I get asked a lot about where Metorik came from. Given my past, having worked on WooCommerce at Automattic, it's a good, valid question, and something I'd love to answer here.

Take me back to the start Bryce...

Sure! It was early 2015. I'd been running my first WooCommerce store but kept growing frustrated with the reporting in it. Not only was it difficult for me to accurately see how much I was making, but managing the store was even more of a headache.

My day to day job was doing support for WooCommerce and its many extensions. But as soon as the work day was done, I'd often work late into the night and throughout my weekends on side projects. I made WooCommerce extensions, WordPress plugins, small SaaS products, and wrote quite a lot on my blog. The intention wasn't really to earn money, but rather to learn. I loved coding and I wanted to do it full-time. It seemed like the only way to make that possible was to, well, code.

Back to my issue with reports though. I knew it was a problem with 0 solutions. So I thought, why not try build my own? I had no clue what I was doing, but I registered a domain - like one often does when they can't get an app idea out of their head - and there it was - WC Metrics (wcmetrics.com).

I found time at nights and on the weekends and after a few weeks, I had a basic version done. It was a truly simple app (if you could even call it an app), which actually existed as a WordPress plugin and just made some API calls to my WooCommerce store in the background. Honestly, I don't even remember very much of it. I do remember it had purple everywhere and used Proxima Nova though!

In the days that followed, I met with various team members at Woo to show them WC Metrics. People were into it, but it never went further than that. Soon after, Automattic acquired WooThemes. And then soon after that, and a couple of laptops later, nothing was left of WC Metrics and since I'd stopped running a WooCommerce store myself, I had no need to continue developing it.

Over my time at Automattic, I suggested we pursue it as a company and team but again, there wasn't any interest. Regardless, my passion and drive to solve the problems that today Metorik solves never waivered, and I was determined to build the product I always wanted even if it meant giving up an incredible job and lifestyle to start from scratch and hope for the best.

"If you don't build your dream someone will hire you to help build theirs". That saying gave me a much-needed wake up call. I had a dream and wasn't going to let others decide whether or not it was worthy of being pursued.

Was it the right call? Without a doubt. Sure, I gave up quite a lot in the process, but now I get to spend every day being completely fulfilled by the work I do while helping hundreds of people run their stores. That's a win in my eyes.