Timeline
December 2013, MJ, a mutual friend, and me started working on a project while I was still studying Computer Science.
In March 2014 we founded the company Storeness. Shortly thereafter, the third co-founder left, while MJ and me started work on our product Baabedo. With Baabedo we created the prototype of a next-generation SaaS price-optimization tool for marketplace merchants.
The next year we applied to the ASPnP Accelerator and became part of their 7th batch, causing our move to Berlin. End of that year we changed our name to Autumn, and frustrated with the current state of Machine Learning tools we began work on Leaf and Collenchyma. Having struck the interest of a lot of developers upon hitting the front page of HackerNews multiple times with Leaf, we decided to focus our work solely on that.
In March 2016 we decided to close down the company. Some of the reasons for that were detailed in this blog post.
Thoughts
The time with the startup was a wild and fun ride. I gained a lot of experience in terms of programming all kinds of different systems, from cloud-based microservice architectures to low-level GPU Machine Learning code. I got to know and share experiences with a lot of interesting people and learnt what makes a viable business and what doesn't.
I learned how to get people interested in the stuff you are working on (sometimes you just have to talk to them!, duh) and I also learned a lot about myself, what I can do, and where my limits are.