Founder Recounts Pivot from Bankruptcy to $5M ARR SaaS
In a recent podcast, Spresso co-founder Jared Yaman detailed his journey of pivoting to a B2B SaaS model after his previous e-commerce company, Boxed, filed for bankruptcy. Spresso, which provides enterprise pricing and margin optimization tools, grew from $2.5M to nearly $5M in ARR since early 2023. Yaman emphasized the market's shift toward capital efficiency and solving acute business problems.
Spresso’s technology was originally the in-house e-commerce platform for Boxed, the online wholesale retailer co-founded by Jared Yaman. This platform, which was a core part of Boxed's strategy, utilized a modern tech stack including Google Cloud and offered a full suite of services from storefront to fulfillment. The AI-powered software, later named Spresso, was also licensed to other businesses as a modular SaaS solution, including the pricing optimization tool that Boxed itself used. At the heart of Spresso's pricing intelligence is a multi-armed bandit algorithm, a type of reinforcement learning that balances exploring new price points with exploiting the most effective ones. This enables online retailers to dynamically adjust prices based on their own customer behavior data, moving away from a reliance on competitor price scraping. For technical teams, implementation involves using Spresso's SDKs, which are available on GitHub for web, Node, .NET, iOS, and Android, and feeding it event and catalog data. The company's infrastructure is built on a modern data stack that includes Google Cloud and Cloudflare. Their use of Google Kubernetes Engine allows for a focus on developing their solutions rather than managing cloud infrastructure, which supports the scalability and security of their AI-powered tools. In addition to pricing, their offerings include a module for customer quality and retention, which helps businesses predict customer lifetime value and reduce churn. The transition to a standalone SaaS company was a direct result of Boxed's Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing, during which the Spresso software business was sold. This pivot allowed the team to concentrate on the B2B SaaS product, taking a technology that had been battle-tested within Boxed to a broader market. This journey illustrates how a valuable technological asset can be repurposed and find new life after the failure of its parent company. To reach new customers, Spresso has formed partnerships with major e-commerce platforms such as BigCommerce, which makes their generative pricing tools accessible to a large number of online stores. Their website features case studies from a variety of retailers, including a luxury footwear brand that determined its optimal launch price in just two weeks and a pet supply company that developed a more customer-centric pricing model, showcasing the concrete benefits of their product. For technical founders, Spresso's story is a case study in spinning out internal tooling into a commercially viable product. Their open-source SDKs on GitHub provide a clear path for developers to integrate their services. While Spresso doesn't currently offer developer-specific pricing tiers or a public developer forum, their strategy appears to be focused on product-led growth, emphasizing tangible business results as a means of attracting new customers.
