About
Hi, I’m Lisa — founder of My Custom Bakes, owner of Borderlands Bakery, President of the Board over at the National Cottage Food Alliance, and someone who has spent the better part of 15 years covered in royal icing.
I started the process of building MCB from scratch in 2019 because I was exhausted. And I knew I wasn’t alone.
After a decade of cookie decorating and 5 years of taking custom decorated cookie orders through Borderlands Bakery, I had a problem I couldn’t solve with any tool at that time.
The custom order process was broken. Not because bakers weren’t organized, but because every tool available was built for someone else. Generic form builders. Ecommerce platforms that didn’t understand the quoting process for decorated cookies. Workflows designed for wedding planners, not cottage bakeries.
So I did what bakers do when a recipe doesn’t exist yet… I made my own.
In 2021, after years of community research and self-funded development, My Custom Bakes launched. No investors. No pitch decks. Just a baker who was tired of duct-tape solutions, and a community that said ‘yes please, immediately.’ What started off as a “google forms on steroids” morphed into a real order management system.
MCB had a free tier from 2021 – 2024; I had reinvested almost all of my profits from Borderlands Bakery back into MCB, and realized that I couldn’t keep that up anymore, so we started charging a nominal monthly platform fee so we can keep the lights on, our team taken care of, and the updates coming. I also work full time to ensure that the money goes back into MCB. In this new age of AI-assisted software development, we’re also adapting to keep up.
Today, we have ~1,700 subscribers who trust MCB to run their businesses. We’ve been featured in conversations on Food Network stages and Netflix sets, but our proudest moments are quieter than that. They’re the messages we get that say: ‘I finally feel like I on doing what I love instead of admin, and feel like I’m supported’.
That’s why we’re here.
The Team
A small, dedicated team maintains MCB, all of us with roots in the cottage food world:
- Lisa He, Founder & CBO (Chief Baking Officer). 15+ years in cookie decorating, founder of Borderlands Bakery, Author of Matcha Meets Macaron, and the product brain behind MCB’s overall direction.
- Jessica, Community Manager & Customer Support. If you’ve ever gotten a warm, fast response to a support question, that’s Jessica. She’s also a baker who uses MCB herself.
- Sheryl, Lead Developer. Our technical backbone, bringing ~20 years of technical experience and fresh energy to the platform’s ongoing evolution.
- Letha & Nura, Software Developers. Fixes the wonky things that inevitably happen in software to keep things running smoothly & brings new features to life based on your feedback.
We’re a small team, and we plan to stay that way. Small means we can actually listen. Small means no one on this team is chasing a quarterly report at your expense.
Our Values / Why MCB Is Different
We talk about these things a lot, so let’s just say them plainly:
No investors means no hidden agenda.
Instead, we’re community-funded at $10/month. Every decision we make is: ‘Is this good for our bakers?’ Not: ‘Will this improve our Series B metrics?’
No transaction fees. Ever.
Other platforms clip a percentage of every sale you make. We don’t. Your revenue is yours. We charge a flat rate and that’s it.
Support that’s actually supportive.
Our support team is made up of real humans. We respond to emails, and we answer questions in our user-only Facebook Group. In fact, we’ve genuinely jumped on Zoom calls to help bakers figure things out and in 2026, and we’re proud of that.
Built from the inside out.
A real baker requested every feature in MCB. We don’t build things to justify raising prices. We build things because our community told us they needed them.
The original. Since 2021.
New platforms pop up regularly in this space. Many don’t last. We’ve been here since the beginning. Because of that, we’ve earned our community’s trust, and we’re not going anywhere.
Not just a tool, also a community.
Since everyone on our team has a vested interest in improving the home food producer community, we’re all active participating members in FB groups and have created an ecosystem of support, beyond the app. We hold regular Build and Bake sessions, open to all MCB members to support their business– be it marketing, introducing them to other industry experts, how to use the system depending on your specific workflow, and so much more. We have a Partner program where we team up with brands in the space to bring you exclusive discounts on the products, ingredients and services that you need.
Here’s a peek at the current features in MCB:
- Ability to create custom forms for each product
- Ability to display products in specific orders & categories
- Ability to “archive” orders
- Ability to delete products
- Ability to offer custom order workflows, including quotes
- Ability to offer presales with a set ordering window & pickup dates/times/locations
- Enhanced payment directions for cash/other payment types
- Tools for batch-print orders
- Customer chat portal w/file attachment to keep all your communications in one place
- Read receipt for chat
- Email newsletter
Coming soon to the platform:
- Ability to offer discounts
- Availability in Canada
- Reporting of shop metrics (revenue, taxes, etc.)
- Discoverability (i.e. baker search)
- Product Reviews