We ran an e-commerce mobile app. There were no real tools for this; things like Shopify were designed for web.
So we built a whole shopping cart and inventory management system from scratch. It was good enough that people were willing to pay for it. But we were only 98% confident in it so we kept it internal.
We also didn't have the funds to develop or keep testing it. If we shut down the company, I might open source it.
It takes a while to go from 98% confident to 99.9%. And a lot of refactoring. Internal tools can be really sloppy, especially when we were selling like 3 items a day.
Something that's paid for and trusted to manage several million dollars worth of inventory has to be a lot more robust.
Investors didn't like the idea. I guess we didn't sell it well as one of them invested in someone else doing the same thing but with less experience.
Comments
We ran an e-commerce mobile app. There were no real tools for this; things like Shopify were designed for web.
So we built a whole shopping cart and inventory management system from scratch. It was good enough that people were willing to pay for it. But we were only 98% confident in it so we kept it internal.
We also didn't have the funds to develop or keep testing it. If we shut down the company, I might open source it.
I have to wonder, why did these not cancel each other out?
It takes a while to go from 98% confident to 99.9%. And a lot of refactoring. Internal tools can be really sloppy, especially when we were selling like 3 items a day.
Something that's paid for and trusted to manage several million dollars worth of inventory has to be a lot more robust.
Investors didn't like the idea. I guess we didn't sell it well as one of them invested in someone else doing the same thing but with less experience.
They mentioned that they weren't confident enough in the system to sell it, which is a shame because it sounds like an awesome service/opportunity.