Sauce

​What was it?

In 2014 I joined forces with my college buddy and partner in crime (we also built this in college) to build what I regard as my first real tech startup - Sauce.

Sauce started out as an easy way to add social logins & social features to Shopify stores. Plot twist - 5 months in we realised we could not increase revenue no matter what we tried.

​We pivoted into a platform that let ecommerce stores leverage their customer CRM and cookie data to personalise ads, sites and emails in real time.

​What were the results?

• After the pivot we hit $10k MRR within 3 months
• It became clear we needed to go upmarket into enterprise software
• The pivot came too late and we were both exhausted and low on cash
• We decided to sell the company and move onto new things

​Post mortem

• While we were acquired with no investors and in an all cash deal- I still feel like we failed
• It was an incredibly humbling experience to ship product that no one cared about and to innovate out of the situation
• It gave me a taste of freedom that beat my corporate job a million times over
• Segment eventually became what Sauce was. It's been incredibly validating to see this happen.