Michael Bromley started Vendure.io as a solo open source project in 2017 because he looked around the e-commerce space and could not believe what he saw. The tools were outdated. The stacks were legacy. And nobody was building what developers actually needed. So he built it himself.
David Höck found Vendure while running his agency and saw a raw diamond. The code was beautiful. The website was terrible. He reached out to Michael on LinkedIn in German not knowing the guy was British. And the rest is history.
Together they built Vendure into the enterprise e-commerce platform without the trade-offs. Open source at the core. Fully customizable. And intentionally boring. No hype cycles. No reinventing the wheel every release. Just software that works and keeps working.
In this episode we go deep on the zero to market journey, the decision to turn down VC money, the pivot from agency to product company, and why boring technology wins every single time.
Key Takeaways
- Do not innovate on stuff that does not matter. Save your innovation for the 20% that sets you apart.
- Boring technology is a competitive advantage. Stability beats hype at enterprise scale.
- They turned down VC funding because it would have bent their vision to fit someone else's narrative.
- Bootstrap means you answer to yourself. That clarity is worth more than any check.
- The agency years were not wasted. Every hard project built the muscle that now powers the product.
- AI is a multiplier for product companies. They built three months of features that would have taken years before.