Porter is a fast-growing all-in-one software platform for tattoo artists and shops.
They help tattoo artists manage everything from booking and appointments, collecting payments, and marketing to their customers. A lot of tattoo artists run on a number of point solutions and fragmented tools, or even still through pen-and-paper, according to co-founder and COO Zack Neff.
Porter wants to help tattoo artists by bringing everything into one platform—including marketing.
Though some of Porter’s customers previously used other marketing applications like Mailchimp or Attentive, they didn’t have visibility into important customer data such as last appointment date or previous in those platforms.
Now, with Pocketflows as the embedded marketing solution directly inside of Porter, these tattoo studios are able to reach exactly the right audience at the right time, and hyper-personalize the messaging to those customers—with the goal of booking more business and bringing more customers through the door.
One of the aha moments that we have on a demo with a studio is when we show them the way that they can segment their customers through Porter,” Neff said. “They can look at things like the customer’s last appointment visit, their total spend, which artist they visited in the past, and they can get really specific about the segments of customers that they want to send campaigns to, and then sending them very targeted personalized campaigns based on their visit history.
Though the Porter team knew they wanted to deliver value to their customers with a marketing solution in their product, they also had lots of other roadmap priorities. On top of that, Porter is the expert on what tattoo studios need, but they didn’t want to specialize or become experts in building the best marketing product.
For us to build it on our own, it would’ve been at least 3-4 months of engineering work,” Neff said. “Pocketflows made it really quick and simple to get everything stood up. It was 2-3 weeks of a single engineer’s time to integrate with the Pocketflows API and get everything working, which is obviously really quick.
However, it wasn’t necessarily the most obvious decision off the bat.
“It was a little scary for us at first because we typically like to build most things for us in house just so we have more control with it,” Neff said.
This is a common and valid concern from vertical SaaS companies. Without the right level of integration and control, you would lose the benefits of syncing valuable data to use in marketing campaigns and tie back to the ROI for the small businesses. Pocketflows’ API-first solutions gave Porter all the pieces they needed—an embeddable campaign builder, email and SMS templates, advanced analytics on campaigns, and real-time data syncing—to focus on building a customized experience that feels tailor-made for the tattoo industry.
“The customizability that we have with working with the Pocketflows API has been perfect,” Zack said. “All around, it’s just been an awesome experience and really helped us out.”