We're Finbarr and Nick, co-founders of Shogun - a storefront builder for eCommerce sites. We started the company 3 years ago. Initially it was a page builder for Rails apps[1, 2]. After about 9 months, we couldn't convince many companies to pay us for that, but one of our prospects wanted to use it for a Shopify store. So we wrote a Shopify integration, waited a week, and gave up.

Within a month of giving up, we had some paying customers, so Nick and I continued to work on it as a side project. I went to work as a software engineer, and Nick moved to Thailand. We continued to work on it in our free time, and figured maybe someday it could be a lifestyle business.

But it continued to grow. And grow. And grow. By spring of 2017, it was making enough to pay Nick and me a modest salary, so I left my job and Nick came back from Asia. By fall, our growth wasn't slowing down, and we figured that this could be a full-on software company.

We applied to YC, and Shogun grew 30% during the month between our application submission and our interview. We got in to the Winter 2018 batch.

Today Shogun is one of the most popular apps on Shopify. We just launched on BigCommerce as well and are now building out support for other eCommerce platforms.

In regard to tech, the hardest part has been implementing workarounds for all the bizarre quirks of each platform. We also build our pages to co-exist with the existing CSS and theme elements, so we have to be really careful with styling conflicts.

There are a lot of page building tools out there. Our major differentiator is that we focus on eCommerce specifically and integrate into your existing eCommerce platform/backend. Shogun is also developer friendly with strong controls over details like padding and margins. We also built in a "custom elements" feature that allows developers to code re-usable drag and drop templates. Finding the right balance where developers love it and non-developers can learn it is very difficult.

We're looking forward to hearing feedback and ideas from the community.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9257363

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9571603

Submissions by Finbarr

Launch HN: Shogun (YC W18) – Storefront Builder for ECommerce Sites

Launch HN: Shogun (YC W18) – Storefront Builder for ECommerce Sites