Founders Everywhere: Andreas Ströberg
Andreas Ströberg is the founder & CEO of Stackend, a SaaS company revolutionizing e-commerce by converting stores into Shopping Communities and enabling seamless shopping experiences.
Welcome to Founders Everywhere, where we highlight the incredible people behind the companies we’ve backed at Everywhere Ventures, a global pre-seed fund supported by a community of 500 founders and operators.
Traditional online shopping experiences have often lacked interactivity and personalization, limiting the engagement and satisfaction of both retailers and customers. Stackend, a Swedish SaaS company based in Stockholm, addresses this challenge by allowing Shopify Store owners to offer their customers an immersive social shopping experience with live shopping connected to YouTube, vast community features, and smart tools to work with influencers. Store owners can create virtual pop-up stores and have them appear in blogs, articles, and ad systems - with full shop and checkout functionality for the customer.
CEO Andreas Ströberg, commonly known as Anton, along with his co-founders Peter Björkman and Kai Groundstroem have known each other since the early 2000s when they crossed paths while working together on the European internet portal Lycos Europe. Bonded by their shared passion for building innovative solutions and leveraging their expertise in building large-scale communities, they first started a software company that built and licensed community backend to enterprise companies such as Bonniers, Schibsted & King.com. After doing this over a decade the idea behind Stackend was born and by 2021 it had grown from a concept into a company.
What’s Stackend’s Northstar?
We want to humanize the online shopping experience by incorporating social features into e-commerce platforms, like Shopify. When you go to Amazon or other marketplaces, there are hundreds of millions of other people there at the same time, but you feel all alone. We create a sense of human presence through live triggers and interactions.
What sets Stackend apart from competitors?
I think we have quite a unique product right now that would take a few years to copy. We always build our features so that anyone can do anything, anywhere. This means a Shopify owner is no longer limited to having their experiences in their shop alone. They could also distribute it to 500 or 5,000 other places like online magazines/news, blogs, and even ads with full functionality, because the functionality is taking place in the backend. We are a bit ahead of the curve and in the last few months there’s been an increase in buzz about social shopping and embedded shopping. We do both.
Tell us about a recent Stackend milestone.
We were approved and released as an app in the Spotify app store. It was quite tricky for us as we’re both an app AND a sales channel but we managed to get that approved. Typically that’s just for Facebook and Amazon. Another thing that we managed to do is to handle almost the complete checkout process via API - allowing for customers to have both their products and actual checkout on other pages such as blogs, ads or campaigns.
How does Stackend inspire ‘customer love’?
It depends on the customer, but the combination of seeing how their products come to life when users can interact with them is powerful. When they see their brand's microshop as an ad, and everything works seamlessly, including add to basket, checkout, and payment, without leaving the ad itself, it creates a positive and engaging experience. We strive to create that magic feeling where the customer can't believe what just happened.
What drives you into startup battle, day after day?
I love the product and concept developing part and creating buttons that have never been created, and then hope that people want to push them.
If you weren’t building Stackend, what would you be doing?
Hopefully something animal related. I do volunteer work for anti-poaching projects in Africa. One project that I started together with Stefan Ytterborn from Cake is very close to heart. The goal is to replace the ranger's gas-driven motorbikes with Cakes electric dirt bikes that can be recharged with solar panels. It has huge potential to expand into national parks all over the world.
Check out Episode 17 of the Venture Everywhere podcast, Stacked with Stackend with Andreas "Anton" Ströberg and Eamonn Carey. Listen on Apple and Spotify and listen to all our episodes here!
