From sneaker marketplace to 4X growth: building Krepling

Executive overview

Most e-commerce merchants aren't developers, yet platforms force them to stitch together four or five disconnected tools. Krepling replaces that stack with a single no-code infrastructure layer. Liam Gerada built it by solving his own problem, iterating brutally on pricing, and staying personally close to customers even as the company scaled.

The only way to find what customers will actually pay for is to charge them and let them tell you why they won't.

From sneakers to e-commerce infrastructure

• Liam and his brother spotted a gap between sneaker resellers and buyers who just wanted to wear the shoes
• They built a consignment marketplace with buy-now-pay-later — almost every buyer sold the sneaker instead of paying it off
• ~15 orders in, the credit model nearly killed the business; they shut it down
• The sneaker experience exposed how fragmented merchant tooling was: email, CRM, invoicing, all separate tools
• That fragmentation became the founding insight for Krepling

Building the first product without technical skills

• Early product was rough — the goal was to prove three things: infrastructure platforms make sense, no-code is viable, merchants want this
• Reached out to ~200 merchants they already knew; gave the first 5–10 free access for a week
• Let merchants experience it first, then pitched the vision — that sequencing was critical to getting buy-in
• Customers effectively co-built the product by surfacing what workflows they actually needed
• Pre-seed funding came via Jason Calacanis's Launch fund — $100K after a pitch that was two sentences long

Pricing from zero to $35/month

• Kept the product free for the first year; when they flipped to paid, 65% of customers churned
• Instead of extending free access further, they did the opposite: stopped accepting free customers entirely
• Required every new customer to pay, then asked directly: what bugs you, what would make you leave?
• Ran through this exercise ~3 times, moving from a $15/month baseline up to $35/month
• Most actionable insight came post-pre-seed, when customers engaged more honestly at a peer level

Staying close to customers at scale

• Customer obsession is easy with five customers; the challenge is maintaining it at 4X the volume
• Liam personally manages 10–15 accounts and joins customer calls himself
• Large customers likely to drive meaningful revenue get direct founder time, not just account management
• The risk as a company grows: optimising for what looks good on a seed deck rather than what living customers need
• "Be a voice for your customers" — the discipline is keeping that human signal above the MRR metric

Mindset on building and glamourisation

• Startup culture overglamorises the journey — Liam is direct that the early grind is not something he'd wish on anyone
• They never set out to build something big; each bottleneck led to the next problem worth solving
• The switch from grinding to excitement happens when you see that what you're building can genuinely benefit people
• Younger founders need to accept upfront: no money for years, just shut up and do the work