Cafekado.ir: Handicraft & gift online platform
- Date : 2015-2022
Cafekado.ir was lunched in 2005 as a simple handicraft online shop. Due to my passion to create a professional shop for selling handicrafts which made by young people, my wife Sephora who is an artisan motivate me to step in this field. After a while thanks to heartwarming messages and feedbacks from artisan especially women who lived in far locations of IRAN, we change it to a 2-side platform which every artisans could establish his/her page on it – free of charge –, list product and use safe online bank port.
As founder I had got great deal of responsibility although the main role I was in charged for was Product owner and Product manager.
• UI/UX design and developement: All pages including more than 60 administrator panels and artisans’
panels were design and developed by me! It was my startup and I spent lots of time and effort on it!
• Coding: At first to release an MVP, I coded back-end with C# and ASP.net in Visual Studio.
It was a good base which many engineers worked on it after a while.
• Building the community of artisans: To build a successful platform you should firstly focus
on building a vendors’ community. I had a brilliance benchmark Etsy which was like a polar star
for me in those years. I connected to artisan and asked them to join to our community and asked
them to introduce this professional platform to their friends. Attending in exhibitions and
events related to handicrafts was one of my main activities in that period.
• Educating Artisans: As a platform we were in charge of any problems like bad packaging, late
delivery, broken delivered products and many other unwanted situations. We try to make many videos
and podcast about creating content, photography, packaging, being ready for some occasions
and holidays and so on that received many heartwarming feedbacks from artisans.
• Marketing matters: As product owner and product manager getting proper feedback from
vendors and user and analyzing these data and convert them to features to improve the product
and creating a better user experience was so critical. So that I closely collaborated with
marketing team and was collecting data from Google Analytics, Google Search console and Hotjar
as well. Moreover at that period of time I worked closely with SEO team to add proper schema,
tags, breadcrumbs and sitemap to soar user acquisition from google.
• Looking for Investor: Raising adequate fund in proper time is the goal of each startup
founder. To show my startup to investors I participated in more than 10 domestic and international
event and competition that broadened my horizon a lot not only in startup field but also in long
term attitude to business. We won many awarded and nominated in many events. In one of those
competitions, we got a prize from Minister of ICT of IRAN in 2017.
Cafekado for me is the abstract of everything that I’ve achieved in these years in terms of Design
and developing a product which many people should communicate with it daily and many people count
on it as a vital part of their business.
To run Cafekado I had to read more than ever to tackle every day challenges we were faced daily. It
was A great memorable journey for me. I found hundred of friends and worked with many talented engineers.
Here you can find some sample videos that we created in Cafekado for introducing our vendors. It was part of marketing activities.
Training was one of our vital activities in Cafekado.
After a deep search in blogs of Etsy.com and Shopify.com I created
Cafekado Academy which was consist of lots of articles which most
of them was written by own.
Please check out "Cafekado academy" playlist in my Youtube channel.
