The Vendorfront Story
This is the story of Vendorfront (www.vendorfront.com), a saga that started in January 2024.
The Problem
In January of 2024, I noticed that over the course of covid, at-home hobby enthusiats started leveraging their creativity in an ambitious turn to drive a Side-Hustle.
In several discovery interviews, I was able to derive that for example, a small-scale cake vendor was using 3-4+ platforms to manage a single customer.
My Plan? Unify all 4 platforms into a single one, making the experience efficient for vendors, and the process smooth for customers that are stressed from event-planning.
Soon after the interviews, I pitched the idea to friends and family alike and at networking events and the responses propelled me into reassurance that this idea had potential to find PMF.
Idea into Reality
I’ve been in the technical domain my whole life, but I knew that for this I needed help - and so I ventured out to YCombinators to find two partners that can deliver on a large scale operation.
I ended up finding two senior engineers, one being a Waterloo Eng Grad to join me on this journey.
Following that was a formal equity split, drafting documents, and getting to work.
Naming and Branding
The intial name was actually slated to be Vendorgram, but we soon found out that it could potentially be a name that is in direct conflict with Instagram and we wanted to avoid that considering the instagram integration was a decent chunk of our USP.
Building the Platform
The marketing site was led by me along with the product roadmap, while the two engineers worked on the Web App which used C# & Blazor hosted on Azure where we got our first big break.
We ended up qualifying for up to $100,000 in azure credits, this was huge because it brought our monthly costs down to zilch.
Because of that, we were able to offer our platform for free, from the MVP all the way to launch.
Key Differentiators
One of the key differentiators in our product vs a lot of the competitors like Fresha and Booksy was the fact that we were able to navigate the treacherous process of implementing META’s API for instagram so that vendors had a platform where customers have a one-stop shop to view their portfolio as well as their services.
Governance, cookie-management, terms of service all of these were things that I didn’t really think about when starting out, but learned a lot through that whole process of how important it is in a production-ready product.
Technical Challenges
One of the other hurdles was navigating a frictionless process for signing up for vendors and clients.
SSO auth worked well until it came to links in social platforms and integrated browsers on platforms like Instagram where it would break.
We had to find a way so that clients were able to sign on fast so that vendors didn’t feel like they lost anyone during that process.
Thinking through the problem in the eyes of clients and vendors definitely made the process a lot easier to iterate on, because while we were selling the platform to vendors, vendors obviously care about the experience their customers have.
The Human Element
Aside from the various of technical hurdles, navigating the relationship of two strangers that became technical family members was something I had to learn how to master, translating requirements to different audiences is an artform that comes with practice.
Launch and Beyond
Eventually we were able to launch our MVP with decent success, but not one that we were satisfied with, leading to product iterations with customers on an ongoing loop - leading to now, where we’re probably going to sunset this initiative once the credits run out, but despite that valuable knowledge I’ll hold dear to heart was learned throughout.
Special thanks to the countless amount of friends and partners I bugged for feedback, y’all made my life 10 folds easier.
Lessons Learned for the Future
- Spend longer on the discovery phase
- Manage the technical load myself till MVP validation
- Focused Sprints with more frequent customer feedback
- Get the users before the full build