i tried to run an actual business - vellapaper

Date : 05-2025

so i did a thing that wasn't code for once, i started a real business. Vellapaper, selling posters and vintage paintings. and i mean i did ALL of it myself, the branding, the store, the product side, the listings, the packing, the customer stuff. it's one thing to ship software where the marginal cost of another copy is basically zero, it's a completely different beast when every single order is a physical object that has to get printed, packed and physically moved to a human

and that's exactly where it got me. the actual product was fine, people wanted the thing. but the finances just would not close, mostly because of shipping. shipping a physical poster eats the margin alive, and once you factor in packaging and the stuff that gets damaged or delayed, the numbers that looked great in my head stopped looking great on paper. i learned the hard way that "people like it" and "this is a sustainable business" are two very different sentences

honestly though i don't regret it even slightly. i learned more about how the real world works from vellapaper struggling than i would've from it quietly succeeding. unit economics, logistics, the difference between revenue and profit, the fact that a great product with broken shipping math is still a broken business. every project i've done before this lived inside a computer where physics doesn't cost money. this one didn't, and getting humbled by cardboard boxes and courier rates taught me things no repo ever could