About Us
ABOUT US
Online Shopping, Made Easy, Is Made With Difficulty
From the Ground Up
"Do you think they'll see how beautiful everything is?"
"Sometimes, only sometimes, all the time would be too much, never would be too little, every now and then, they'll see it sometimes... and that will be enough"
-Exurb1a
It was the evening of November 28th, 2019. While in the shower, I was busy contemplating a company named Stitch Fix, made famous and successful for highly utilizing data to design customized packages of clothing for their customers to order. Suddenly, I ran out of soap and became "predictably" aggrivated at my situation. My eminant frustration made me recollect the dozens of times I've ran out of tissues, toothbrushes, toilet paper, and yes, shower soap in the past. "Since people's daily routines stay the same every day" I thought, "then why doesn't someone create a company that auto-designs recurring orders for these products from a few basic questions like Stitch Fix does with clothing?" Wait... I paused... I think I may be on to something.
Another Way Forward
If you wish to become rich, perhaps to feel a sense of freedom your current situation lacks; it is best, if not counterintuitive, to avoid pursuing money directly as the majority of society already fills that niche. Wealth is a game of ideas: find a problem, find a solution. Implement, fail, repeat. Fail hard, fail fast. Learn from your mistakes. One day, with a bit of luck and a stroke of skill, you will be successful. It is strenuous work, but worth it nonetheless.
-Unknown
It became immediatley apparent to me in the midst of winter while I was writing out my business plan that the odds were against me. To create a website like this would not only be challenging, but down-near impossible. Thus after four months of slowly testing and developing my idea, I decided to take a different approach. Since the Coronavirus went "viral" back in April, I've been looking into delivering groceries myself; so I ran the numbers and found out how ubsurdly overpriced my competition is. Even during a time of crisis, they have the audacity to retain 50% margains on their service to make effective quarrentines for low income families an unreasonable option. This frustrated me, but also gave me an opportunity: develop a delivery service (The Complementary Project) and expand it accross Austin in order to raise enough support to one day create my original idea (The Predictability Project). I assembled a team and began work immediatley on 5/4/20.
Work Begins
“Gen-Ys are delusional; Most people are not special—otherwise “special” wouldn’t mean anything. Even right now, most of Gen-Ys reading this are thinking, 'Good point. But I actually am one of the few special ones'—and this is the problem.”
-Tim Urban
Let me take you back to May of 2020. The sun is shining, the birds are singing, and I've created a team of myself and two fellow students to build our startup:
Myself- I've built pretty much everything you're looking at right now. I'm not going to try to list out my talents here since the bias one has toward their own abilities typically exceeds the prejudices they've set to even their worst enemies. I have no talents besides the ones you believe I do, which you'll have to decide for yourself.
Josh- A skilled programmer who can perform magic by speaking the cryptic, runic languages of Javascript, HTML, and CSS. He's been with me since pretty much the beginning and we've both concluded that we suck at building a website from scratch. Despite this, he's continued to grind away to the demise of his sleep scheduale. My deepest sympathies to you my friend.
Ethan- Picks up the slack and helps me grind out any tasks that would cause mental paralysis if done by a single induvidual. Seriously, We've entered in tens of thousands of items/collections manually and organized them into countless spreadsheets and shopify apps together. Without his help, I would've surely gone insane, but thankfully we've both decided to go half insane together. I extend my gratitude to you sir.
Starting From Scratch
We had high hopes, perhaps too high. Our deadline was early June and we immediatley visited Shopify to begin our struggle. We ended up experimenting alot at first with different plugins and designs while recording useful H-E-B collections. After that, we made pretty good progress creating a collections structure, configuring our different designs, and figuring out our logistics process.
How To Fail Miserably
When we started importing products to our page, everything fell apart. I was mentally exausted from working constantly for 23 days and ended up procrastinating for over half a month as a result, driving our progress on the website to a halt. I advise that if you ever fall into a downward spiral of procrastination, swear an oath to complete 25% of what you do on a normal day no matter what else happens. Regulate your sleep scheduale and seperate your work space from your recreational space. Also get some fresh air and excersize for at least an hour a day, nothing clears your mind and helps you focus more than a run or hike through a local trail. The next day, do 50%, then 75%, and bam! Productive again in no time.
The Endgame
It's 7/9/20 as I write this, I've been working for 10 days now and I'm making progress again setting up screen crawlers to help me update my website while finalizing some of the design aspects. I'm also getting the team back together for a release on 7/15/20, hopefully I won't have to change that date. Edit: The website was officially finished on 7/21/20; never have I worked on a project as complicated or challenging as this, now you must decide whether or not it was worth it.
Thanks for Reading!
The story doesn't end here though, check out our updates often (the newest one always has its summary at the bottom of every page, including this one). If you want a reminder whenever we post an update, typically ~1-2 times/week, subscribe to our newsletter!