Taking a punch
This is the business we've chosen.... - Hymen Roth, Godfather II
Please forgive the cliche Godfather quote to start things off, but it's oddly been giving me solace the last 6 months as a way to deal with some roundhouse punches I've gotten. Allow me to explain.
FeedGeni
As I alluded to in my Q1 '25 Report, when I acquired FeedGeni in '22, the application was a down-the-middle SaaS application. It would sync product catalogs from either Shopify or BigCommerce, then allow users to create any number of product feeds to serve to any channel you can imagine (Google, Meta, TikTok, et al) or create entirely custom feeds for what you needed.
I wanted to combine it with our experience in the automotive space from SPT and extend the product into other types of catalog <> channel management, specifically eBay where automotive parts is so unique and complex, there's a separate site for it, eBay Motors.
The goal was the land a major pilot customer, go to market with a splash and compete with some of the larger, more expensive, slower moving enterprise competitors. Move fast & occupy a niche: a classic startup playbook.
And it was working. FeedGeni landed a nationally recognized retailer (they had a car in the Nascar series) and before the summer it was managing almost 500,000+ listings on eBay for their store. Almost 5x what they were able to do in the past, all without adding any headcount.
However, despite that success, our customer decided to shut down their store and completely pull out of eBay at the EOY '24. oof I wanted the world to be one way, but it's the other way
Fast forward to today, EOY'25, and things are mostly ok. FeedGeni doesn't fit into the strategic vision for the business as much as I wanted and it's weighed down a bit by debt (financial and technical). Pretty bleak eh? Not so fast my friend, that's just one handle.
The other one is this: FeedGeni is stable, profitable and in the sweet spot of backend heavy, API driven applications that I want No Fixed Plans to focus on. It's a great asset to have in the portfolio.
And so we persist on, focusing on the good, always looking forward, not backward. Upward, not forward. And always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom.
Onto the update
FeedGeni: Please, for the love of god, make the downtime outages stop.
Standard Parts Toolkit: After much delay and discussion between myself and cofounders (inanimate vinyl art on my desk), I decided to publish SPT live on the Shopify App Store. Lots of new learnings to be had as we close the year. Expect more public marketing on this front.
Personal: Predator: Badlands rocks and so does the new album by Lil Chano from 79th. Give it a listen
If you made it this far, give me a holler and let me know what change you're making today, this week or this month to make yourself just the slightly bit happier.
👐🏻
