I’m in the final stages of launching my first SaaS (software-as-a-service) business and I’m pretty psyched about it.

It’s been 5 years since I started Patent Earth, my e-commerce business selling wall art & t-shirts based on patent art illustrations, and it’s been a wild ride.  I use POD (print on demand) services to fill a lot of my orders, which are printing companies that also handle shipping.

Print on demand e-commerce is a fairly new business model (Printful got started in 2013), and I’m a big fan of it because it lowers the barrier to entry for selling printed products online damn near to the floor.  That creates a lot of opportunity for people with plenty of motivation but little money to invest – which is exactly why I got into it in the first place.

But it’s far from perfect.  In this business, to have the full sweep of products you want to offer, at the prices you want to offer, you will often need to work with multiple POD services.  And to get as much market exposure as possible, you will often need to operate multiple channels (meaning you build a website, but also sell on Ebay, and Amazon, etc).  It becomes a lot to manage.

So I built some in-house tools to make my life easier.  Tools to keep track of what I was spending and making, how fast my orders were shipping, and to let me monitor all my orders in one place.  And I figured other POD sellers would probably love to have these tools as well.  So when the pandemic struck in 2020 and drove us all into quarantine, I used the newfound abundance of free time to build my custom tools into a fully developed web app.

Which brings to my new SaaS business: Printalytics, the world’s first multi-channel and multi-platform analytics app for POD E-commerce shops.

Last Monday (Memorial Day), I made the website public.  It’s not really a launch – I’ve still got a couple of things to iron out before I actually start accepting new users.  But it’s still a big step, took a lot of work to make it that far.  And I’m only days away from inviting the first users in.

I have no idea how this is going to go, but I’m excited & optimistic.  I feel like I’ve managed to be first to market with something that could be <cliche>a game changer</cliche> for POD sellers.  Hopefully the results will bear that out – I’ll find out soon enough.

Wish me luck!