Kurieta was working. I had no plan to build software. The plan was to keep consulting.

But the deeper I got into consulting, the more I saw something I couldn't unsee.

A large part of the work ended in software. Cost optimization, line balancing, warehouse design — the engagements often closed with an ERP or WMS implementation. I was inside those implementations on behalf of my clients. And the more of them I did, the more I started looking at the software the same way I looked at a manufacturing line or a warehouse floor.

As an industrial engineer.

Most of it didn't hold up.

There was fluff in the sales pitch. Features that weren't real, or weren't planned. Workflows that forced humans to bend around the software instead of being shaped to how operations actually run.

On one major ERP implementation, we had to hire people who already knew the software just to operate it. That stopped me. Why should running an operation require knowing a specific piece of software? You can break almost any operation into smaller steps and train people on the steps. Software should be built to support that. Most software isn't.

That was the trigger. I started thinking about building something different.

Around the same time, in 2019, I had gone back to Purdue for my masters. I was on a thesis track, with the idea that I might continue into a PhD. One of my professors asked me what I was doing outside of school. I told him about the company, about the early thinking on the software. He said something I didn't want to hear at the time. Someone running a decently successful company, while thinking about starting another company, does not do a PhD. He suggested I put that time and energy into the business instead.

I finished the masters without the thesis. He was right. That was the moment I realized I was already doing the thing. I just hadn't admitted it to myself yet.

The original plan was to build a full ERP. That was the first instinct. Build the whole thing.

In 2020 I met my mentor, who helped me see clearly what I had been avoiding. Building an ERP without investor money was effectively impossible. And I wasn't going to take investor money. I needed a narrower starting point.

I did the research. The most fragmented piece of the stack, the one without a clear winner serving 3PLs the right way, was the WMS layer. It was also more buildable than a full ERP. That became the wedge.

Leanafy would start as a WMS.

The first attempt did not go well. I built a team. The team couldn't align with the vision. A year of work and a lot of money went into something that wasn't going to work.

Then I met Ankush.

It was a LinkedIn post. Not mine. Someone else's. He had left a comment, I had commented on his comment, and something in what he said made me reach out. We spoke. He told me what he was doing, I told him what I was doing, and we clicked fast. A couple of months of pilot work and the decision was obvious. He came on as cofounder and built the tech team.

I trust him with my life. The product Leanafy is becoming, neither of us could have built alone.

We bootstrapped. Five years in, that decision still shapes everything. We've built features into the product that companies who've raised millions are still trying to build one piece of. Most people don't know that yet because we haven't put real money into marketing. That's fine. The product is there. The customers we've earned, we've earned by being the version of a WMS that an operator would design if an operator were building software, which is the version I wished existed when I was implementing somebody else's.

That is what Leanafy is. Built by people who have stood on the floor and watched the gap between what the software promises and what it actually does. Built to fit the operation, not the other way around.

Every decision we make in the product traces back to that. Saying no to investors came from it. So did the discipline of not building everything at once. So did the choice to keep serving the smallest customers at a loss, because somewhere in there is the operator who reminds us why we started.