May 5, 2026

How Layout started

In the summer of 2025, I was at a coffee shop in my local city, Roseville, that I go to all the time. The line was like 15 people out the door, which was super common for this place. I was just sitting there thinking, “Oh my gosh, I want a coffee. Why is there not a different way to order? There should definitely be an app. Chipotle has an app. Why don’t these guys have an app?

So I ended up scheduling a meeting with the owner, and I sat down with him and talked to him. I asked him why he doesn’t have an app, and he said they typically cost around $10,000 and they’re just expensive. I ended up making a mock-up of what I thought an app could look like. I hopped in Figma and created an app interface And pitched it to him. He liked it, so I took the next few months figuring out how to use Square APIs and properly relay information into an iOS app that users could easily interact with.

I spent the next three months creating an MVP of this app and ended up showing it to the managers. They liked it, and we started trying to get it live. However, We kinda hit the brakes on it, as they were just really busy, and then I was sitting there with this app in my hand, thinking, “What am I going to do with this?”. I took a pause for a few months, and always had the thought in the back of my head that this would be as soon as if I just made this for all the shops that I go to. Then I finally just realized I should just white label this app. I didn’t realize that was a thing, and yeah, I had to redo the whole infrastructure of the app so it would be white label. That’s pretty much the concept of layout today.

Layout today has a way more dynamic and flexible app interface than what that MVP was, and honestly even more than what the first version was for the first live shop. It’s changed so much since then and is constantly adapting.

But the initial thought of the app itself came from a problem that I knew I had. I had sought validation from a few other people that I know, and then I just ended up building it. There wasn’t any crazy rocket science behind it. It was simply that I had a problem and I wanted a fix for it, and I was pretty confident that other people wanted that fixed too. After some light validation, in hindsight I probably should have validated a little bit more, but it ended up working out.