Post‑Seed Startup, E‑commerce Platform
CartVelocity: Scaling Support Without Burning the Runway
E‑commerce enablement platform | London, UK | $2.5M seed raised
Overview of the Company
CartVelocity is a London‑based e‑commerce enablement platform helping new and growing merchants launch and scale online. Coming off a $2.5M seed round, adoption accelerated to 200+ merchants added weekly across the US, UK, and Australia. A lean core team relied on four freelancers for support, two contractors for QA, and an external content agency, pushing burn to $180K/month without consistent quality or round‑clock coverage. First‑response time slipped to 18 hours, churn began to climb, and investor patience was at risk. Local hiring would take ~3 months and materially raise annual costs, putting runway at risk in a critical growth window.
The Challenge
As growth outpaced capacity, tickets piled up across time zones, QA cycles lagged, and the freelancer mix created variability the team couldn’t predict or manage. Vendor sprawl meant coordination overhead and inconsistent ownership, so engineering context‑switched into support fires while feature releases stalled.
“We had customers in the US, UK, and Australia but no 24/7 coverage. Our response time was 18 hours. Churn was climbing,” said Sarah Williams, COO.
Metric | Before | After | Δ |
Monthly burn | $180K | $95K | −$85K |
First response time | 18h | 1.5h | −91% |
CSAT | 72% | 91% | +19 pts |
Vendors | 6 | 1 | −5 |
Churn impact | , | −40% | +$50K MRR |
The SoTalented Solution:
In 21 days, SoTalented deployed an integrated “team pod” seated together in a branded section of our Bangalore facility with enterprise IT, SSO, device management, and secure network access live from day one.
The pod combined a 4‑agent support team plus a team lead for 24/7 coverage, 2 dedicated QA engineers tied into JIRA, and 1 content specialist to keep help docs and merchant resources current. We joined Slack/ticketing/QA suites/repos, co‑created SOPs to close gaps, stood up a live dashboard (tickets, QA pass rate, cycle times), and ran weekly business reviews with local leadership. Coverage expanded to 16 hours/day across time zones; QA cycles tightened; by month two, juniors owned the bug backlog under senior review and MTTR dropped materially.
Within six months, burn fell to $95K/month,extending runway by 20 months; first‑response time improved from 18 hours to 90 minutes; CSAT rose from 72% to 91%; churn fell 40% (saving $50K MRR); feature testing ran 3× faster enabling weekly releases; and six vendors collapsed into one accountable partnership.
“Our SoTalented team doesn’t feel remote,they’re on our Slack, join our standups, and celebrate our wins. When we shipped our biggest update, they ordered cake for the Bangalore office. That’s real culture.” – Sarah Williams, COO
21‑day rollout timeline
(Intake → Security/SSO → Seating/Branding → Go‑live → Dashboard).
Note: Client names have been changed to maintain confidentiality. Results are representative of typical outcomes achieved by SoTalented customers.
