A ShopWithMore founder update
There’s a moment every builder recognises.
You’ve been heads-down for months. You’ve learned tools you never heard of a year ago. You’ve built systems, written scripts, debugged pipelines, and stitched together platforms that were never really designed to talk to each other. It works — just about — and the work it took to get there has cost you more than you’d like to admit.
And then one morning you step back and look at what you’ve built and ask a question you’d been avoiding: is this the right road, or just the one I’ve been on?
That question changes everything.
What we were building
For the past year, ShopWithMore’s first version was being built as a dropship platform centred around a single supplier — CPC — with the goal of importing over 120,000 products onto the site and selling them directly.
To make that work, the tech stack looked like this: GitHub for version control. Render for hosting the backend. Cloudinary for image hosting and transformation. Square for product management and commerce. Custom scripts to sync products, update inventory, handle images, manage categories, and keep everything talking to everything else.
Each individual piece of that stack is a legitimate tool. Together, they created something that became increasingly difficult to manage alone. Every product update touched multiple systems. Every image required processing through Cloudinary. Every sync had to be monitored, debugged, and rerun when something broke — which something always eventually did. The complexity wasn’t a sign that anything was wrong. It was just the honest cost of what the model required.
And that cost — in time, in energy, in mental load — was a cost I was paying on top of a full-time job and everything else that comes with being a solo founder.
Why the pivot happened
The decision didn’t come from failure. The dropship model worked. The pipeline ran. The products appeared on the site.
It came from clarity.
Over the course of building V1, something else became increasingly obvious: the affiliate model — which was always planned as stage two — was not only achievable sooner than expected, it was actually simpler, faster, and more scalable than the path I was on. XML feeds from suppliers. Clean HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. No image hosting dependencies. No multi-platform sync scripts. No middleware holding everything together by the thinnest of threads.
Twenty-plus suppliers. Twenty-thousand-plus products live already, with a clear path to millions. A site that loads in an instant because there’s nothing heavy holding it back. An architecture so lean it’s almost elegant.
I’d been planning to get here eventually. I just got here faster — and the year of building the hard way made me certain enough to make the move. <div class=”callout”> <div class=”callout-label”>💡 On Sunk Cost</div> <p>A year of work isn’t wasted because you change direction. A year of work is the education that makes the new direction possible. Every pipeline I built, every API I integrated, every platform I learned — that knowledge doesn’t disappear. It lives in every decision I make from here.</p> </div>
The goal hasn’t changed
This needs to be said clearly: the destination is the same.
ShopWithMore was always going to be an AI-native ecommerce platform serving millions of products across multiple categories, built for the world from Lancashire. That vision hasn’t moved an inch.
What’s changed is one section of the road. Instead of arriving at the affiliate model via the dropship route, we’ve taken a shorter path that gets us there faster and with less infrastructure weight. CPC — the original supplier at the heart of V1 — will still come onto the platform. Just not yet. The timing is right for everything that’s already live. The expansion continues from here.
A pivot isn’t a retreat. It’s a recalculation. Same destination, updated route.
What this means for solo founders
I want to say something to anyone reading this who is building something alone, around a job, around a family, around a life that doesn’t pause while you figure out your startup.
These moments happen. They happen to every founder. The difference between the ones who make it and the ones who don’t isn’t whether they pivot — it’s whether they can distinguish between giving up and changing direction.
Giving up is walking away from the goal. Changing direction is finding a better path to it. They can feel identical from the inside, especially when you’re tired. But they’re not the same thing at all.
I could have walked away from ShopWithMore this week. The complexity had built up. The mental load was real. The easier option was to stop.
I didn’t stop. I simplified. I made a hard call, kept the goal alive, and moved forward on a leaner road.
That’s not failure. That’s what building actually looks like.
What’s coming next
The new ShopWithMore is live, fast, and growing. The affiliate pipeline is running. Products are being added from multiple suppliers daily. The site is built to scale — not just to 120,000 products, but to millions, across multiple categories, across multiple markets.
V2 — the AI-native experience, the conversational commerce layer, the features that make ShopWithMore genuinely different — that build continues. Everything we’re doing now is laying the foundation for what that becomes.
The road is the same. The pace hasn’t slowed. If anything, this week proved something important: when the path gets harder than it needs to be, the answer isn’t to push harder. Sometimes it’s to find a better path — and keep moving.
— Justin
Founder, ShopWithMore
Preston, Lancashire
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