Thank you so much, everyone, for your feedback! Appreciate the encouragement and constructive criticisms equally. We understand and share the shortcomings you mentioned as well. As one of the co-founders and the key person to take the blame, I wanted to answer some of the common concerns and admit our weaknesses as well.
Why build your own platform instead of Woocommerce/Shopify?
The countries we were targeting in south Asia were countries like Nepal and Bangladesh where debit card purchases aren't really a thing. Most of the transactions are still in cash, bank transfers that require using local payment gateways or locally popular app-based transfers (which resemble Venmo and Square Cash in the US). And also, we needed to use a combination of shipping services since worldwide shippers like UPS and FedEx don't ship to the doorsteps in these countries since home addresses aren't easily GPS-able due to organization issues. Some of us grew up in these countries, so we've experienced this personally. These were just some of the custom situations which wouldn't have been addressed while using Woocommerce or Shopify. So we decided to build our own platform to customize it as per our unique needs as we go.
Licensing
We would appreciate feedback on this very much. We went with MIT License since that seemed to be the only one that allowed people to use it without much restrictions. I admit I didn't spend much time on this, but now looking at all the forks and engagement, it is something that needs refinement for sure.
Shortcomings in the tech and tests
There is a fair share of shortcomings which we are aware of - like missing tests and antipatterns. We wanted to get the initial version to the market quick, so a good portion of the work was rushed. We're working towards addressing these issues now, since we never thought someday Veniqa would be open-sourced and others might end up adopting it. Also, the engineering team for 80% of the build was just two of us, and we had a third member join us after. With regular full time engineering jobs during the day, the only way to finish building Veniqa was through caffeine powered insanity of 15 hr coding marathons during nights, weekends and vacations.
Future Plans, Contributions and Developer Documentation
We are currently in the process of building test suites, docker images and writing extensive documentation to speed up startup time. Hopefully, so we can encourage code contribution from other smart fellow engineers like yourselves. Also, there are areas like shipping where the logic is heavily geared towards fitting our custom needs, we are looking to generalize that. In general, we aren't aiming Veniqa at people for whom Shopify or Woocommerce gets the job done. It is for the engineers or bedroom startups who have custom needs due to the nature of the business or want to use it as a baseline to speed up rapid development.
Any github issues, code contributions are all greatly appreciated.
I have detailed some of the lessons I learned in the process in this article.
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Why build your own platform instead of Woocommerce/Shopify?
The countries we were targeting in south Asia were countries like Nepal and Bangladesh where debit card purchases aren't really a thing. Most of the transactions are still in cash, bank transfers that require using local payment gateways or locally popular app-based transfers (which resemble Venmo and Square Cash in the US). And also, we needed to use a combination of shipping services since worldwide shippers like UPS and FedEx don't ship to the doorsteps in these countries since home addresses aren't easily GPS-able due to organization issues. Some of us grew up in these countries, so we've experienced this personally. These were just some of the custom situations which wouldn't have been addressed while using Woocommerce or Shopify. So we decided to build our own platform to customize it as per our unique needs as we go.
Licensing
We would appreciate feedback on this very much. We went with MIT License since that seemed to be the only one that allowed people to use it without much restrictions. I admit I didn't spend much time on this, but now looking at all the forks and engagement, it is something that needs refinement for sure.
Shortcomings in the tech and tests
There is a fair share of shortcomings which we are aware of - like missing tests and antipatterns. We wanted to get the initial version to the market quick, so a good portion of the work was rushed. We're working towards addressing these issues now, since we never thought someday Veniqa would be open-sourced and others might end up adopting it. Also, the engineering team for 80% of the build was just two of us, and we had a third member join us after. With regular full time engineering jobs during the day, the only way to finish building Veniqa was through caffeine powered insanity of 15 hr coding marathons during nights, weekends and vacations.
Future Plans, Contributions and Developer Documentation
We are currently in the process of building test suites, docker images and writing extensive documentation to speed up startup time. Hopefully, so we can encourage code contribution from other smart fellow engineers like yourselves. Also, there are areas like shipping where the logic is heavily geared towards fitting our custom needs, we are looking to generalize that. In general, we aren't aiming Veniqa at people for whom Shopify or Woocommerce gets the job done. It is for the engineers or bedroom startups who have custom needs due to the nature of the business or want to use it as a baseline to speed up rapid development.
Any github issues, code contributions are all greatly appreciated.
I have detailed some of the lessons I learned in the process in this article.
https://medium.com/swlh/why-my-startup-never-went-live-despi...