How RocketFuel brought a fintech platform for 3PLs to market by leveraging Trackstar

Company Background

RocketFuel is the first fintech company purpose-built for 3PL and fulfillment providers. Founded by industry veterans with deep logistics and warehousing experience, RocketFuel’s flagship product is a prepaid metering system that allows merchants to pre-fund their shipping balance, which is directly connected to the 3PL’s bank account. As orders ship, funds are automatically deducted in real time and recharged when low — ensuring predictable and reliable cash flow for 3PLs.

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Originally incubated inside Launch Fulfillment - a 3PL - to solve internal working capital pain points, RocketFuel’s solution proved so effective it improved Launch Fulfillment’s cash flow by $250,000 per week during peak season. Recognizing its broader potential, the team spun the platform out as a standalone offering for the wider 3PL market.

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Challenge

Expanding RocketFuel beyond Launch Fulfillment posed a significant challenge: onboarding new 3PL customers required an integration with each 3PL’s underlying WMS.

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Real-time order and shipment data from the WMS is the lifeblood of RocketFuel’s platform. With a highly fragmented WMS landscape integrating one-by-one would have required RocketFuel to dedicate engineers solely to integrations. "If we didn’t have Trackstar, we would have needed full-time developers just to build and maintain WMS integrations.

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That’s six figures in resources devoted to integrations alone."

— Carter Lowe, COO, RocketFuel

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Building and maintaining custom integrations would have also delayed go-to-market efforts and limited RocketFuel’s ability to close new deals.

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Solution

To avoid the cost and delay of building one-off integrations, RocketFuel partnered with Trackstar, a universal API for warehouse management systems that supports 70+ platforms.

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“From a sales perspective, it was huge,” noted Carter Lowe. “Trackstar allows our sales team to go after and immediately close anyone, no matter what WMS they are using.”

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RocketFuel was able to quickly go live on Trackstar, unlocking instant connectivity to Trackstar’s evergrowing WMS library. This allowed the engineering team to focus entirely on building core product features rather than plumbing.

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“We were integrated in a matter of days.”

— Carter Lowe

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Results

With Trackstar, Settle accelerated its product development and quickly expanded its inventory management offerings. Using Trackstar delivered measurable benefits for Settle including:

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Accelerated Launch Timeline

RocketFuel launched its platform to the broader 3PL market within weeks. Months of custom development work was condensed into a few days.

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Sales Velocity and Confidence

With Trackstar, RocketFuel’s sales team confidently tells prospects: "we already integrate with your WMS." The team uses Trackstar’s integration library page as a reference in meetings and have closed dozens of deals by advertising pre-built integrations.

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Expanded Pipeline

Within the first couple of months of working together, RocketFuel onboarded 17 customers and secured 9 more verbal agreements — made possible by Trackstar’s WMS library. When faced with a new WMS, Trackstar quickly builds the integration at no cost, allowing RocketFuel to close the customer.

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Engineering Efficiency

RocketFuel’s four-person dev team focuses entirely on product innovation, while Trackstar handles all things integration related - effectively acting as an extension of the team.

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Seamless Onboarding

With pre-built integrations, new 3PLs can go live on RocketFuel within a day. This is critical in a space where 3PL working capital problems demand immediate solutions.

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Product Expansion

When RocketFuel builds new features that require additional WMS data, they only need to pull that data once through Trackstar’s API - instantly unlocking it across every connected WMS, without having to code system-by-system.

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Key Takeways

Trackstar played a critical role in helping RocketFuel bring its product to market quickly and efficiently. By eliminating the need for custom integrations, the universal API allowed RocketFuel to dramatically accelerate development, reduce engineering costs, and unlock new sales opportunities. With broad WMS coverage and normalized data, the team now launches features faster, closes deals with confidence, and supports onboarding in record time - ultimately saving RocketFuel an estimated six figures per year in engineering resources.

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"Trackstar is like having an entire integration team behind us. It’s the easiest decision we made as a company”, highlighted Carter Lowe, who continued “we love working with you guys. The product is awesome, but the people behind it are even better.