solution wasn’t clear and it cost us dearly.”
TxtCart burned through $40,000 paying the salaries of the new sales team and eventually let it go to avoid further losses. It was a hard lesson for Kyle that not all big investments would pay off if he didn’t move carefully.
Kyle has since developed a rough framework for progressive hiring that he believes most bootstrappers tend to follow.
“As a bootstrapped business, you can’t really afford to hire good full-time talent, especially in the US,” he says. “When we started we would use Fiverr and Upwork guys. As we’ve grown the company, we’ve leveraged resources and connections including talent agencies. Referrals are usually best. You need to make deals and negotiations where you bring someone on in a part-time capacity and give them sweat equity.”
You’ve Got to Create Your Own Luck
In Kyle’s opinion, the greatest contributor to TxtCart’s success is his cofounders.
“Your cofounders are the single most important decision you’ll make,” he says. “You’ll work with these people day in and day out. When you see people with failed businesses, and when I look at my failures, they almost always go back to picking the wrong cofounders.”
Kyle also says a large contributor to his personal success was changing his mentality about money.
“Most people think you need to have a lot of money to have success,” he says. “And while that can help you, it’s not required. At the end of the day, it boils down to resourcefulness and passion. If you really want to, you’ll succeed.”
His parting words for Bootstrappers readers are to reach out to the people who can help you, just like he did with his mentors on YouTube.
“You’ve got to make your own luck, and if you want to achieve greatness, you can’t be afraid to fail,” he says. “Look for people in positions to help you and talk to them. The worst they can say is no. You’ll never know if you don’t put yourself out there.”
