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.
> no direct communication between services
How does indirect communication work?
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.
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.
Using shiny/new tech is just complementary, and might even come back to bite you later on.
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.
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?
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.
100K per hour for 50% of the hours $432,000,000 per year. Total worldwide revenue of LVMH for 2019 is 53.7B euros. At 100k/h for 50 percent of the time it that mystery IG seller is at nearly half a percent of LVMH revenue.
If you can give an NYC boutique owner targeting a luxury market ability to sell 10-20k for 2-3 hours a week of their time based on your audience and you can replicate it across different subsections of a luxury market, you will be picking up clients until the cows come home. Of course not single client would actually be able to do more than 2-3 hours a week of sales at most because they simply won't be able to get the product needed to resell. The LVMH-like supply chain is corporate and it is not sold via random channels, so each of the successful luxury boutiques has their own developed contacts with the designers/producers who have very small ( measured in single digits ) manufacturing capacity ( it is however or maybe because of it commands LVMH-level and even higher pricing and higher than LVMH level margins).
Tech platform part here is 100% irrelevant. Building the sales platform on a top of shopify would have had the exact same results.
UPI is an interface that any bank or wallet app can use to allow individuals or businesses to send money to a mobile number or UPI Id.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Then don't.
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.