Lean Ecommerce with Magento - 25 Aug 2009
It’s been over a year since myself, Emily and Rob left our jobs to focus on Foodzie full time. I haven’t written extensively on what we’ve learned or the choices we’ve made over the past 12 months because things are happening so fast I’ve hardly had a chance to sit back and digest everything that we’ve done and learned. But we have some big things coming soon that I wanted to share.
At Foodzie, we started talking to our customers on day 1. We began building a prototype tailored directly to the problems of food producers. We built a lot from scratch in Ruby on Rails because there was nothing out there that would be able to work perfectly for our customers. We worked directly with producers to get feedback and design our product. We were able to move very quickly validating a number of product concepts. We used our application to raise funding. We used it to build our customer base. Our product and our team stayed very lean.
We wrote our own shopping cart. We wrote our own CMS. We wrote our own checkout logic. As we looked down the road at features we were going to have to build, we decided it was time to take a different approach.
Gandalf said, “All you have to decide is what you’re going to do with the time you are given,” and that’s very much how we feel at Foodzie. The Foodzie team has better places to put our focus than on building ecommerce features that are already out there ready to be leveraged.
Recently we’ve been working on switching our commerce application to an open source ecommerce platform called Magento – an platform with an amazingly large community. I’m happy to say that it’s going live very soon with a new design and many more robust features for our customers.
Now the entire infrastructure of our app is based on an open source project; I can’t tell you how good that makes us feel. We’re thrilled to be joining the Magento community and look forward to giving back.
The adoption of the Magento platform is going to allow us to spend more time learning from and improving our product for our customers. We look forward to this next technological chapter of Foodzie as we continue to provide an unparalleled experience for buying and selling the best artisan food online.
Look for more soon!
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J. Nikolaus Bauman
Cofounder of Foodzie
nik@foodzie.com
