It's the end of June - but I'm writing my New Year's lookback letter now.
A year ago this month, I finally took D2C Developers full time. I'd started this company twice before and shelved it both times for full-time roles.
Before and during those full time roles, I freelanced as D2C Developers for years, serving clients like Hint on retainer, building out stores for new brands, and doing what I genuinely call "the Lord's work" on UpWork.
But I'd never committed to it full time.
What changed? A single email from a newsletter. Not a pitch, not a business plan - just someone writing with conviction about why people who have value to add need to actually go and add value to stuff. So I put in a resignation letter and started working towards it.
Here's what the last 12 months looked like:
Launches and builds:
- Skin care brand (BRG Skin)
- Hair care brand (Naturelle Grow, designed by Christine Ashley)
- Supplements brand (Plenty Postpartum)
- Olive oil brand (The Virgin Organic)
- Instant hydration brand (4ORE Hydration)
- Fine artist in Argentina with custom print-on-demand setup (Isidro Escasany)
- Marketing site with course sales and member portal (Accelebrand)
- Market research platform on Shopify used by Fortune 500 brands to test product concepts in a simulated retail environment
Custom features and UX:
- Tinder-style bundle builder for Nerdwax
- Custom embroidery configurator with live preview for KindThread
- A/B testing for Nokbox and others
- Custom buy box UIs, size guides, email templates, and a Squarespace-to-Shopify migration
- Roughly 50 Shopify Flows across the board
We spent hours in Skio, AfterSell, Rebuy, Klaviyo, Shopify Messaging, Shopify Forms, Intelligems, Redo, TripleWhale, and so many other apps. A dozen plus themes, custom and off the shelf.
Stoked for the rest of 2026 - if you sell on Shopify, let’s chat. 🤝
tldr: i started a business exactly 1 year ago and it has been absolute chaos