Kyle Bigley started racing at ten. By 2018, in his first full season competing in the NHRA’s Super Comp class, he won the Division 1 championship — and was named Division 1 Driver of the Year. The son of driver and crew chief Ed Bigley, he grew up around vehicles that punished any inefficiency with a lost race.
That instinct — find the faster lane, waste nothing — followed him into software.
The gap that was hiding in plain sight
When Bigley turned his attention to e-commerce, what he saw in SMS marketing looked like a category error. The channel was growing fast. But the major platforms were treating text messages the way email marketers had treated email for years: one direction, no reply, optimized for volume over conversation.
“SMS was never supposed to be a one-direction, no-reply channel,” Bigley told The AI Journal. “You lose the conversational aspect that makes text messages uniquely different from email and other forms of chat.”
His premise was that most Shopify merchants were leaving money unreachable — not because they lacked an SMS tool, but because the tools available had the wrong model for what SMS could actually do.
The basement years
In 2019, Bigley invested $25,000 of his own savings and began building TxtCart: an AI-powered platform that conducts genuine two-way SMS conversations on behalf of Shopify merchants — answering product questions, working through shipping concerns, guiding shoppers back to checkout. He cold-called a stranger who became his cofounder. He built from his parents’ basement, during late nights and weekends, while still holding a full-time project management job in New York City.
For the first two years, he and his cofounders funded operations out of pocket. The inflection point came through the Shopify App Store. “When app store ads launched, it was a goldmine — they were cheap and easy to use,” Bigley told Bootstrappers.com. “By December of 2020, we’d made thirty thousand dollars in monthly revenue.”
That number gave him enough confidence to quit the NYC job and go full-time.
No funding required
TxtCart has remained entirely bootstrapped while competitors in the Shopify SMS space have raised hundreds of millions in venture capital. Bigley’s position on this is unambiguous. “I took TxtCart to over $1M ARR with a team of 1-2 people,” he posted on X in 2025. “Even now approaching $3M, we’re only 6 people. Yet I constantly see founders trying to outsource their way to success from week one.”
The company has helped Shopify merchants recover and generate more than $100 million in revenue through its platform, with thousands of active merchant accounts as of 2024.
Where it goes from here
Bigley’s stated goal is $25M ARR over the next five years, staying bootstrapped, and positioning TxtCart for a strategic exit. The product has grown from an abandoned-cart recovery tool into a full conversational SMS marketing platform — one that bets on the insight that Bigley identified early: the merchants who will win aren’t the ones sending the most texts. They’re the ones having the right conversations.
