Co-founded with a partner from a previous job. EcomNinjas was equal parts confidence and no business plan: two developers deciding to be an agency because clients kept asking us for help anyway.
From technical to whatever the client needed
We landed a mix of national and international clients. Some wanted changes to a store they already had, some wanted one built from scratch. Neither of us had run a business before, so scoping, pricing, and talking to clients got learned live, on real projects, with real money involved.
When a client had no designer, I was the designer. That keeps happening to me.
Why it ended
The work went well. Clients were happy, and we never had a shortage of them. What we couldn’t solve was hiring: demand grew faster than we could bring people in, and around the same time we both got strong offers abroad. We took them instead of forcing the company to grow into something we weren’t ready to run.
We were both leaders in our own way there. Running things is the part I kept doing afterwards.