We built the first prototype in a few months. I wish I could say we built it in a few days or a few weeks, but even after the first version that we could demo to the outside world, it took over a year for our small team to build out the first genuinely production-ready version of Shoptype.
We didn’t go down the blockchain rabbit hole this time even though we were building a highly decentralized system. We kept ourselves firmly agnostic, preferring instead to build the meta layer for commerce, by building on top of existing Internet services for various functions of the Internet, and focusing instead on integration and experience.
Of course, even with this explicit focus on function, our experience layer was really minimal. We wanted it to be very clean and extremely simple to use, something like Twitter or Instagram. I told our product and engineering staff that we would build nothing in-house that was available elsewhere, and “Not Invented Here” was very far from the culture we wanted.
So we went way beyond the Pareto Principle and focused on that 5% of work that would bring 95% of the value we were looking to provide. It turned out that adding a functional layer for the Internet was the most sensible thing we could do, that is to say, we built what I jokingly called a “web zero” layer that empowered users to monetize their own activity and reach across the Internet.
We decided that this peer-to-peer-to-peer ad infinitum chain of tracking would serve our customers best because any Internet user could become (and indeed already was) our customer. We made users of the Internet our main customers so that when they made money, we'd make money also, and when they won, we won.
