The ShelfLife founder knows that things don’t always go as planned
startup as an idea. Maybe the founder sees a pain point and thinks they can solve it with a little technology and transform the industry, but it doesn’t always go as planned. That’s what ShelfLife founder Lillian Cartwright found when she launched her startup. With the economy turning last year, and investment capital drying up, Cartwright has been forced to shut down her company, taking the painful lessons she learned and moving on to whatever comes next.
When she started, Cartwright believed the beverage industry was ripe for digital transformation. When she was in graduate school at Harvard a few years ago, she came up with the idea of starting an extensive business. I soon learned that sourcing ingredients was harder than I imagined, and I began to envision a business, a two-sided marketplace where businesses could find ingredients and negotiate price, invoice, and payment—all in one convenient location.
It sounds like an idea an industry confined to paper and manual processes would embrace, but Carwright would know it may have moved too quickly, especially on the accounting side of the business.
When you think about digital transformation, it’s easy to forget that long-held manual processes are difficult to change. For a startup aiming for an industry that is still overwhelmed with phone calls, faxes, emails, and paper invoices, even if digital is more efficient, even if it can save money and time, it’s not always easy to change an established company’s workflow.
“I was struggling in terms of understanding the nature of the supplier, figuring out who was going to supply us with the juice concentrate, the citric acid, the cans, the labels — all of that. As I talked to other brands about what some of their issues were, I started to realize there was an opportunity to open up the process and bring more transparency to it. Cartwright told TechCrunch+.
Around the same time Cartwright was struggling with the idea of a seltzer business, she had a summer job at Bessemer Venture Partners, researching e-commerce markets. Without really realizing it at the time, she was laying the groundwork for a startup idea.
It started working in February 2020 as the pandemic hit, perhaps a harbinger of things to come. Early on, however, it all looked rosy: I managed to raise more than $300,000. I used that money to find a more technical co-founder. Eventually, she partnered with John Cline, an experienced engineering manager, who worked for eBay, Blue Apron, and Google before joining Cartwright to help build ShelfLife.
So far, so good
With Cline in the hangar, they started building the platform. By the following year, it had raised another $2.7 million. The platform began to gather. The future looked bright.