Rustic Cart wasn’t groundbreaking, nor was it backed by cutting-edge tech, but I believed in it. Oregon was full of talented people making pottery, candles, handwoven baskets, but most of them had no idea how to sell their work online. I built simple websites and took a 5% commission from every successful sale. The rest belonged entirely to the seller.
In those early weeks, I coded by day and sent cold emails by night to small craft stores from Portland to Eugene. Most never replied. Some asked,
“What college are you attending?”
When I said,
“I’ve never been to college,”
they fell silent.
One even sent back a laughing emoji with the words, “Good luck with that.”
My bank account emptied faster than I expected. I lived on cup noodles, boiled eggs, and canned beans. Every night, I cranked the heater up to full blast, not just to chase away the cold, but to push back the creeping fear that was starting to seep into every corner of my mind.
Once, I called my mother just to hear her voice. For a few seconds, I imagined her asking if I was eating enough, if the city was treating me kindly.
When I told her I hadn’t gone back to school, her answer was immediate.
“Then don’t expect anyone to be waiting for you.”
I thought I had grown used to the coldness, but after that call, I sat on the floor of my apartment in silence for nearly an hour, listening to the hum of the fridge and the distant sound of MAX trains.
Three months after launching, Rustic Cart had exactly two clients. One was Josie, a soap maker who worked out of a tiny studio that smelled like lavender and eucalyptus. The other was Walter, an elderly woodcarver who lived a forty-minute drive away, past the edges of the city where the highway met dark pine trees.
Walter called me “computer girl” and often got my name wrong. He thought it was Lucy, but he still paid me twenty dollars a month to manage his orders.
Thanks to them, I was able to cover my first month’s electric bill without borrowing from a credit card.
I thought things would gradually improve, but one February morning, while dropping off a shipment for Josie at a small boutique on NE Broadway, I was rear-ended at the intersection of 15th and Broadway. No one was hurt, but my old Honda Civic refused to start again. The repair estimate was nearly eight hundred dollars, a sum I didn’t have.
I sat in the middle of my living room that night, surrounded by rolls of packaging tape and unpaid invoices, wondering if I’d made the wrong choice.
That evening, I decided to attend a local small business meetup at the downtown library, a free event I had scrolled past on a community site before. I didn’t know what I was looking for—maybe just the comfort of being in a room with other people trying as hard as I was.
That’s where I met Marcia Bennett, a woman in her fifties with neatly tied silver hair, simple clothes, and piercing eyes. She was the founder of LedgerFlow, a small business accounting software company based out of Seattle, and she was sharing lessons on scaling a product.
When the Q&A ended, I waited until the room cleared, then nervously walked up and handed her my homemade business card, nearly dropping it in the process.
“I’m Ruby,” I said. “I run a small platform helping artisans sell online. No degrees, no funding, but I have real clients and real revenue, even if it’s small.”
Marcia was quiet for a few seconds. Then she smiled and extended her hand.
“Do you have customer data?” she asked.
I nodded, opened my laptop at one of the long oak tables, and showed her the orders and growth charts. Modest but clear.
She scanned a few spreadsheets, then said,
“You don’t need more individual sellers. You need B2B clients.”
I looked at her, not quite following.
“Instead of selling one bar of soap at a time,” she continued, “why not sell your order management software to fifty craft stores? It’s the same goal—helping them—but on a larger scale with more value. You already have the model. Now it’s time to restructure.”
We talked until nearly 10 p.m. as we walked out into the damp Portland night. Even though my leg ached from the morning crash, I felt light. A door had opened, and I knew I was ready to walk through it.
I renamed the company Craft Logic Solutions right after my meeting with Marcia. The old name sounded too naive, no longer fitting for the direction we were headed.
Under her mentorship, I pivoted from a consumer-facing retail platform to building supply chain management software tailored specifically for small- to midsize artisan businesses, a market almost no one had tapped properly.
The first month post-pivot, I averaged just three hours of sleep per night. I rewrote the entire system using a new framework and launched an email campaign targeting independent retail stores across the West Coast.
Every new contract helped pay off my car repair debt, cover hosting expenses, and eventually hire a part-time intern: Jared, a UX design student I met at another community meetup downtown. He joined for a stipend and the promise of real experience.
We worked out of my apartment, used boxes of instant noodles as makeshift desks, and hung a whiteboard on the fridge door. It was scrappy, but in that tiny space, Craft Logic began to take form.
By fall, after more than a hundred failed cold calls, I received an email from the operations department of a handcrafted furniture chain called Maple and Sage. They had thirty-six locations across six states and were using outdated management software from the early 2000s.
The sender, Rebecca Tran, wrote simply,
“I hear your software can track inventory per location. Send us a demo.”
I read that email ten times.
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