Michael Lane

← All work · 2014 – 2017

LinkGreen, now OrderEase

From a napkin diagram to a live B2B platform, starting with line one

I joined LinkGreen as its first technical hire and wrote the first line of code. Eight months later, wholesale suppliers and buyers in the horticulture industry were ordering through it, on the web and on phones. The company is still going today as OrderEase.

LinkGreen’s 2015 home page for the horticulture industry, with an explainer video of a garden center.LinkGreen’s 2016 banners: a single interface connecting wholesale suppliers and buyers, and place orders with all your suppliers on demand.LinkGreen Mobile, the wholesale ordering app, with an order on a phone.Close-up of the LinkGreen Mobile app’s order screen, with Done and Save buttons and a running total.LinkGreen’s 2016 About page entry for Michael Lane, Chief Technology Officer, with his photo.

2015: “Your link to the green industry”

8
months from a napkin diagram to live customers
1st
line of code, written by me
4
developers at our biggest: me and the three I hired
2
mobile platforms, one codebase

The napkin

LinkGreen was founded in 2013 by Warren Patterson and Rob Tigwell. Their idea was simple and overdue: wholesale ordering in the horticulture industry still ran on phone calls, faxes and printed catalogs, and every order a garden center placed by hand was slow, expensive and easy to get wrong. LinkGreen would connect suppliers and buyers on one neutral platform, so every supplier could reach all their buyers and every buyer could order from all their suppliers.

When I arrived, there was a napkin diagram and no code. I wrote the first line.

Eight months

Eight months later it was live, with real suppliers and real buyers placing real orders. I built the platform on ASP.NET MVC and Angular over SQL Server, with NServiceBus on Azure Service Bus to move orders reliably between parties, and set it up in Azure with automated tests and daily deployments from the start.

I also built the mobile app, with Ionic, so one codebase shipped to both iPhone and Android. It wasn’t a cut-down companion app: it did everything the website did, so a buyer could build an order walking the sales floor and a supplier’s rep could take one on the road.

From one engineer to a team

At first it was just me. As LinkGreen grew from a niche in Ontario to customers across North America, I hired three developers and grew into the CTO role, scaling the engineering as the company scaled.

Still going

LinkGreen grew beyond horticulture into hardware, building materials, food and more, and today it’s OrderEase, a B2B order platform used by companies like Scotts Canada and Milwaukee Tool. I’m proud that it started with a line of code I wrote, sitting next to a napkin.