The Company
Fueled by Co-Founder and CEO, Ovi Negrean’s, passion for entrepreneurship, SocialBee was created while working on a separate startup called Nugget. In an effort to strategically scale Nugget, Ovi and the team discovered powerful social media techniques that led them to develop their own internal tools for managing social media processes. Many were impressed by their success with their internal tools and the team decided to offer it as a stand-alone product.
After selling Nugget, the team went all-in on building their social media management tools under the new SocialBee brand. Their solution has evolved into a multi-pronged approach. There is the classic SaaS offering—a suite of features built-in to an easy-to-use platform. And then there are add-on concierge services for businesses that need more hands-on support for their social media initiatives but lack internal resources.
At their core, SocialBee is focused on delivering an amazing social media management experience for their customers around the world, and are committed to consistently delivering innovative features and solutions that help make their customers’ lives easier.
With their strong core values, the SocialBee team has expanded from a two-person team in 2017 to a “hive” of thirty-five worker bees worldwide.
The Challenge
Ultimately, SocialBee was designed to help customers set their social media on “autopilot” to save time while delivering better results. However, the tight-knit team at SocialBee realized that their ecommerce setup powered by Braintree was not capable of supporting their company goals of expanding into new global marketplaces.
They realized they needed a full-service solution that would take the responsibility of global payments, taxes and VAT, and other ecommerce-related administrative burdens off their plate so they could focus on what they truly care about—building a great social media management platform for businesses worldwide.
“Before FastSpring we were using Braintree. The decision to move to FastSpring was a complex one, but one of the key factors was the fact that FastSpring was easing our administrative burden regarding global tax and VAT management, and the number of invoices that we needed to register.”
The Solution
Once the team recognized they needed more than a payment solution, they found FastSpring. The robust platform with a feature-rich suite of ecommerce solutions combined with a helpful support team was exactly what SocialBee needed in order to focus on global expansion.
“We are a particular case because of our mix of the tools and concierge services so when implementing the FastSpring integration we received a lot of help and support from the team.”
SocialBee partnered with FastSpring for a variety of reasons including:
- The ability to automatically offer relevant, global payment methods based on the geolocation of the customer.
- Dunning management features like automatic email notifications for subscribers when they make a purchase or they need to update a failed payment.
- Automatic VAT calculation, collection, and remittance.
- A dedicated support team that was there every step of the way while the SocialBee team was implementing FastSpring.
“Having many payment methods that are always relevant to each different region around the world has helped us achieve significant growth worldwide.”
FastSpring Feature Shoutout: FastSpring Payouts – Instead of registering hundreds or even thousands of invoices for each of their subscribers to manually calculate how much revenue the company is earning, SocialBee automatically receives payments directly from the FastSpring app twice a month.
The Results
“Only through providing real value to your customers, can you build a valuable business.”
What initially began as a search for a payment solution quickly turned into the beginning of a long-term partnership focused on growth. Since they partnered with FastSpring, SocialBee has doubled its monthly recurring revenue (MRR) each year without the hassle of any ecommerce-related administrative burdens.
In addition to their success in doubling their recurring revenue year over year, the SocialBee team found a true partner in FastSpring. While initially looking for a payment solution, they realized FastSpring is so much more—as a full-service ecommerce partner, FastSpring is committed to SocialBee’s long-term growth as a business.
With the support of FastSpring, SocialBee has its eyes set on the future as they are focused on improving their tools and services in order to grow their company and serve more customers worldwide.
“Our mission is to help companies take off so our internal roadmap is filled with many delightful improvements as well as larger modules that we are planning to build. We’re glad to have a partner like FastSpring who is with us every step of the way.”
Read more about SocialBee’s years-long success with FastSpring in our 2024 blog post, FastSpring Support and Subscription Management Continue to Impress SocialBee.
![[Customer Story] Why TestDome Considers FastSpring a Real Partner](https://fastspring.com/wp-content/themes/fastspring-bamboo/images/promotional/2023/FastSpring-TestDome-blog-thumbnail.jpg)
Global Payments
Fraud Prevention
Subscription Management
Affiliate Marketing
Checkout
Digital Invoicing
Tax Compliance
Interactive Quotes
Reporting and Analytics
Merchant of Record
Developer Tools
Use Cases
