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
