7 ms·

Not to be a jerk, but IMO this is a good example of why not to build your own greenfield e-commerce solution for your B2C idea. They were a "a New York based fa

by themgt 7y ago

Not to be a jerk, but IMO this is a good example of why not to build your own greenfield e-commerce solution for your B2C idea. They were a "a New York based fashion retail startup that served consumers in South Asian countries to shop from luxury western brands" so it's entirely unclear why their own in-house e-commerce platform would be anywhere near enough of a value-add to be worth the investment. Skimming the code it looks like mostly an overengineered CRUD/SPA with a lot of non-DRY code, possibly some security issues, and no obvious major game changer that would have made it worth building in the first place. And building it would drastically slow down ability to iterate on the actual business proposition of selling stuff, down to e.g. the HTML for customer emails hard-coded into JavaScript. I sorta see this as the inverse of the no technical founder problem - it's the solely technical founder problem, where you're supposed to be focused on selling luxury fashion to South Asian consumers but that's boring and you'd rather be a cool startup writing your own e-commerce app using "MongoDB, Express.js, Vue.js, Node.js, Mongoose ORM, Redis", etc. Like seeing a nail and deciding to build a hammer factory from scratch to supply yourself with a single hammer. There are companies doing millions of dollars per day in sales on Shopify or similar platforms. You should at least be at a significant fraction of that or doing something extremely weird before you consider DIY.

taytus 7y ago
>Not to be a jerk, but Then don't.
- marcinzm 7y ago
  To me his comment wasn't being a jerk at all.
- sumedh 7y ago
  Sometimes people need to listen to some honest feedback without any BS.
  - wizardforhire 7y ago
    Unfortunately for the company in question and all those that will surely come after is that advice and more importantly the humility to hear that advice came too late. ~sigh
    - dewlinedew 7y ago
      Those who come after may find this HNews
    - bcrosby95 7y ago
      One of the smartest things we can do is learn from the mistakes of others. Unfortunately most of us think we're too smart for that.
SlippyCrisco 7y ago
Solid advice.
notyourday 7y ago
Their issue was that they were selling to South Asian countries and they thought the commerce there was done the way the commerce is done in the West. It is not. It is video and instant messaging with QR codes to buy. There are boutiques in NYC that sell 20-30k/week to SE Asia by being "showrooms" once or twice a week for 2-3 hours for QVC-like shows broadcast on chat platforms/TikTok/Instagram in native languages by 20 somethings who charge these boutiques 10-20% commissions.
- 2323235555667 7y ago
  I guess you mean South Asia (which really just means India) and not SEA. I can’t speak for India but e-commerce in SEA is like it is everywhere else. Also, it’s very doubtful that people shopping at NY boutiques at a premium would not be comfortable with English and that ‘native language’ would be worth the effort. I live in SEA and when I want to shop — provided I’m too lazy to drive 5 miles to a JV, Polo, Fendi, Prada, Hermes, etc boutique — I can order from a local boutique / brand online. No one I know cares enough about boutiques in other countries to pay a premium, risk sizing issues. Generally people affluent enough to try to keep pace with trends in other markets travel enough to shop in them in person. Did you just make that up?
  - notyourday 7y ago
    > I can’t speak for India but e-commerce in SEA is like it is everywhere else. In the West we use credit cards and our payment systems are based around that. We do not do live video selling as a part of the commerce. Our platforms are optimized towards static image-based shopping carts with text describing products. > Also, it’s very doubtful that people shopping at NY boutiques at a premium would not be comfortable with English and that ‘native language’ would be worth the effort. They are broadcasting QVC-style out of New York boutiques to their viewers in Vietnam, China, India, Cambodia, Thailand. > No one I know cares enough about boutiques in other countries to pay a premium, risk sizing issues. Generally people affluent enough to try to keep pace with trends in other markets travel enough to shop in them in person. Good luck getting Dry Clean Only, BHH, Minions, Mia Vesper, Chen Peng etc by dropping by your local boutique.
zweep 7y ago
Nobody doing marketplaces etc. should be using anything but off-the-shelf software until $10 million annual revenue.
- dman 7y ago
  Wonder how much of this is startups hiring early engineers who are only too willing to write new things to prove themselves.
- amoitnga 7y ago
  why 10 mil? where the number come from?
  - zweep 7y ago
    It’s obviously not precise. But roughly after that you are making about a million a year minimum in cash flow and can think about spending $250k+ on custom software.
- cbnotfromthere 7y ago
  Could you please give some examples of such off-the-shelf software for marketplaces?
EpicEng 7y ago
This perfectly describes how I feel in my current position... and why I signed an offer letter this morning to go somewhere else. We've hit hard times and no one seems to know exactly what we need to build to bring in new revenue. So instead of figuring that out as quickly as possible and building something of value... we're building a 'platform'. No one knows exactly what the platform needs to do, but management seems pretty sure that it needs to use gRPC for APis, table storage instead of SQL, an 'onion' architecture, a multi-stage data ingestion pipeline with more visio lines than I can count, docker, CQRS, a service bus for eventing, a micro-service architecture, no direct communication between services, and a SPA front end. While it does seem enticing to get paid (well) to play around with new tech, it strikes me as a massive waste of resources and a huge risk. I just want to build something that solves a real problem before we run out of money.
- DelightOne 7y ago
  My condolences! > no direct communication between services How does indirect communication work?
  - williamdclt 7y ago
    I suppose they mean asynchronous communication through a message broker/queue?
    - EpicEng 7y ago
      Yep, exactly.
  - oulu2006 7y ago
    Is no direct communication between microservices necessarily a bad thing? I've made a few similar design decisions in our tech stack, we have no "direct communication" between microservices, discounting the shared database. Microservices communicate through the use of RabbitMQ. We build our system around the premise of eventual consistency, thus reducing the need of blocking computations. So-far this has served us rather well.
say_it_as_it_is 7y ago
This company was fortunate enough to have sufficient talent to build such a system. If they were forced to use shopify, they would have had another 11 months out of the year to do something productive with their time. This system may be the v2 that was created following a shopify v1. Grumble grumble costs grumble profits. Talented people don't stick around to maintain shopify workflow. Management needs to give people incentives to work, beyond a paycheck. Go ahead and refuse to recognize the fundamental needs of talented people. It's a great way for talent to reallocate itself to a place where it is more appreciated and supported.
- sokoloff 7y ago
  Useful people will stick around to do what needs doing. Most of them will also be talented.
  - say_it_as_it_is 7y ago
    What talent is anyone developing with third party api glue work? Third party api talent. Spend years in shops that buy rather than build and you will have a major skill deficit when you move on and want to do more in your career. If a manager fails to develop actual talent, that manager deserves the outcome.
    - marcinzm 7y ago
      >Spend years in shops that buy rather than build and you will have a major skill deficit when you move on and want to do more in your career. That's not the fault of the company or the manager but the employee for staying in a job that does not line up with their long term career prospects. You cannot expect anyone to care about you except yourself. If they do then that's nice but don't expect it. >If a manager fails to develop actual talent, that manager deserves the outcome. You mean a successful company and stock options they can buy a house with? If a business succeeds then it can use it's series B/C funding to buy better talent. Expensive to do but by then money is a lot less tight.
arkades 7y ago
>Not to be a jerk It doesn't seem the OP was asking for a post-mortem of his start-up. It seems they were giving a gift to the community, by open-sourcing their work now that their project has come to an end.
mattkevan 7y ago
Totally agree. E-commerce is hard, and getting the tech right is only a small part of it. I work for a very large e-commerce company, and I’ve been building e-commerce sites myself for years. My first attempt, in part, failed because I spent too much time trying to get the tech perfect and not enough on marketing. I should have accepted the tech was a bit crap and only tried to sort it once I had enough revenue to sort it properly. In my experience crappy tech doesn’t stop a company from being successful if it’s got good product/market fit. It might slow things down or cause problems later, but the company will still function. Focusing on the tech before getting the business fundamentals right means an ‘It’s been an incredible journey’ blog post is imminent. My rule now is to use off-the-shelf tech wherever possible, and only try and build something new if it provides enough value. Reinventing the wheel, only newer and shinier, is not providing value.
- kd22 7y ago
  This is so true. The key to building something that succeeds in the longer term is because you are providing value to the market. Using shiny/new tech is just complementary, and might even come back to bite you later on.
zelly 7y ago
> There are companies doing millions of dollars per day in sales on Shopify or similar platforms To be fair, Shopify takes a huge cut, and retail margins can't afford that. If I were them, I would have also made a homegrown e-commerce CRUD software as well. BUT I would have used Django or Ruby-on-Rails. It would have been finished so much faster. And I'm not sure it would even be much slower than the Node/PHP solution. The reason to make a greenfield solution is to plug in to the rest of your tech. It is easier to make it from scratch than to customize some third party e-commerce software. If you do not have any other software to plug in, and Shopify would actually fully meet your needs, then you should reconsider calling your idea a tech startup.

by themgt 7y ago

taytus 7y ago

>Not to be a jerk, but Then don't.

marcinzm 7y ago
To me his comment wasn't being a jerk at all.
sumedh 7y ago
Sometimes people need to listen to some honest feedback without any BS.
- wizardforhire 7y ago
  Unfortunately for the company in question and all those that will surely come after is that advice and more importantly the humility to hear that advice came too late. ~sigh
  - dewlinedew 7y ago
    Those who come after may find this HNews
  - bcrosby95 7y ago
    One of the smartest things we can do is learn from the mistakes of others. Unfortunately most of us think we're too smart for that.

SlippyCrisco 7y ago

Solid advice.

notyourday 7y ago

Their issue was that they were selling to South Asian countries and they thought the commerce there was done the way the commerce is done in the West. It is not. It is video and instant messaging with QR codes to buy. There are boutiques in NYC that sell 20-30k/week to SE Asia by being "showrooms" once or twice a week for 2-3 hours for QVC-like shows broadcast on chat platforms/TikTok/Instagram in native languages by 20 somethings who charge these boutiques 10-20% commissions.

2323235555667 7y ago
I guess you mean South Asia (which really just means India) and not SEA. I can’t speak for India but e-commerce in SEA is like it is everywhere else. Also, it’s very doubtful that people shopping at NY boutiques at a premium would not be comfortable with English and that ‘native language’ would be worth the effort. I live in SEA and when I want to shop — provided I’m too lazy to drive 5 miles to a JV, Polo, Fendi, Prada, Hermes, etc boutique — I can order from a local boutique / brand online. No one I know cares enough about boutiques in other countries to pay a premium, risk sizing issues. Generally people affluent enough to try to keep pace with trends in other markets travel enough to shop in them in person. Did you just make that up?
- notyourday 7y ago
  > I can’t speak for India but e-commerce in SEA is like it is everywhere else. In the West we use credit cards and our payment systems are based around that. We do not do live video selling as a part of the commerce. Our platforms are optimized towards static image-based shopping carts with text describing products. > Also, it’s very doubtful that people shopping at NY boutiques at a premium would not be comfortable with English and that ‘native language’ would be worth the effort. They are broadcasting QVC-style out of New York boutiques to their viewers in Vietnam, China, India, Cambodia, Thailand. > No one I know cares enough about boutiques in other countries to pay a premium, risk sizing issues. Generally people affluent enough to try to keep pace with trends in other markets travel enough to shop in them in person. Good luck getting Dry Clean Only, BHH, Minions, Mia Vesper, Chen Peng etc by dropping by your local boutique.

zweep 7y ago

Nobody doing marketplaces etc. should be using anything but off-the-shelf software until $10 million annual revenue.

dman 7y ago
Wonder how much of this is startups hiring early engineers who are only too willing to write new things to prove themselves.
amoitnga 7y ago
why 10 mil? where the number come from?
- zweep 7y ago
  It’s obviously not precise. But roughly after that you are making about a million a year minimum in cash flow and can think about spending $250k+ on custom software.
cbnotfromthere 7y ago
Could you please give some examples of such off-the-shelf software for marketplaces?

EpicEng 7y ago

This perfectly describes how I feel in my current position... and why I signed an offer letter this morning to go somewhere else. We've hit hard times and no one seems to know exactly what we need to build to bring in new revenue. So instead of figuring that out as quickly as possible and building something of value... we're building a 'platform'. No one knows exactly what the platform needs to do, but management seems pretty sure that it needs to use gRPC for APis, table storage instead of SQL, an 'onion' architecture, a multi-stage data ingestion pipeline with more visio lines than I can count, docker, CQRS, a service bus for eventing, a micro-service architecture, no direct communication between services, and a SPA front end. While it does seem enticing to get paid (well) to play around with new tech, it strikes me as a massive waste of resources and a huge risk. I just want to build something that solves a real problem before we run out of money.

DelightOne 7y ago
My condolences! > no direct communication between services How does indirect communication work?
- williamdclt 7y ago
  I suppose they mean asynchronous communication through a message broker/queue?
  - EpicEng 7y ago
    Yep, exactly.
- oulu2006 7y ago
  Is no direct communication between microservices necessarily a bad thing? I've made a few similar design decisions in our tech stack, we have no "direct communication" between microservices, discounting the shared database. Microservices communicate through the use of RabbitMQ. We build our system around the premise of eventual consistency, thus reducing the need of blocking computations. So-far this has served us rather well.

say_it_as_it_is 7y ago

This company was fortunate enough to have sufficient talent to build such a system. If they were forced to use shopify, they would have had another 11 months out of the year to do something productive with their time. This system may be the v2 that was created following a shopify v1. Grumble grumble costs grumble profits. Talented people don't stick around to maintain shopify workflow. Management needs to give people incentives to work, beyond a paycheck. Go ahead and refuse to recognize the fundamental needs of talented people. It's a great way for talent to reallocate itself to a place where it is more appreciated and supported.

sokoloff 7y ago
Useful people will stick around to do what needs doing. Most of them will also be talented.
- say_it_as_it_is 7y ago
  What talent is anyone developing with third party api glue work? Third party api talent. Spend years in shops that buy rather than build and you will have a major skill deficit when you move on and want to do more in your career. If a manager fails to develop actual talent, that manager deserves the outcome.
  - marcinzm 7y ago
    >Spend years in shops that buy rather than build and you will have a major skill deficit when you move on and want to do more in your career. That's not the fault of the company or the manager but the employee for staying in a job that does not line up with their long term career prospects. You cannot expect anyone to care about you except yourself. If they do then that's nice but don't expect it. >If a manager fails to develop actual talent, that manager deserves the outcome. You mean a successful company and stock options they can buy a house with? If a business succeeds then it can use it's series B/C funding to buy better talent. Expensive to do but by then money is a lot less tight.

arkades 7y ago

>Not to be a jerk It doesn't seem the OP was asking for a post-mortem of his start-up. It seems they were giving a gift to the community, by open-sourcing their work now that their project has come to an end.

mattkevan 7y ago

Totally agree. E-commerce is hard, and getting the tech right is only a small part of it. I work for a very large e-commerce company, and I’ve been building e-commerce sites myself for years. My first attempt, in part, failed because I spent too much time trying to get the tech perfect and not enough on marketing. I should have accepted the tech was a bit crap and only tried to sort it once I had enough revenue to sort it properly. In my experience crappy tech doesn’t stop a company from being successful if it’s got good product/market fit. It might slow things down or cause problems later, but the company will still function. Focusing on the tech before getting the business fundamentals right means an ‘It’s been an incredible journey’ blog post is imminent. My rule now is to use off-the-shelf tech wherever possible, and only try and build something new if it provides enough value. Reinventing the wheel, only newer and shinier, is not providing value.

kd22 7y ago
This is so true. The key to building something that succeeds in the longer term is because you are providing value to the market. Using shiny/new tech is just complementary, and might even come back to bite you later on.

zelly 7y ago

> There are companies doing millions of dollars per day in sales on Shopify or similar platforms To be fair, Shopify takes a huge cut, and retail margins can't afford that. If I were them, I would have also made a homegrown e-commerce CRUD software as well. BUT I would have used Django or Ruby-on-Rails. It would have been finished so much faster. And I'm not sure it would even be much slower than the Node/PHP solution. The reason to make a greenfield solution is to plug in to the rest of your tech. It is easier to make it from scratch than to customize some third party e-commerce software. If you do not have any other software to plug in, and Shopify would actually fully meet your needs, then you should reconsider calling your idea a tech startup.