Micro-business reaches 27,000 users in 111 countries just six months after launching its creative coding tool for children and educators. With efficient, automated flows, the sky’s the limit.
Supporting rapid growth and even bigger ambitions.
Flip Computing’s team of three have big ambitions and a great product. Flock XR is free to use, the company offers free learning resources, and it has a user community set up on Discord. It generates revenue through consultancy and micro-purchases, in the form of curriculum-aligned content, from as little as £39.
The team works on consultancy projects with contractors and serves educators and students in 111 countries. When it launched Flock XR, it quickly grew a huge user base. Its founders realized there was far greater demand for services than they’d originally anticipated.
To handle high volumes of micro-purchases and maintain strong relationships with customers and its community, Flip Computing needed a CRM platform that would grow with it.
It wanted a solution that would easily integrate with WooCommerce, WordPress, and Zapier so it could automate manual processes and centralize data and customer interactions. It was also looking for a platform with advanced functionality – like analytics, AI agents, and communication channels – it could roll out in the future as the business grows.
As three female founders working in tech education, we’ve become used to hearing that we shouldn’t do something. We’ve learned to trust our own judgement on whether something is right for us, and I’m proud to say we made the right decision in implementing Salesforce
Liz SmartCo-founder, Flip Computing
Implementing Salesforce in-house with help from Trailhead and the online community.
Flip Computing explored the CRM platforms on the market, ruling out options that would work in the short term but wouldn’t scale with the company. One of the founders also attended the SPARK business accelerator, which encouraged participants to look at their organization holistically.
“Salesforce kept coming up, but people told us we were too small to use it,” recalled Liz Smart, Co-founder at Flip Computing. “However, at SPARK, conversations about customer journeys, automations, sales, marketing, and analytics kept bringing us back to Salesforce.”
The team had also used Tableau and Slack when working with partners and saw the long-term potential of Salesforce. They decided to implement the Salesforce Starter Suite and spent two months setting it up in-house.
“There’s so much free support available from the Salesforce online community and Trailhead,” said Smart. “It was a steep learning curve, but it was really worth it. We took our time getting the right foundations in place for our specific needs, and we’ve learned skills we can apply to other projects.”
Salesforce Flows and Zapier integration are set up to streamline high volumes of micro-purchases from the website.
When someone makes a purchase on the Flock XR website, it’s handled in WooCommerce. Flip Computing used Zapier to connect WooCommerce to Salesforce and automate the workflow.
The flow matches the purchase against the products and customer record in Salesforce. If it’s a new customer, it creates a new contact with the order details, and if it’s an existing customer, the purchase is added to their order history.
“Capturing micro-purchases in Salesforce gives us the opportunity to follow up with the customer with relevant marketing campaigns for new products or to notify them if a digital product has an update,” said Smart. “We also use Salesforce analytics to monitor how products are performing and make better decisions about what we create.”
Building the Flock XR community with segmented leads, automated email journeys, and insights from campaigns.
Just six months after its launch, Flock XR has 27,000 users and a growing community on Discord. Flip Computing uses Salesforce web-to-lead forms to encourage people to join its mailing list and Discord channel.
An automated flow picks up forms when they’re submitted from the Flock XR website and generates an acknowledgement email. Leads are segmented in Salesforce and sent on tailored marketing journeys based on their products and interests – no one needs to create contact lists or emails manually.
The company also uses web-to-lead to manage downloads of its free digital magazine, which compiles articles from people in the Flock XR community. “When someone submits a request to download Flip Computing Magazine, we capture their details in Salesforce and send them an automated email with the download link,” said Smart. “We can then track how they engage with the magazine using Salesforce analytics and notify them when the next issue is out.”
Salesforce helps Flip Computing with more than just sales, it supports its mission to make learning accessible and create a community of learners and educators.
“People engage with us across multiple channels before becoming a paying customer. With Salesforce, we can track those interactions and understand our community as a whole, not just our paying customers,” said Smart. “We can use that insight for product development and to make sure we’re having the biggest impact on our cause.”
Planning for the future by adopting more features and functionality from Salesforce.
Although early in its Salesforce journey, Flip Computing is expanding how it uses the platform all the time. For example, the team uses tasks to handle website inquiries. When the inquiry is submitted, it creates a task and emails the team with the details. They can then decide who’s best placed to respond.
And while native Salesforce analytics are sufficient for now, the company has plans to use Tableau when it has more data in Salesforce. “We wrote an apprenticeship program for a customer who wanted to use Tableau and Microsoft Power BI, so we understand the potential of both tools and how we could apply that knowledge to our own data,” said Smart.
This could help the social enterprise to demonstrate its reach, engagement, and growth rates when it presents to potential sponsors, partners, funders, and during grant applications without needing to manually collect data from different systems.
We’ve saved hours on every task we’ve automated with Salesforce flows. Six months after going live, it’s already paid for itself
Liz SmartCo-founder, Flip Computing
Salesforce improves the digital journey of everyone who interacts with Flock XR, from paying customers to interested prospects and free users. It centralizes contact details, improves the sales cycle and communications, and collects useful insights to help Flip Computing with product development and its business strategy.
The platform is also scalable – as Smart said, “What we’ve built will scale without needing to change the process. If there’s a surge in demand in magazine downloads, purchases, or inquiries, Salesforce will handle it.”
Smart acknowledged that Salesforce was the best fit for Flip Computing and advised that the size of the business should never be the deciding factor. “It should be about your long-term vision and business needs,” she said. “Automation, efficiency, and visibility are really important for small companies with big ambitions.”
And as Flip Computing grows and evolves, the Salesforce ecosystem will continue to add value. “We love that you don’t need to implement Salesforce all at once. You can build it out gradually,” Smart said.
For example, Slack could become the company’s digital headquarters in the future and Flip Computing could move its Discord community there. This would centralize communications and capture more valuable data from informal conversations between users. Smart also believes AI and Agentforce could be helpful to stay close to customers and handle sales efficiently as the volume of transactions increases.
The great thing about the Salesforce ecosystem is that additional functionality is there waiting when we need it. It’s affordable and flexible enough to grow with us.
Liz SmartCo-founder, Flip Computing
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