“Sorry for the long delay.”
That was the first sentence of the email. It was also true.
I was sending a report for November 2020 in January 2022. Not ideal.
Apply sold art as stickers. Some of that art came through licensing partners, which meant the work did not end when an order shipped. We had to connect each sale back to the right asset, calculate what was owed, send the report, and make the payment.
We were behind.
The first version had every transaction as a line item and a pivot table organized by Getty asset ID. I sent one month as the test and asked Getty to approve the format before I built the rest. If it was wrong, I did not want to repeat the mistake across every missing month.
Two days later, the answer came back. The report looked good. We could send the rest. Future reporting also needed to go through an API.
Great. One problem closed and another small system to build.
The funny part was how different the two sides of Apply looked that week. The Drive was filling up with Pop Shop drafts, silkscreen tests, and a Keith Haring sticker-sheet proposal. That was the part people could see: artists, color, physical objects, and a good reason to put something on a laptop or a wall.
Behind it was a spreadsheet tied to asset IDs and a backlog I should have handled earlier.
I was working at TRX, commuting between New York and California, and keeping Apply moving at night and on weekends. That explained how the reporting got late. It did not make the reporting less late.
So I sent the awkward email, attached the first report, and asked what needed to change.
The first report was approved. I could send the rest.
There were a lot of them.