Focus on your strengths

By far the best thing to happen in August was meeting with a friend for a couple of hours just to deep dive into No Fixed Plans. Flying solo can get quite echo-y and it's helpful to have a sounding board. Otherwise, you can talk yourself in and out of decisions forever. This does a few things:

• First and foremost, it allows you to verbalize your thought process and thinking. Not defend or justify, just speaking it out loud and hearing what it sounds like out loud. Novel concept eh? I know, I'm a trailblazer.
• Second, getting insight from people who you a) trust b) respect and c) have the ability to give you actual, relevant feedback is priceless. So thank you Brett for the time this month!

Since it's been 4 years(!) since starting No Fixed Plans, I decided to step back and rethink my original thesis a bit. This talk helped me crystallize the next phase and really double down on focusing on our strengths & saying no to more things. I'll explain in more detail in a future post, but suffice it to say that the rest of August was spent cutting things.

Now for the ask: I'm looking to bring on some Product Management experience to my little advisory board. In case anyone's got a good connection I should chat with, I've put together a one-pager that outlines what type of background I'm looking for. I would appreciate any worthwhile intros.

On to the updates:

FeedGeni - Renewed growth and interest in the platform (based on the above discussions) have me focused on new developments here. We're seeing a rise in international customers, which means dealing with complex currencies & translations. Opportunities, but complex nonetheless. I would also be lying to say that we're not seeing the downstream impacts of tariffs on the e-commerce market as a whole. I'm confident in the long term, but short term may get rocky.

Standard Parts Toolkit - August saw the launch of a frequently requested feature: My Garage. This allows shoppers to quickly store and recall previous vehicle searches within their browser. Handy and, frankly, table stakes for a lot of these integrations. September is a big month for SPT, with several new API upgrades and (finally) a live launch in the Shopify App Store.

Other - With a renewed sense of focus, we shut down two projects this month: Trickle (our first acquisition) and SAMS, a Shopify AI MCP Server:

• Trickle was a dud from the start and we let it sit on life support with the thinking that we'd pick it up and never did. Shopify then "shipped our roadmap" and we finally closed it down. Ultimately it was a fly that kept buzzing around and annoying us.
• SAMS was a new project I alluded to in previous updates that was meant to be a way to query & pull data from your Shopify store directly in MCP clients like Claude & ChatGPT. We made good inroads on it and were close to an Alpha with a few customers, but ultimately the combination of MCP being so young, buggy and changing daily plus our renewed focus meant we had to make the tough choice to shelve it. May or may not come back in the future, but not in '25.

So that's it. If you made it this far, I appreciate you reading. Give me a shout on what you're working on, seeing at the movies (go see Weapons) or listening to (the new Slick Rick & Clipse over here).