Our story
Why we built Selldoh.
We were tired of guessing.
Every baker who's ever sold a loaf has had the same conversation: someone asks “how much should I charge?” and forty people answer with forty different numbers, none of them based on what your butter cost. We had that conversation too. We picked numbers we could defend out loud, hoped the math worked, and most of the time it... mostly did.
But “mostly” isn't a business. We wanted to know — not feel, not guess, know — what every batch cost us to bake. So we built it. Cost of goods to the gram. Live margin on every product. The math is just there now, in the background, doing what we never quite got around to doing ourselves.
Our customers paid us. Not the platform.
When we set up Lolo's Backstube on someone else's platform, one of the first decisions was a single toggle: tack the platform's fee onto our customer's bill, or eat it ourselves. For us that wasn't really a choice — we couldn't justify billing our customer for the platform's fee. They weren't the platform's customer. They were ours. So we ate it. The platform took 5% + $0.55 per order; card processing took another 2.9% + $0.30. About 11.8% of every sale, all in. A tax that big wasn't acceptable to us.
That's the position every microbaker on a marketplace is in: eat it, or pass it. Both options carry a tax — either on your margin or on your relationship with your customer. We didn't want you stuck with that choice. Your customer is not our product.
So we made a structural choice instead of a marketing one. Our fee comes out of your transfer, not your customer's checkout. The menu price is the price. We don't offer a “pass it through” toggle. Removing the option removes the temptation — for us and for you.
Our shop should have felt like ours.
We wanted a shop our customers would think of as Lolo's. Not as “the Lolo's page on Hotplate.”
The clearest gap was the URL. Our shop lived at hotplate.com/lolosbackstube — their domain in front, ours after the slash. Every bookmark, every shared link, every customer who typed our name into a search bar saw someone else's name first. A small thing. But the address bar is brand real estate too.
So we built Selldoh to lead with you. Clean type, generous spacing, no platform chrome competing for your customer's attention. Every shop gets a clean subdomain by default — for us it's lolosbackstube.selldoh.com, your name first. Baker's Plan vendors bring their own domain entirely. Modern. Slick. Yours.
We made a list. Then we built it.
When nothing on the market was the thing we wanted, we wrote down what was missing. The list was specific:
Real per-item cost.
Calculated from your recipe, including packaging. To the gram.
Labels that write themselves.
Allergens in regulatory order. Ingredients sorted by weight. The right made-on date, every time.
A subscription model that can't bankrupt you.
The customer's discount grows the longer they stay. The discount is margin-aware — so it can't accidentally cross zero on a low-margin product.
Fees that don't surprise either side.
We charge on cash collected, not on coupons or wallet credit your customer never sent you. Your customer pays the menu price, not a hidden line item.
A way to give bread away.
Family and friends at zero margin, without paying a platform tax for the privilege.
Nothing on the market did all of it. Most things on the market wanted a meaningful percentage of every sale to do half of it. So we built it. Same kitchen.
We're not going anywhere.
Selldoh is two people right now — Ben on the code, Lois on the bakery side, telling Ben when the code is wrong. That's the team, and being a small team is part of what makes our fees what they are. No growth team to feed, no investor return to chase, no quarterly target overriding whether the platform is still good for you.
We're hiring as the platform grows — in the same order a careful bakery scales. Someone on the customer side first. Someone on the product as we have proof to build with. Slow on purpose. The shape of the company is part of the product.
If any of this resonates, the rest of the story is the platform itself.
— Ben & Lois