It’s Sunday, and I’ve been thinking about how far Okiela has come.

Around October last year, this was still just an idea in my head.

I’m not an engineer.
I don’t come from sales.
I don’t come from marketing.

My background is FP&A finance.

So I understood P&L, margins, COGS, unit economics, and the feeling of looking at numbers that seem fine on the surface but don’t fully explain what is really happening underneath.

That was the starting point for Okiela.

A simple belief:
Shopify founders should not need 30 hours of spreadsheets just to understand what is actually left after all the costs.

But building even a “simple” version of that has been anything but simple.

Behind Okiela, there have been months of working through things I had never touched before:

Shopify data.
CSV uploads.
Refund logic.
Discount logic.
COGS assumptions.
Shipping cost gaps.
Payment fee estimates.
Profit waterfalls.
Dashboard bugs.
Billing flows.
Security checks.
Real-world test cases.

Some days I felt proud.

Some days I honestly felt completely out of my depth.

There were moments where one small issue could block the whole product for hours. Sometimes days.

But I kept going because the problem still feels real.

A lot of ecommerce founders can see revenue.
They can see orders.
They can see ROAS.

But they still struggle to answer the question that matters most:

after everything, what is actually left?

That’s what Okiela is trying to make clearer.

It is still early.
Still imperfect.
Still being improved every day.

But it is real.

Built by one solo founder from Vietnam, with a finance background, learning in public and trying to make something useful for sellers who deserve better profit clarity.

If you know a Shopify founder or ecommerce seller who is tired of guessing their real margin, I’d really appreciate you sharing Okiela with them <3

And if you try it, honest feedback means more than you probably realize.

Still learning.
Still building.
Still here.

#buildinpublic #shopify #ecommerce #saas #founderjourney #profitability #Okiela