We built self-serve order management before Shopify did: Our 10-year bootstrapped journey

We've been working together since 2009. After 10 years of building Cleverific and serving over 12,000 customers, we wanted to share what we've learned. Starting with how we even met in the first place.

A wildfire and a photo project

In 2009, Santa Barbara had a devastating fire. Many people lost everything, including all their photos. A mutual friend connected us to build an app that would help the community collect and share photos so fire victims could retain some of their history.

That project showed us our skills fit together well. Tu brought the creative and visual side as a designer. Andrew worked as a web application developer focused on UX. Together, we could build a complete product.

But we also discovered we read the same books.

The book club we didn't know we were starting

Every week we'd meet to share progress and make decisions. We'd also swap books. Seth Godin, lean startup methodology, anything that challenged how we thought about building things.

One book shaped how we think about building products: Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug. It's a UX book about being in service to the user. We make everyone on our team read it. The principle still drives how we build Cleverific today.

That weekly book exchange built trust. We had real conversations about what we wanted to build and what kind of company we wanted to run.

The one thing that matters most in a partnership

Commitment. Delivering what you promised when you promised it.

We'd both been burned by people who didn't follow through. Finding someone who actually shows up on Monday when they said they would? That's rare. And when something couldn't happen on time, we were honest about it so we could prepare together.

That reliability made everything else possible.

Why we bought an app instead of building one

Most founders assume you have to build something from scratch. We did too, until we discovered a different path.

Andrew was listening to a podcast called Startups for the Rest of Us by Rob Walling. He described this stairstep approach to entrepreneurship: start small, maybe acquire something that already has revenue, then build up from there.

That reframed everything. As product people (a designer and developer), we'd always thought starting something meant dreaming it up and making it real from nothing.

Then we found an order editing app for sale on Shopify. It had some revenue. It was in an ecosystem we knew well. And it solved a real problem we understood.

We acquired it. Turned it around from a string of one-star reviews. And realized editing orders on Shopify is genuinely interesting. Complex enough to keep us engaged. Important enough to keep building.

We've kept at it for 10 years instead of moving on.

The decision that shaped everything: No funding, ever

When we incorporated in 2012, we had a direct conversation about what we wanted this company to become. We set a ground rule: we would never take funding.

Not because we weren't ambitious. We're extraordinarily ambitious. But because we wanted to grow at our own pace. Build something that served our customers and our merchants, but also served our lives.

Funding comes with expectations. Investor returns. Growth timelines. We wanted Cleverific to help us become the people we wanted to be, not just chase someone else's metrics.

What bootstrapping actually made possible

For Andrew: Training multiple times a day for 6-8 months and winning a Brazilian jiu-jitsu world championship in December 2018. That doesn't happen when you're optimizing for someone else's timeline.

For Tu: A year and a half abroad in Portugal and the UK. Not visiting as a tourist, but staying long enough to actually live somewhere. That kind of experience requires a business built intentionally.

These aren't vacation stories. They're proof that you can build something real (12,000+ customers real) without sacrificing everything else.

Customer support as a core value, not a department

We've always tried to be helpful. That means answering questions even when they have nothing to do with our app. Merchants figure out we're knowledgeable, so they keep asking. We just answer if we know.

Laura, our head of customer support, has been with us for 5 years now. She's more knowledgeable than we are on many things because she's in there day in and day out.

Our level of support from day one, and maintaining it after 10 years, is what we're most proud of.

What 10 years taught us

Building a bootstrapped Shopify app isn't glamorous. There's no funding announcement. No hockey-stick growth chart to post on Twitter.

But there's something else: a business that actually works for the people running it. Customers who stick around. A team that knows the product deeply. And the freedom to keep building because we want to, not because we have to.

That's the 10-year version. We're looking forward to the next 10.