In 2017, I started my own company: SUBLIME, the first centralized shopping app to buy from independent brands.
Sublime set out to:
- be a one-stop shop for direct-checkout of hundreds of independent brands & boutiques (via a Shopify Sales Channel)
- learn your style and your size and do our best to only show you things that match both
- allow influencers to more easily earn money by creating & sharing curations
Myself and my technical cofounder were very motivated by IndieHackers and wanted to bootstrap the whole endeavor. We met up every Wednesday evening until 10pm along with two other software engineers I paid out of pocket. She and I would meet up again on Sunday afternoons. We strived at our full time jobs and worked on Sublime at this pace for over a year.
One day I looked at her and said, “I have to tell you something. I'm pregnant.” And she said, “I have to tell you something, too. I am also pregnant.” Our due dates were 1 day apart and as hard as we tried, our full-time working pregnant selves could not pull off launching a company without any funding.
But we built an entire Rails app with a React front-end that only looked good on a mobile device + product data imports, a working “SALE” feed, a product recommendation model, and were 3/4ths through an integration with Braintree as the payment processor. IIRC we had about 85 real people on the waitlist to join the beta.