Personalised Product Recommendations to Each Visitor – Bluebarry Startup Review

Website traffic is up, but sales aren’t matching? You’re not alone if you’re scratching your head. Many online store owners are facing the same puzzle. Shoppers are visiting your site, but those carts get abandoned. High-intent visitors just bounce. And your customer service team? They keep hearing shoppers say they picked the wrong product. Giving every single online visitor personalised product advice feels impossible, right?

But what if it wasn’t? What if you could guide each shopper to exactly what they need? Bluebarry saw this gap as a huge chance. They’ve built a way for online stores like yours to create digital product advisors. We interviewed Bluebarry to find out how easy product advice can be the secret to more online sales.

What is Bluebarry?

Bluebarry is a platform designed to help eCommerce businesses enhance their shopping experience with interactive digital product advisors. By addressing the challenge of high cart abandonment and unfulfilled sales potential, it becomes a tool for businesses to match their visitors with the perfect products.

So, who benefits the most? Small and medium-sized eCommerce businesses, especially founders and marketing leaders. If you’re trying to curb the frustration of shoppers leaving their carts or bouncing off your site, you’re not alone. Bluebarry offers a solution to help you quickly adapt, offering guidance that clarifies your product offerings.

The standout feature? Its simplicity and customisation. Without complex technical setups, you can create unlimited product advisors tailored to every niche of your site. Just upload your product feed, construct questions and answers, and in no time, your digital advisors are live and assisting.

Bluebarry isn’t just about building advisors; it’s about smart functionality that learns user preferences, filtering relevant questions seamlessly. This leads to higher conversion rates, reduced return requests, and valuable insights straight from your customers, making it a game-changer for improving overall site engagement.

Bluebarry Founders

Meet Jelmer Reitsma, a driving force behind Bluebarry’s vision. Co-founding the startup, Jelmer represents a group bound not just by business, but friendship. Together with Anco Postma, Reinder Kas, and Martijn Douma, they form a team of four who have been friends since high school. This bond has been their foundation, supporting them as they build ideas and concepts that go beyond just a startup.

Delving into their backgrounds, each co-founder brings unique expertise to the table. Anco Postma is steeped in a decade’s worth of experience in product development, having built SaaS products from scratch. His knowledge isn’t limited just to startups but scale-ups as well and extends into technology leadership. Then there’s Reinder Kas, whose proficiency in AI product development has been honed over the years, merging seamlessly with his experience in SaaS. On the commercial side, you’ve got Martijn Douma and Jelmer Reitsma. Martijn is well-versed in international deals, handling everything from small businesses to large enterprises. Jelmer, meanwhile, has a knack for assembling marketing teams and strategies from the ground up.

Their journey into entrepreneurship was inspired by their own experiences. After witnessing a SaaS startup transition into a scale-up, they realised they wanted to carve a similar path, this time with the four of them at the helm. Their shared vision and complementary skills made the leap from concept to concrete action seemingly the next step.

In the early days, Bluebarry was bootstrapped, relying on organic reach through LinkedIn and SEO. With a tight budget, every move was calculated, each step aimed at establishing their foothold without external funding, focusing on delivering value right from the beginning. It’s a testament to their resourcefulness and shared commitment to shaping a solution that makes eCommerce more intuitive and insightful.

Interview with Jelmer Reitsma, Co-founder of Bluebarry

We had the chance to sit down with Jelmer Reitsma, Bluebarry’s founder, to understand more about their approach and where they see the future of eCommerce going. It was a great opportunity to get insights straight from the source about the challenges online businesses face and how Bluebarry aims to tackle them. Here’s how our conversation went:

Q: Jelmer, could you tell us a bit about yourself and your role at Bluebarry?
A: I’m Jelmer Reitsma, one of the co-founders here at Bluebarry.

Q: And for those who are just getting to know Bluebarry, what exactly does your startup do?
A: Bluebarry is all about helping eCommerce businesses create better shopping experiences through what we call conversational shopping. If you think about it, websites with loads of products, unclear descriptions, or really technical details can stop buyers in their tracks. It becomes too much. We give businesses a way out of that. We’ve made it so anyone can build digital product advisors for their online shop. This way, buyers are guided to the products they’re actually looking for.

Q: What kind of results are businesses seeing?
A: We see a few key improvements. Firstly, higher conversion rates. When shoppers find the right product quicker, they’re more likely to buy. Secondly, fewer returns. Because people are getting better advice upfront, they’re less likely to pick the wrong item. Thirdly, fewer questions for customer support. The advisors handle a lot of the basic product queries. And finally, we gather real customer insights. The interactions within the advisors tell businesses a lot about what their customers are looking for and what questions they have.

Q: Who is Bluebarry really for? Who benefits most from using your platform?
A: Our focus is on small to medium-sized eCommerce businesses. Specifically, we’re thinking about founders and marketing leaders – managers and directors in those roles.

Q: What are the day-to-day problems these people are facing that Bluebarry helps with?
A: We hear about a few common struggles. Firstly, maintaining good conversion rates even when website traffic is steady. Secondly, spending loads of time trying to figure out why shoppers are abandoning their carts or leaving the site without buying. Thirdly, trying to understand why visitors who seem really interested still don’t end up purchasing anything. And lastly, customer service teams often hear from shoppers who realise they’ve picked the wrong product after it arrives.

Q: So, if you had to boil it down, what’s the main problem Bluebarry solves?
A: It’s the inability for online stores to give personalised product advice to each and every visitor. It’s just not scalable to do it manually.

Q: And how does Bluebarry solve this problem? What’s the process like for businesses?
A: Bluebarry lets you build as many product advisors as you need, for any part of your online shop. It’s designed to be straightforward. You upload your product data, create the questions and answers that guide the shopper, design how you want the advisor to look, and then publish it to your site.

Q: Could you tell us a bit about the team behind Bluebarry?
A: The founding team is made up of four of us: Anco Postma leads product development and has years of experience building SaaS products, from startups to scale-ups. Reinder Kas is in charge of AI product development, bringing strong AI skills combined with SaaS product expertise. Martijn Douma handles the commercial side, with a background in international business deals. And then there’s me, Jelmer Reitsma, also on the commercial side, with experience building marketing teams and strategies.

Q: What’s the story behind starting Bluebarry? What inspired you all to get into this?
A: The four of us have actually been friends since secondary school. We were always talking about business ideas and the idea of starting something together one day. We worked together at another SaaS startup for years, helping it grow. That experience showed us we wanted to build something of our own, together.

Q: What were the early days of Bluebarry like?
A: We started bootstrapped, so we were working with a very limited marketing budget. We focused on building organic reach through LinkedIn and SEO.

Q: What makes Bluebarry different from other similar platforms out there?
A: Ease of use and speed of setup are key for us. You can typically get Bluebarry up and running within 24 hours. A big part of that is our AI-assisted setup. Our advisors don’t need really complex question sequences. Bluebarry is designed to intelligently filter and order questions based on each user’s preferences as they interact with the advisor.

Q: Has Bluebarry received any external funding?
A: No, we haven’t taken any external funding yet.

Q: And in terms of revenue and customers, what does that look like currently?
A: We’re currently making about £50 per month in revenue and serving around 12 customers on average each month.

Q: What are Bluebarry’s plans for the future?
A: Those plans are still in development.

Q: Finally, what advice would you give to aspiring entrepreneurs looking to start their own business?
A: I think it’s important to remember that starting a business is just the beginning. The real challenge is pushing through and keeping it going. Have a solid plan, not just a vague idea.

Feedough’s Take on Bluebarry

Bluebarry seems to be hitting on something real. Think about it. Online shops often struggle to give shoppers the same help they’d get in a physical store. This startup is tackling that head-on with digital product advisors. It’s a smart move in a world where everyone expects things to be easy online. The fact that it’s simple to set up and use is a big plus, especially for smaller businesses that don’t have huge tech teams.

Looking ahead, Bluebarry could really shake up how online shops work. If they can get more businesses to use these advisors, we might see less of the frustration shoppers feel when they can’t find the right thing. The challenge will be standing out as more similar tools appear. And getting businesses to change how they currently do things isn’t always easy.

But the core idea is strong. Giving every online visitor a bit of expert guidance? That could be a game changer for sales and customer happiness. Keep an eye on Bluebarry. They’re addressing a clear need in e-commerce, and that’s often where the most interesting startups succeed.