In an article on TechCrunch, “All-In-One E-Commerce Solution FastSpring Takes Its First Outside Investment From Pylon Capital”, published this morning, Sarah Perez writes about the investment and ongoing success of FastSpring’s e-commerce platform and growth.
Because sometimes it’s the companies you don’t hear about constantly. FastSpring, founded in 2005 as an all-in-one e-commerce solution for companies selling desktop software and downloadable games before heading into the Software-as-a-Service space in 2011, has received a significant but undisclosed new equity investment from L.A.-based Pylon Capital. This is the first outside funding the previously bootstrapped company has taken in.
The article goes on to touch on the addition of Pylon Capital’s Managing Partners Tom Tzakis and Chris Lueck joining FastSpring’s management team, with all four co-founders – Dan Engel, Ryan Dewell, Jason Foodman & Ken White – continuing the work that has elevated FastSpring from a bootstrapped startup to a company with substantial revenue and trust among both enterprise and small business clients. It also highlights the importance of FastSpring’s subscription functionality and the growth in number and quality of clients:
FastSpring has grown its business from 1,000 clients worldwide to now 2,200… While the company can’t disclose the names of many of its customers, those it can mention are familiar: Smith Micro, Adobe, Flexibits (makers of Fantastical), Toshiba, Random House, and Intego (Anti-virus).
Dan Engel, moving from CEO to Senior Vice President of Marketing and Board Member, is quoted on the strategic move to take outside funding: “As a group of serial entrepreneurs, we have a lot of experience in getting from A to B — ‘B’ being getting to where we are as a company in terms of revenue, profit, headcount, and what we’ve scaled to, to date. But we felt like we wanted some outside expertise from folks who had experience going from B to C.”
Pylon Capital is a great fit for FastSpring’s quest to realize this movement to the next level. As Dan comments in the Press Release that went out today (picked up by the Wall Street Journal, among many others): “We’re thrilled about this new partnership with Pylon Capital which will introduce new financial capital, resources, and talent to the FastSpring team. Chris and Tom have a genuine appreciation for what makes our company unique, including our culture, our people, our technological innovation, and our reputation for providing the industry’s best customer service. As a result of the relationship, we will be increasing our hiring efforts, investing further into sales, marketing, software development, customer support, and other key areas.”
One of the focus areas currently for the WFP is helping hunger in Syria and the surrounding countries where refugees have fled. You can read more about this work at 
To document the SpringBoard platform’s ever-growing capabilities, FastSpring has systematically worked to broaden and deepen its knowledge base — adding and updating support articles on detailed feature workflows, documenting new features coming out of steady release cycles, explaining steps for partner integrations, and answering frequently asked questions.
Our newest release offers numerous additions for translating into languages other than English. Invoices for customers are now translated for German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, and Dutch. The same language translations now occur for product descriptions when a customer orders a backup CD or extended download service.
The Google Analytics tracking code used in SpringBoard has been updated to use the newer, asynchronous method, allowing increased page rendering performance. During the Google Analytics tracking method setup, you can now utilize a checkbox to Enable Google Remarketing, which lets you “retarget” – show ads to users who have previously visited your website as they browse the Web. According to Google, “Remarketing is a powerful way to stay engaged with your target audience. Presenting them with highly relevant ads and offers across the Web – and making sure your brand is top of mind when they’re ready to buy – can radically improve ROI.”
Have you seen our new, stylish Reports area? This section of SpringBoard has a new, updated look with more options. You can now view Orders, Subscription Renewals, and Returns by Day, Country, and Product, as well as reporting on orders by Coupons, Offers and Sources. A new Report Type now exists to display Inactive Subscribers. The CSV reports that can be viewed by going to SpringBoard’s Store Home » Account » Accounting now separate the product Name and the product Display into two columns. This is especially useful for those who use an SKU as the product name, but a customer-friendly product display name.
When using the Embedded Web Store SDK, a URL is now included for customers to manage (update or cancel) their subscription in the data available after making an order. For subscriptions, the information (including the terms and pricing) that is displayed during the check out process is now also included in the email receipt sent to customers. When retrieving localized store pricing via the pricing API, the output now includes product_1_first_value, which displays the subscription’s first period price, which may be different than the recurring price. The output now also includes quantity tier information.
There are three new user roles that have been added to SpringBoard to allow different types of access to your account. Each new role offers slightly more access than our Store Order Support user role that only provides access to order information.
Everyone knows how popular YouTube® is and how ubiquitous video has become on the web. As attention spans contract and tweets become the new measure of text length, the moving image still compels our gaze. The plain fact is: beyond its entertainment value, video is a strong and well-received tool for conveying information to consumers. An appropriate video embedded in the right web page can have all kinds of positive impact on your web site performance metrics.
It goes by a few different names, but download service has become a standard in online sales of digital software and, unlike most efforts in e-commerce, this one is pretty much a “sure thing” for increasing your average order value.
Over the past several quarters, FastSpring has systematically worked to document existing SpringBoard features, new features coming out of a steady release cycle, partner integrations, frequently asked questions and more.
