How I Helped Factor75 Go from First Line of Code to $277 Million Acquisition: A Case Study

In November 2020 the Chicago Tribune ran the headline: HelloFresh buys Batavia-based Factor75. Up to $277 million.

I was there for the start of it: the first line of code, the two-week MVP, the first customers, and the team that kept building after I handed it off.

In December 2012 I was Director of Software Engineering at Recsolu, the Chicago recruiting-software company that later renamed itself Yello. Nick Wernimont had an idea for a direct-to-consumer prepared-meal service: chef-cooked meals for specific diets, delivered, heat and eat. That is a familiar category now. In 2012 it was a bet, and he needed software to take the bet with.

I wrote the first line of code in the back of a car on the way to Florida for the holidays. Two weeks later the MVP was live. I built it the way I still like to build first versions: with the most boring stack that would let us ship. Ruby on Rails for the application. PostgreSQL for the data. Stripe for subscriptions and payments. Heroku so nobody had to think about servers. The product was a customer portal where someone could sign up, pick meals, and manage a subscription, with the billing wired to actually charge people every week.

Then I helped scale it to its first customers, still at Recsolu, on nights and weekends. The site had to hold up under real orders before anyone talked about a team.

That spring I left Recsolu to start a development studio with Michael Pollack, a friend from high school who had just sold his logistics startup, Advantage Freight Network, to Echo Global Logistics. Mike gave a long interview to Chicago Venture Magazine that September about the sale and about how the two of us came together. We called the studio Rocket Fuel Labs at first and renamed it Big Astronaut in January 2014. Built In Chicago carried our launch post that July, and a week later I wrote up the Factor 75 build there: Nick had turned to us for the technology, we built it on Rails with a test-driven workflow, and we shipped fast. BusinessWire ran the studio's launch release that September.

Factor75 was our first customer, and the work changed shape. It was no longer one engineer in a back seat. I hired and built the engineering team that would keep building Factor75 long after the hand-off.

Factor75 grew faster than a small studio was the right shape for. In September 2013 the company took our team in-house. A year later I wrote the whole story up on the Big Astronaut blog in one sentence, which the Wayback Machine still has: "We've worked extensively with Factor 75 for the past year, and have successfully moved Factor 75 development team in house!" The exclamation point was sincere.

Mark Moschel took over as CTO. From that point the platform was his and the team's. I moved to Naples the next month.

In August 2014 we published a short video of the Factor75 team talking about what it was like to work with Big Astronaut. It is two minutes long and it is still my favorite reference.

Seven years later, when HelloFresh's diligence team read the platform, they were reading a company built on the 2012 decisions. The Rails, Postgres, Stripe and Heroku stack never needed a rewrite to reach scale. Subscription billing meant retention had been the business metric since the first cohort. And the engineering team was already in place on day one of in-house development, because I had hired it.

The in-house team under Mark built a great deal on top of that: a recommendation engine, database scaling, a data platform, the compliance work, and the diligence preparation itself. That is what a good team does with a foundation that holds.

The first version is the one the rest gets built on. That is the part I do.

Three things from Factor75's first year are the method I have used on every product since.

Ship in weeks, not quarters. The first line of code was written in the back of a car and the MVP took two weeks. The stack was the most boring one that would let me ship: Rails, Postgres, Stripe, Heroku. Nothing about the first version needed to be clever. It needed to charge cards on Monday.

Make revenue the first feature. Subscription billing went in before anything else. When the money moves weekly, retention is not a dashboard someone builds later. It is the business, and everyone can see it from the first cohort. Factor75 knew what it was worth from month one.

Build the team that will outlast you. I hired the engineers, then handed them to the company. A studio that keeps a client dependent on it is a studio, not a foundation. We built the team, then we gave them the team, and it kept shipping for seven years without me.

I have repeated that pattern since. Big Astronaut, the studio itself, was taken in-house by Factor75 in 2013. Cloud Logistics, where I led engineering, was acquired by E2open in 2018. CredZK, which went from a five-day prototype at Moca Network's Identity House to a working product, was acquired by Byzantine Solidus Inc. in 2026. Four acquisitions from the inside, all sourced on the About page.

HelloFresh announced the acquisition on November 22, 2020: $177 million up front, with an earn-out that could take it to $277 million. Factor75 became Factor, HelloFresh's ready-to-eat brand, which is what a weekly subscription started in the back of a car grew into.

I wrote the first line in the back of a car. The team I built wrote the rest.