case study
How Kickfurther Increased Business & Engineering Efficiency by 3x
Kickfurther used Rutter to automate the manual process for pulling data and reviewing businesses, helping Kickfurther speed up their vetting process from hours to minutes while also saving them thousands of engineering hours.
Founded in 2014 in Boulder, Colordao, Kickfurther is one of the largest inventory financing marketplaces in the world with over $150M in inventory funded and over 1000+ businesses supported. Kickfurther is a marketplace where businesses that need capital can connect with people who could provide it in a mutually beneficial way.
As Kickfurther scaled, they needed to automate key functions like vetting businesses on their marketplace and assessing inventory by building integrations with the businesses they serve across platforms.
Initially, they tried building these integrations in-house but then quickly turned to an agency when they realized how much development work was needed. The initial cost and timeline for the agency ultimately wasn’t scalable for Kickfurther so they turned to Rutter to provide them with one API with integration coverage across platforms, best in class reliability, and customer support.
the problem
Manual Processes for Pulling Data & Reviewing Businesses
In order to best assess businesses on their platform, Kickfurther wanted to go beyond high level banking data, random CSVs from different tools and top level information.
We didn’t have access to SKU level data and inventory level data and what was being sold and that was a big gap we needed to solve for.
Looking to find more granular data, Straub and the Kickfurther team searched for a solution.
Straub shared, “We were trying to do this partnership with another company but they weren’t an API based solution. Then we went down the path of working with another firm to build it ourselves and it went nowhere and spent as much as our Rutter annual contract just to build one integration.”
Prior to Rutter, Kickfurther’s operations team spent a lot of time manually pulling data and reviewing every business that applied to work with them. These manual processes were slowing down their ability to onboard businesses and grow.
the solution
A Universal Ecommerce API
Kickfurther leveraged the Rutter API to automatically pull order, inventory, transaction, and payout data within hours of a new customer signing up.
“Rutter’s Universal API has saved us thousands of engineering hours, and we were able to accomplish a years worth of work in a few weeks.” - Erik Straub, Kickfurther’s Head of Product.
the impact
10x Improvements in Efficiency & Quality
Increasing Efficiency & Saving Hours of Manual Work
Straub shared, “It has massively increased our capacity to be more efficient by at least 3x. This has completely changed our business and has sped up our vetting process from hours to minutes.”
Improvements in Quality of Vetting via Richer Data
With Rutter, Kickfurther gets much more granular sales and inventory data from merchants, which led to faster and more scrupulous vendor assessment process and an optimized risk profile. The fact that Rutter has the best integration coverage was also a game changer. Straub shared, “A lot of these businesses we work with sell via omnichannel so platform coverage was something really important for us to get the whole picture.”
Access to Historical Data for their Marketplace
Straub is excited to leverage the Rutter API for new products including being able to present data for their two-sided marketplace. He shared, “We want to be able to present information about businesses in our platform in a more consistent apples to apples format with more nuanced and reliable data and Rutter’s universal schema enables us to easily do that across any type of business.”
the future
Advice for Other Head Of Products on Build vs Buy
After first scoping out these integrations in-house and then with an agency before deciding to use Rutter, Straub shared some thoughts on the build vs buy decision.