I co-founded EcomNinjas with a partner from Vasta and ran it for about a year. We had been getting a lot of opportunities for this kind of work, and after leaving Vasta we saw the demand was there. We decided to start the agency.
The work
We took national and international clients. Some wanted a new store. Others already had one and wanted us to improve it. Neither of us had run a business before, so I learned scoping, pricing and client conversations on real projects with real money. When a client had no designer, I was the designer.
Why it ended
The work went well and we never had a shortage of clients. What we could not solve was hiring, because demand grew faster than we could bring people in. Growing past that would have meant running a company neither of us was ready to run. Around the same time we both got offers abroad, and we took them.