Field Note · E-Commerce Operations
Before Fortstak, one of our founders was the sole DevOps engineer behind Dabdoob, the largest kids' toys app in the Gulf. He ran the entire platform, including a custom-built ERP, across all six GCC markets.
Dabdoob is an app-first retailer, founded in 2017 in Kuwait, serving families across all six GCC markets with thousands of products and same-day delivery. In 2022, Jadwa Investment acquired a majority stake, a marker of how far the business had scaled.
Our founder operated the whole platform end to end. That meant the public storefront and mobile app, the Node.js and Java services behind them, and a custom-built ERP that ran the operational side of the business: inventory, orders, fulfillment, and the warehouse and delivery workflows behind same-day shipping. On the infrastructure side it was a mix of bare metal, Kubernetes, and managed app services on DigitalOcean, backed by MySQL, with the web of outside services a consumer retail business lives on wired in around it.
Storefront, app, and a custom ERP running as one system, with payments, analytics, email, and delivery integrations, on a mixed bare-metal and Kubernetes footprint.
Kept the customer-facing platform and the internal ERP in step, across all six GCC markets and their currencies.
Ran Knet, Tap, MyFatoorah, Apple Pay and other gateways so trouble with one provider never stopped checkout.
Held the line through the peaks that define kids' retail, Eid, Ramadan, back-to-school, and the holiday campaigns.
Owned deployments, monitoring, and incident response across bare metal, Kubernetes, and managed app services at once.
Ran it as a team of one, where automation and good instrumentation carried the load a larger ops team usually would.
Kept analytics, email, payments, and delivery wired together so a hiccup in one service never became a broken order.
The busiest day of the year is the day an outage costs the most.
Success depends on your own code, a dozen outside services, and the ERP behind them all staying in step. Operating Dabdoob is where we learned to run consumer platforms and the internal systems behind them, on infrastructure that mixes bare metal, Kubernetes, and managed services, at a scale that later drew a majority acquisition. That is the same discipline we bring to the companies we work with now.
If checkout, fulfillment, or the systems behind them are creaking under load, that is exactly what we operate. The first step is a fixed-scope platform review.
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