Title: We&#x27;re Finbarr and Nick, co-founders of Shogun - a storefront builder for eCommerce sites. We started the company 3 years ago. Initially it was a page builder for Rails apps[1, 2]. After about 9 months, we couldn&#x27;t convince many companies to pay us for that, but one of our prospects wanted to use it for a Shopify store. So we wrote a Shopify integration, waited a week, and gave up.<p>Within a month of giving up, we had some paying customers, so Nick and I continued to work on it as a side project. I went to work as a software engineer, and Nick moved to Thailand. We continued to work on it in our free time, and figured maybe someday it could be a lifestyle business.<p>But it continued to grow. And grow. And grow. By spring of 2017, it was making enough to pay Nick and me a modest salary, so I left my job and Nick came back from Asia. By fall, our growth wasn&#x27;t slowing down, and we figured that this could be a full-on software company.<p>We applied to YC, and Shogun grew 30% during the month between our application submission and our interview. We got in to the Winter 2018 batch.<p>Today Shogun is one of the most popular apps on Shopify. We just launched on BigCommerce as well and are now building out support for other eCommerce platforms.<p>In regard to tech, the hardest part has been implementing workarounds for all the bizarre quirks of each platform. We also build our pages to co-exist with the existing CSS and theme elements, so we have to be really careful with styling conflicts.<p>There are a lot of page building tools out there. Our major differentiator is that we focus on eCommerce specifically and integrate into your existing eCommerce platform&#x2F;backend. Shogun is also developer friendly with strong controls over details like padding and margins. We also built in a &quot;custom elements&quot; feature that allows developers to code re-usable drag and drop templates. Finding the right balance where developers love it and non-developers can learn it is very difficult.<p>We&#x27;re looking forward to hearing feedback and ideas from the community.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9257363" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9257363</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9571603" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9571603</a>
Upvote: