I would wager heavily that this could've been a Shopify store. A few hundred bucks for a premium theme, a few hundred a month to run it, and maybe some overseas VAs at a few bucks an hour to help fill in the vendor/event details.
OP's LinkedIn shows he's never worked at a very early stage startup. I really can't recommend that enough before starting a company - being immersed in a culture where things are scrappy helps to instill a reflexive reaction of "how can we do that faster/cheaper" when someone tells you something is going to cost tens of thousands of dollars.
Definitely! And the migration to a proper custom-made platform would have been easy, just a matter of migrating the database instead of getting developers to start on a mess of tech dept.
OP's LinkedIn shows he's never worked at a very early stage startup. I really can't recommend that enough before starting a company - being immersed in a culture where things are scrappy helps to instill a reflexive reaction of "how can we do that faster/cheaper" when someone tells you something is going to cost tens of thousands of dollars.