LemonStand

LemonStand was a hosted e-commerce platform aimed at brands that had outgrown the templated checkout but didn’t want to run their own infrastructure. The bet was on design flexibility and merchant experience, at a time when most platforms forced a trade-off between control and convenience.

Founding and running it was a long lesson in the parts of company-building that don’t show up in the product. Distribution in a market with entrenched incumbents, the economics of SMB software, and how much of a commerce platform’s value lives in the unglamorous reliability beneath the storefront.

In March 2019, Mailchimp acquired the company. That outcome taught me as much about timing, positioning, and the trust you build with partners long before any deal as it did about shipping software.