Tyler Tringas — Storemapper, Turning a Recurring Store Locator Feature into an Independent Business

Tyler Tringas built Storemapper, which adds store locator maps to company websites, in 2012 and sold it to SureSwift Capital in 2017. He initially ran it alone and later assembled a small remote team. It is a micro-SaaS case study of building and selling a product that solves a narrow job without outside investment.

An Opportunity Found in Recurring Freelance Requests

Storemapper's customers are businesses that operate multiple locations or sell products through retail stores or dealers. When a company registers its store information and embeds code on its website, visitors can search for nearby sellers. The value companies buy is the convenience of easily handling the installation of a store locator and the management of its information.

Tringas was originally a consultant covering wind and solar at Bloomberg/New Energy Finance. He began learning to code in 2011 and co-founded SolarList, which sought to simplify the solar adoption process, but that business failed. Storemapper was a side project he started while juggling another startup and freelance work.

The idea emerged in 2012 while he was developing websites for Shopify merchants. Within a few weeks, several clients asked for a feature that would let visitors enter a zip code to find nearby stores. When he could not find a suitable service that could be installed immediately, he decided to turn this recurring freelance work into a product.

He built the first version while traveling from San Francisco to Buenos Aires via New York. According to a 2014 retrospective, he had about 36 hours including transit and layovers, and he launched the product after arriving. The initial price was $5 per month, and he got three paying customers on the first day.

The foundation that made the first sale possible was nine months of freelance experience. He had collected contacts even from leads that did not convert, and at launch he sent an announcement email to 30–40 people. Within two days, he had five paying customers, and existing business relationships became the channel for acquiring early customers.

Build small and improve what is needed first

The initial product focused on the core task of store search. When CSV file uploads errored, he would receive the file by email, fix the format himself, and register it on the customer's behalf. By recording recurring problems and gradually automating them, he provided manual service to customers waiting for development to finish.

The technology stack was likewise a combination of existing services. Public records from 2015-2016 mention Ruby on Rails, Heroku, PostgreSQL, Stripe, and others. Tyler Tringas used already existing tools to reduce the time needed for launch and maintenance.

A high bar was applied to adding features. Priority went to features that many prospective customers required as a condition for signing up or that were necessary enough that existing customers would consider canceling. A later analytics feature showed in which regions consumers searched for products and where they failed to find a retailer, and it became a component of higher-priced plans.

Customer acquisition and revenue model

Revenue grew slowly. In spring 2013, there were about 50 customers and a few hundred USD per month; by December of that year, it had reached about 2,000 USD in monthly recurring revenue (MRR). During this period, he limited his time investment to no more than 15 hours per month in order to work alongside other jobs.

After his existing network, he targeted forums where merchants gathered and freelance job boards. He answered questions in e-commerce forums and put a product link in his signature, and pitched Storemapper in freelance postings requesting a store search feature. He also simplified prospecting by receiving and checking relevant postings via RSS and IFTTT.

The durable acquisition channels were organic search, the Shopify app store, and the 'powered by Storemapper' link beneath maps. Another business owner who saw a map on a customer's website could click the link and come in, and in the app store the product was exposed to merchants looking for that feature. The installed product itself was structured to bring in the next customer.

Paid search advertising and referral reward programs did not produce results. In a 2015 retrospective, he wrote that growth through organic inbound continued, but he had not found a way to accelerate growth through additional resources. This characteristic was also part of the context that led him to choose to reduce operating time.

The most effective measure for improving revenue was raising prices. Even after raising new customer prices from $5 to $9 per month, and then to $20, new signups continued to grow, confirming that the initial price had been too low. Later, however, he found that increases also raised customer expectations and the support burden, and he reversed some price increases.

Customer retention was also important. In a July 2017 public post, he said monthly churn had generally been about 1–2 percent over roughly five years. In several months, revenue gained from existing customers upgrading to higher-tier plans exceeded revenue lost to churn, and customers going out of business was the main reason for churn.

The work that supported this was reducing friction in the setup process. If the store list was empty, it showed a video guide for entering data; immediately after signup, it guided customers through installing the code for their website platform. Help text was placed at points where customers got stuck, helping them complete their first use.

Selling higher-tier plans was also tied to a concrete pain point. On the CSV upload screen, the product introduced a Google Drive sync feature, offering a more convenient option for customers who had trouble managing files repeatedly. This feature reduced customers’ administrative work while also serving as a way to increase revenue from existing customers.

Revenue Growth and Running a Small Team

The public revenue record runs from ARR above $50,000 in August 2014 to ARR of $100,000 in February 2015. In May 2016, he shared a Q1 update stating that the annualized run rate had exceeded $200,000. Each figure is an annualized measure of subscription revenue at the time.

When he reached $100,000 ARR in 2015, he estimated annual net income at roughly $90,000–$95,000 based on the revenue and cost structure at the time. Once it reached a level that could support his living, he shifted his goal to reducing his own time commitment. It was a choice to preserve revenue while freeing up time for other projects.

To that end, in 2015 he planned to hire a part-time customer support person and a part-time Rails developer to handle maintenance. In a May 2016 update, he said the team had grown to three. He had turned a product he started alone into a small-team business that shared support and development.

Turning It Into a Sellable Business

The reason he decided to sell in 2017 was to reduce the risk of concentrated income and focus on projects. At the time, his own operating time was about 10 hours per week, and the business was profitable. He wanted to devote more time and energy to Maptia, which he was already involved in.

The dashboard that publicly disclosed revenue metrics and his writing about operating experience also made the business known to potential buyers. In a 2019 interview, Tyler Tringas explained that thanks to this public activity, acquisition inquiries came in steadily, and when he was considering a sale, he was able to turn existing interest into actual negotiations.

The connection with SureSwift began at MicroConf in 2017. There he met Kevin McArdle, and after negotiating in parallel with multiple buyers, he closed the deal about five months after their first meeting. He did not use a sale broker.

When choosing SureSwift, he examined its acquisition experience, ability to run a remote team, and the role and future opportunities for existing employees. The deal was an asset purchase that transferred Storemapper's operating assets. The exact sale price was not stated in the public retrospective, and he described it as a life-changing amount.

What made the sale easier was a team that could work without the founder and well-organized work processes. Most employees had worked with him for more than two years, and he could show the buyer that the business operated even when he disconnected from the internet for about ten days. The use of managed services such as Heroku also made the transfer of operations simple.

The Experience That Expanded into the Micro-SaaS Business Model

Tringas organized this experience in writing and an e-book, explaining the Micro-SaaS business model. His 2016 definition included a niche market, a narrow feature scope, low costs, a one-person or small team, and operation without outside investment. Storemapper was a case that demonstrated this definition through actual operating records.

After the sale, he broadened his activities into investing to support independent founders. In 2019, through Earnest Capital, he addressed the early funding problems of small technology companies, and the organization was later introduced as Calm Company Fund. The direction was to help other founders get through the period he had experienced, when 'the product works but does not yet pay the bills'.