MightyHQ Delivers Speed, Simplicity and Cost Savings with Custom Ecommerce Tooling

“Dream it. Make it. Love it.” 

That’s the idea behind MightyHQ, a platform designed to provide all the necessary tools to help businesses thrive. And with employees in the U.S., Europe and Asia, it’s catching on quick with entrepreneurs worldwide.

“MightyHQ is our brainchild,” said Razvan Neagu, self-titled “Chief Nerd,” who, along with co-founder and “Chief Creative,” Schad Deesing, worked in the eCommerce space for years prior to launching the company. 

“It’s a custom-built, unified platform that replaces all the auxiliary tools that we used to use in the eCommerce space.”

The quest for a unified solution

When they started MightyHQ, Razvan and Schad pieced the platform together with point solutions like Shopify, Zendesk, ShipStation and others, but quickly learned that having multiple, disjointed solutions makes everything slower. 

Plus, putting all of their eggs in Shopify’s basket was a risk – any downtime in Shopify’s service would be catastrophic for MightyHQ’s customers.

“Point solutions all have many limitations, and integrating additional functionalities meant adding more apps on top,” Razvan said. “When it was just Schad and I, we could keep track of it all, but as our team grew, that approach became untenable.”

Razvan needed a unified platform that was robust, easy to use and extensible, so they could eventually merge all of their existing tools. Directus was the perfect fit.

“The first step was to consolidate all of our data – product data, marketing data, customer data – with Directus as our single source of truth,” he said. “Soon, it became the backend for all of our services.”

Powerful features for any digital business

Recommended by a colleague, Directus gained points with Razvan because it was open-source and unopinionated. The powerful Directus API was another big selling point, since it enabled him to connect data to virtually any tool or service. 

“Directus is our CRM, our inventory and fulfillment apps, our customer portal, and our loyalty subscriptions email and SMS app, all rolled into one,” he said. “Plus we use it to automate all kinds of different marketing tasks, so we can start up, grow and manage a wide range of brands and ecommerce businesses.” 

Directus also provides a single source of truth that he can leverage for any use case. 

“Let’s say we wanted to test a new product,” he said. “Easy – go create a new table and relationships and it’s done. So that’s huge.”

Directus Flows are another key feature Razvan uses frequently. 

“When a new customer is created, a ‘cheat sheet’ is generated that outlines every data point about the customer and its interactions with MightyHQ eCommerce sites,” he said. “We also use Postgres triggers to calculate order totals.”

Ease of use is also an important factor for MightyHQ. “We have tens of thousands of customers and transactions, and I’m the only one who’s ever logged into the Directus dashboard,” Razvan said. 

The need for speed

According to Razvan, there's one top-line benefit that matters most to MightyHQ – and it's speed. “Speed to develop and speed to debug is critical, and I don't see that anywhere else,” he said. 

Directus makes it fast and easy to spin up a new ecommerce site leveraging the existing data. 

“Say I have the idea to launch a new page offering golf products,” he said. “A push of a button triggers the workflow and, boom! Everything gets created, and all you have to do is configure the variables.” 

“Within an hour, I can have a new business up and running. It’s at least 10 times faster.”

Plus, by integrating all of the services associated with running an ecommerce business, Directus saves MightyHQ time and money. “in a world where certain niches with high chargeback rates of 3 - 5%, ours are at or below 1%,” he said. “Why? Because all of our data is in one place. We can automate customer responses and provide self-service capabilities, as well, eliminating a lot of administrative overhead and labor costs.”

But that’s not all – using Directus slashes the cost of implementing and maintaining multiple point solutions and services, as well.

 “What we pay for Directus is a fraction of the cost of what we used to pay, when we had to manage numerous cloud-based and enterprise services,” Razvan said, adding that prior to using Directus, a single SMS blast to only 10,000 people would cost around $600.

“With Directus, you can set up an extension to quickly integrate Twilio, and cut costs by at least 50%, not to mention eliminating the monthly fee for the SMS service.”