One day Brett Brockway walked into a local automotive shop to get his tires changed. The manager was being lambasted with phone calls and drowning in a sea of paperwork, when all the while he was doing a hell of a job keeping up with orders. Seeing this, Brett started to think that this problem couldn’t exist in isolation, so he and his friend researched. They visited a series of small businesses and started to make a mental note of all the technology that looked like they came from the dark age, and saw an opportunity.
For two years, Brett and his co-founder ironed out a plan for a light-weight cloud based resource planning software devoid of tech talk. “We’ve noticed that tech jargon is as annoying to a small businesses owner as sobriety is to Charlie Sheen,” he said. Soon, they came up with CloudB2B, a startup that would allow business owners to focus on building the products they love by reducing touch points and increasing transparency.
How Will CloudB2B Help Small Businesses?
CloudB2B aims to connect the small business community through a fully integrated supply chain. Small businesses could us our services to:
- Reduce product returns, phone calls, paperwork, and outstanding debt.
- Find and establish new relationships with the click of a mouse
- Order products at a discount with the rest of the network
What Challenges Have You Faced in CloudB2B’s Development?
My co-founder and I worked on CloudB2B for two years and foundSpree Commerce as a solution we could use to build our product. We thought it was our salvation.
And it was, for a while… Until we had to work in the abstraction of spree_commerce. We had a hard time figuring out what anything meant. We didn’t really have a “software engineer” and thus had some misfits hacking code together.
We can’t forget how we found Codementor－we were struggling with getting our MVP together to show to our client, tapping on every resource we knew to get help. Unfortunately, each person responded with something like: “Oooh, yeah… Spree commerce… that gets complex.” So we hit the internet for help.
How has Codementor played a role in CloudB2B’s Development?
We’ve used Codementor to be a bit more like Buzz Aldrin and break through barriers (quite literally.) When we can’t figure out how to do something, we will consult one of the mentors on the Codementor network to bring us to the next level.
Our sessions have been incredibly informative and productive. We’ve used Codementor to work through building a better UI so that we could mass update products. One of my mentors, Andy Maleh, was patient and more than willing to walk me through how things behaved and even help me think about the unknown, which as an entrepreneur is priceless.
I learned that you can get an MVP going with a minimal amount of money and a solid mentor.
Andy really helped us fast track the development of our platform, and help us make our app better.
Anything Else You’d Like to Add?
I like the quality of the candidates on the site. I also like how the mentors have dealt with many of the exact same problems you have had. Let me just say that we are sleep deprived, overworked, excited and ready to empower small businesses. Thank you Codementor!
