A Year of Nothing. Live in 4 Months.
4 months
to first release
2.4x
MRR, year to Aug 2026
4.6x
output, same engineer
- Sector
- Etsy Seller Software
- Engagement
- Venture Build
- Structure
- 50% Co-Owner
- Dates
- October 2023 to today
The Situation
ProfitTree's founder spent over a year with vendors and released nothing. SIROC rebuilt it from scratch, live in 4 months, with sellers paying a month later.
- one vendor, nothing released
- 1 year
- both left unfinished
- 2 builds
- no paying customers
- 0 MRR
Hannah Gardner, an Etsy seller and coach, wanted a tool that showed sellers their true profit. She spent over a year with an outsourced agency, and nothing reached the market. A second engineer started over from scratch and never finished.
That made 2 builds, 0 releases and nothing for sellers to pay for. Sellers kept reconciling profit by hand, in spreadsheets fed from Etsy, Printful and Printify.
A founder we had worked with before referred her to SIROC. Before committing, we ran due diligence on both codebases.
What We Did
Diligence first, then a full rebuild.
One codebase duplicated the profit formula in many places and synchronized slowly; the other was an unfinished build. Nothing carried over from either; we started from scratch.
2 codebases reviewed, 0 lines kept
Test willingness to pay first.
The founder had planned a large platform. A workshop reframed it as a hypothesis: would sellers pay? The MVP roadmap put a profit-tracking dashboard live in 4 months, and revenue came a month after launch.
4 months from the first workshop to a live product
Pivoted in a quarter.
Under a year after launch, profit tracking had proved a real problem in a niche too small to scale on. A second workshop moved the product to research tools from June 2025, and a free plan followed in August 2025.
4 months from the pivot to new research tools live
A market dataset the app can read.
Within months, ProfitTree was pulling in and serving data on 4.1M Etsy shops and hundreds of millions of listings, with its own estimates of views and demand on top.
4.1M shops tracked in ProfitTree's Etsy data
AI in the product and in the build.
ProfitTree AI shipped in July 2026 with five agents that report from ProfitTree's own estimates, so the model never guesses. Behind the product, an AI-powered workflow let the team ship features several times faster.
4.6x monthly output, one engineer
Before vs After
| Time to first release | After: 4 months Before: Over a year, nothing shipped | Change: Shipped |
|---|---|---|
| Code carried forward | After: Full rebuild Before: Two failed codebases | Change: Rebuilt |
| Revenue | After: Paying from May 2024 Before: No paying customers | Change: First revenue |
| Monthly recurring revenue | After: $39k (Aug 2026) Before: $16k (Aug 2025) | Change: 2.4x |
| Monthly output, one engineer | After: 26.5 Before: 5.8 | Change: 4.6x |
| Etsy market data | After: 246M listings Before: No market data | Change: Built |
Showing the after state.
Where They Are Today
246M listings
in the Etsy data ProfitTree runs on
ProfitTree now puts AI to work on its own Etsy data. Five purpose-built AI agents turn 246M listings into answers sellers can act on, and paid users can bring that data into Claude or ChatGPT to run their shop workflows.
What Etsy sellers say about ProfitTree
“Amazing App for any Etsy seller that wants to get a handle on their shop’s profitability. Saves you hours of effort …”
Carl Gardner · 6-figure Etsy seller
“ProfitTree is awesome! It has really helped me better understand my business and be able to see where I’m having success and areas for improvement. … It’s legit!”
catsheep85 · 5-figure Etsy seller
“ProfitTree gives you the clarity of your Etsy business which Etsy fails to do. Give it a go and see for yourselves”
nothernhouse · 6-figure Etsy seller
“So far I’m loving ProfitTree! Thank you so much for creating it. It’s made my store so much more profitable since I can look at my numbers much clearer.”
daniellemetoyer · 5-figure Etsy seller
“Just hit 500 sales! This feels like a real milestone! … using ProfitTree to see exactly what I am making has been so helpful.”
Nikki Delgado · 5-figure Etsy seller
What SIROC Brought
Speed counted because it was aimed. We reached a live product in 4 months by testing whether sellers would pay before building the platform the founder first asked for. We then changed course in a quarter, once the evidence showed the first niche was too small.
The same discipline runs through the data platform. Four of its five core design decisions turned on what a query costs in memory, so a dataset of hundreds of millions of rows stays fast to read.
SIROC holds 50% of ProfitTree Ltd, so we built a company we co-own.
“We work on the business as well as the product: what the opportunity is, what it is not, and how to test it.”
Pablo Garcia, Head of Product Design, SIROC
- to a live product, after two failed builds
- 4 months
- to change course on the evidence
- 1 quarter
- of ProfitTree Ltd held by SIROC Labs
- 50%
“We were stuck in endless loops without delivering anything. SIROC got us moving again. Now we ship weekly, learn from users, and actually make progress. Game-changer.”
Hannah Gardner Co-Founder, ProfitTreeA year of vendor spend bought no product and no revenue. A scoped rebuild had paying customers a month after launch.
