EasyMarket: the supermarket on your phone before it became the norm
In 2016, together with Michael and Fábio, I created a start-up so that people could do their supermarket shopping on their phone and have it delivered or collect it in store. At the time, app-based delivery was still in its infancy in Brazil. Today, almost every supermarket offers it.
We partnered with an investor who would handle the commercial side, and the three of us left our jobs to focus only on the product for six months. Working with agile methods, I built the entire Android front end, making sure the app worked well on any device, while Fábio and Michael handled the back end, the APIs and the database.
The app was finished and working, but when the partner in charge of sales had to step away for health reasons, the investment stopped and we had no one to take the product to supermarkets. We tried on our own, but could not win customers in time, and each of us had to go back to work.
What I learnedA finished product is not a business. Since then I think about the whole service, from building it to how it reaches the people who will use it, and I avoid having an essential part depend on a single person.