w/ Kyle Hency, GoodDay Software, ex-Chubbies
“I’m a builder. I want to be building a team, building an exceptional product, and competing every day.”
Kyle Hency had a simple goal: create a brand that speaks authentically to men like him. What started as a fun idea among friends quickly grew into Chubbies, a $100M+ brand known for its short shorts and unapologetic personality. In this episode, Kyle reflects on the early days of experimenting with marketing, the challenges of scaling, and the unexpected lessons learned along the way. We explore how he transitioned from building Chubbies to co-founding Loop Returns, and now, his latest venture, GoodDay Software, an ERP solution for Shopify merchants. It’s a journey of reinvention, risk, and relentless pursuit of creating something new—while keeping things fun.
Kurt Elster
This episode is sponsored in part by Omnisend. Do you sell stuff online? Then you need Omnisend. Yes, that Omnisend, the powerful yet refreshingly intuitive email and SMS tool that helps you make $73. for every dollar spent. That one's so good it's almost boring. Like watching steady lines go up in charts and up and up. Just automate your email and SMS campaigns with Omnisend. Set it up once, then sit back and watch the sales roll in while you snooze. Oh, you're still awake? Then give Omnisend a try and start getting sales so steady, they'll definitely put you to sleep. Omnisend, your dot omnisend. com slash unofficial shopify podcast. Today we're gonna hear from someone who has quite the history building brands and making quite a lot of money doing it. He's built a hundred million dollar brand. You've you've listened to the show enough times you've heard of Chubby's. And has also built uh the number one returns management app, loop returns, uh, and and is now moving on to yet another even harder project. Building an ERP with Good Day Software. We are joined by Kyle Hansey, who is going to walk us through this incredible journey, both uh as a Shopify merchant, now a Shopify partner. Kyle, how are you doing?
Kyle Hency
I'm great. I'm great. How are you? Thanks for having me, Kurt. Appreciate it.
Kurt Elster
Uh you know, thank you for for using my name. I should have introduced myself. I'm I'm your host, Kurt Elster. Jack Nasty. And of course this is the unofficial Shopify Podcast. It helps if you uh include an intro in your own show. So Kyle, uh how did entrepreneurship become the your career path? Where does that that spirit come from?
Kyle Hency
I I think it was there really early for me and I knew it was I knew it was the endpoint for me. Um, I think like a lot of people growing up uh in the U I grew up in the Midwest, um uh just outside of St. Louis. Um, entrepreneurship always also felt like really elusive and risky and just kind of outside of the realm of how much risk I would take as a human being growing up. But uh over the arc of my uh uh life, you know, I was continually kind of interested in being able to pave my own path. kind of blow the lids off of any limits to my personal potential and found myself in my mid-20s saying, hey, I kinda tried the corporate thing for a couple years. I don't think it's for me. Um uh I want to kind of drive my own success and if I get there, great. If I don't, at least I know it's it's because of me, right? And I I was really fortunate in that Um I met uh three of my three of my best friends in college. We all kind of had that same feeling in our mid-twenties at the same time And so we found ourselves in San Francisco saying, hey, we should just we should do something different. We should do this together. Um and that became Chubbies. And so I always tell people I had the easiest entrepreneurial onboarding ever and that I did it with three of my best friends. And so every moment you had like a little ounce of doubt on like, oh man, this is pretty crazy or this is pretty risky. I had three really talented, hardworking folks saying, hey, no, like This is a great idea, this is a great plan, let's let's push through and execute. So I feel feel very fortunate.
Kurt Elster
Work nine to five in a corporate environment for someone else. It sounds like that was the other option here for ya. What was unattractive about that? Now you said, yeah, uh I'm gonna take the risk with the the entrepreneurship path.
Kyle Hency
Yeah, I mean I think and like don't don't get me wrong, I've had the best mentors ever, um, and all of the folks who are my old bosses uh continue to be mentors to me today, so I also had it pretty good as far as things go in that world. Um, I think it was more around being an independent thinker, uh, wanting to build. I mean, there's something very real about um the moment of creation for any business. The moment of creation uh for Chubby's was us realizing that in the men's apparel world Um the way that these apparel brands talked to other um talked to their consumers was not very authentic Certainly wasn't how I showed up or engaged with my friends. And so the genesis of our opportunity there was like, hey, like We have these really unique, dynamic, funny, quirky relationships with each other. Like what if we built a brand that kind of spoke to its audience like that? We And that was really the original genesis of of Chubbies. It didn't have much to do with apparel or this, that, or the other. It was more like, hey, we can bring this to life. This will be really fun to work on. Oh okay, if that's what we're doing, then w what are we actually building? And and and certainly in apparel we had we felt like we had an edge and and some interesting and unique perspectives.
Kurt Elster
So once you're at, hey, I I found I I found my business bros and we we're gonna build this We're going to build an online business and we've determined, and then we determine it's going to be fashion and apparel. What inspires the idea for Chubby's? Chubby's known for selling short shorts for men.
Kyle Hency
Uh I always tell people this the genesis really was not like let's go build a short shorts business. Um the genesis was let's go build a brand that matters and is authentic for this audience of of uh guys. And then uh well We are one of these guys, so we're really building this for ourselves. Let's do so authentically was the idea. In the early days we had these ideas around let's own the weekend, which is still very pervasive in Chubby's bread today and very fun. Oh it it's in the tag of the shirts I own. Of course.
Kurt Elster
Ready for the weekend.
Kyle Hency
Yeah. Um the weekend has arrived.
Kurt Elster
Um so Oh is that one the weekend has arrived. Yes by mistake.
Kyle Hency
So of course of course it has been fun. Um, you know, I think the really special thing about the experience was we gave each other and our entire teams the liberty to go experiment. When we first started Um we had a head to toe look that was very much like a a modern young man's version of Tommy Bahama. You can see I'm wearing a a golf polo right now that that um could kind of uh be be put in that lane. And uh right out of the gates people were like, hey, these kind of vintage inspired um shorts that kind of feel like my dad just gifted me a brand new pair of vintage shorts um from the internet um are really interesting. Like there's nothing like this out there. You know, we we started to build just a brand, an apparel brand that mattered head to toe. It was very clear from day one, it was like, hey, this whole thing right here, these like shorter shorts are super interesting to us. And that business carried through real quick for for a long time. Um and then, you know, like most entrepreneurs like You're scaling, you're scaling, you're scaling, you're having a hect of a time. Things are um you you're of course experiencing challenges like any entrepreneur does. Um, but then like you got to a place where the scale was real. You it required real capital, it required really talented people, it required a lot of planning and a lot of process and a lot of systems and tools. that we weren't used to using. We're entrepreneurs, we're learning all this stuff on the fly. Um but even to this day I think I I look back and one of the most memorable things is just giving each other the ability um to try things and learn from them. And that was true in the apparel and the merchandising. That was true in the marketing. We were really edgy in marketing. Um we talked a lot internally about the main thing we need to make sure that we are is we're authentic and real to somebody. And we don't mind being polarizing. We're gonna be pretty unapologetic about that. We're gonna be really authentic to what we're building and why and and why it's interesting to us and We are welcoming to everybody. We want everybody to join, but if they don't want to, all good. Um and and I think holding that line still today with the Chubby's brand is one of the things I'm most I'm most proud of.
Kurt Elster
So that that brand is Authentic, we heard that word a lot, uh edgy, polarizing, and in some ways experimental. It's also a hundred million dollar brand. What do you think's like the one thing that that enabled that? How did it become a hundred million dollar brand? A big difference between I sell some t-shirts online and I've built the next Tommy Bahama.
Kyle Hency
Um, I would think about it in phases of growth. And I think all all businesses that have been fortunate enough to survive for over a decade kind of go through different phases. Um if I look at the brand, I would say in the early days, uh, we were very marketing driven. Um a lot of our edginess and differentiation was in the marketing and how we were selling online and distribution. Um in elements of that continue to today for sure. It's definitely a big part of the brand overall. Um Over time, as we saw started to see real scale, what became clear is we were going to have to become great operators in apparel. Which is a whole different set of um needs. Now, we were fortunate enough that my co-founder Rayner um was ex-Levi's ex-gap, came from that world.
Kurt Elster
And help.
Kyle Hency
It is also individually one of the most talented people I've ever met, right? So for us, we had an unfair advantage in the world where we were all trying to teach ourselves how to become great operators in fashion. Right. Um so as we hit kind of logical milestones in the business, you know, I would say somewhere between twenty and forty million in revenue, uh, we uh hit real roadblocks that we had to work through operationally. That took years to figure out. and required resetting and rethinking everything we were doing top to bottom. But the net of it is we became really, really great at building great products that were differentiated and fit within our brand envelope. um fit within what the customer thought of as where we should be um super differentiated. And so I would say both being really good in the digital sphere and then transitioning that into a an entire new skill set of being really great at product. Um and then now as I look at the brand I think they're doing really, really cool big brand initiatives. Um and we did really interesting brand initiatives in the early days, just not at the scale of what we're doing uh today. You know, they have huge partnerships with the NFL. We couldn't even have imagined. you know, five plus years ago. Um the brand has a foundation and they're they're giving back hundreds of thousands of dollars to like really, really impactful initiatives. Um and so there are really big brand things that they're doing today that we couldn't imagine. You know, they're um, you know, they're in every single dick sporting goods across the country. and succeeding and thriving in that environment. You know, operationally six years ago, we couldn't have handled that. But all of those things just speak to like, man, there's a really big um really big brand out there and now they're starting to work through how to continue to build it at that scale. And that's like a whole different set of challenges that that the team's working on.
Kurt Elster
What's the the bit with like looking back on it, what's the biggest challenge you ran into in scaling where you may you thought okay, this is like we plateaued it, it's been a great run, but like this is it.
Kyle Hency
So again, remember we built this like internal culture and framework around not building towards perfection. We were not right 100% of the time. We were experimenting wildly and we were learning from our mistakes and moving. Quickly, yeah, always. Um, so I would say some of our biggest lessons were in and around this, like become great a great merchandisers and apparel operators. Um and that was, okay, you've had some success in uh uh shorter men's shorts. What do you parlay that into from a brand perspective? For us, um, swimwear was a really logical one. Holy cow, swimwear is all already kind of naturally short. It's vibrant and fun, fits really well inside the brand. It immediately became half of our business. Um this overnight it hit and it was amazing. You know? Then the next logical extension was like, hey, we uh we were kind of like doing a lot of work on the bottoms, let's make a bunch of shirts. Now we had not yet receive the permission from our customer to go be differentiated. We were not yet great at developing and bringing those products to market. So the V1 of that was just not as successful. And so we learned that we we took some lumps there. Um and then we had, you know, call it another one or two of those. We're like, ooh, man, new product categories in some of these directions can be really Really hard. Um, but then you fast forward, and I think a lot of what we've learned is one, we needed to try it, we needed to learn, we needed to iterate and get better. And so now we've now spent years doing that across all these vectors. But also we needed to widen what the brand meant to a larger audience and um and I think as the team kind of continued to hack down all those things Um, we found we found opportunities. Um and and you look at the business now today, and it's um there's a large piece of it that's fully offline. You know, for the first, you know, five or so years it was it was all it was all direct digital. Um and now now the team is just so much more you know, well rounded and and attacking the market in a much more um in a much more diversified and interesting way for the brand.
Kurt Elster
I was in uh Shields in Springfield, Illinois, waiting for my car to charge when uh imagine my surprise, they have like a whole section that's devoted to chubbies and like everything on display. It was really cool to see. And for a brand that started with shorts and uh this very like cruisewear look, we'll say the my favorite Chubby's item. A three-quarter zip fleece sweatshirt. That's I got two of them in like the most outrageous highlighter colors. They're so fun.
Kyle Hency
I love it. I love it. Yeah, Shields has been an amazing partner. I think I think that's that's like a pretty good example of when you're a young operator in your mid twenties And direct to consumer digital brands are just being built. You gotta remember when we started Chubby's, this was like three years off the heels of this starting to happen in general, right? Bonobos had just been created three years prior to us and like it was really, really early when we started. Um, you know, we looked at these retailers and said, oh, that's like that's a thing of the past. And what we learned over time is like, man, These retailers are really good operators. They're really, really great at building experiences that draw people in and centralize great products in there uh spaces. And so for us, as we became really great at making differentiated products, these became great places for us to have really big build-outs. I mean that experience at SHIELS for me is one of the best ex ways to experience our brand. Of course, we're supporting them, but they're really great at that. Really great at that. They they support hundreds of brands in that same way. And they were a great early partner, took a lot of risk on our brand. Um, you know, we wouldn't be in some of the other big accounts we're in if they hadn't taken as much risk as they did.
Kurt Elster
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Kyle Hency
No, I think I think your instincts are right, right? This uh Shields is an employee-owned business based out of Fargo, North Dakota. And as such, all of the people inside of the business have like incredible agency. Um, all of the leaders in the merchandising group, if they believe this is where things are going, they pursue it. And so I do think it's they're operating at a level that is in many ways different and superior to a lot of the people they compete with. Um if they're in their local community and they're noticing that all of the you know 15 to 25 year old boys are all of a sudden wearing this brand, why wouldn't they be bringing that to their community? is the question and and how they think about it. So so to me I think it's a really interesting experience. So people haven't been in Shields, uh go. It's really, really cool. Um I love taking my kids there. Uh we go to the one arena all the time. And so so yeah. Cool, cool cool retail experience.
Kurt Elster
So based on what I know, are you no longer involved with Chubby's?
Kyle Hency
Yeah, so when we sold um when we sold in 2021, we sold to um a roll-up of D2C, disruptive D to C brands called solo brands. Which we then took public.
Kurt Elster
That included Solo Stove, right?
Kyle Hency
Solo stove, Oru Kayak, IL paddle boards. Um and so it was kind of an outdoor uh focus, D to C disruption um family of brands. And we were looking to bring in a lot more um a lot of other kind of disruptive and exciting brands. Now, of course, the early part of twenty twenty two hit things became pretty challenging pretty fast. Um, you know, I think I think I'm excited that Chubby's has been able to join that family of operators and really thrive. Um one of the, you know, in in Rainers down Holy Cow just such a excellent job of navigating. How to build an amazing brand and it's kind of like next phase. Um but for me I d I I took a year off. And so as an entrepreneur, I kind of in my mind had said, hey Had this amazing experience with Chevbies. You know, also on the side, you remember we started Loop Returns back in 2016 along with John Poma and the Rocket Code team. um also big big contributors to the Shopify ecosystem. And you know, I had had a front row seat from the board there of of loop kind of growing up and and thriving. you know, spent a spent a year on the sidelines or what I thought would be a year, got about four months into that and was like, Whew, this is boring out here. I think I just am a builder. I want to be building a team. I want to be building an exceptional product. I want to be competing and winning every day. And quickly, um, you know, I found myself on a golf course with with Dave Wardell, my now co-founder at Good Day, talking about how we needed to bring disruption to this ERP world. um in in how hard it was gonna be and how excited we were about attacking it. And so I do think I learned a lot about myself in that quiet time, which was just that I don't like it. I want to be in the flow. I want to be in there competing. Um, but it was it was really valuable time. Um and and you know, here here we are building good day.
Kurt Elster
I would like to think that were I hand you know, were I to win the lottery that I could just stay home and play PlayStation Forever. And the reality is by day five, I would be bored out of my mind and curling up the walls. Like some people are are work dogs. They gotta work. And it sounds like that is the case for you. And it's a good thing to feel productive, isn't it? And to be making something.
Kyle Hency
Like, I just really love competing. Almost like the more head to head it is, the more I love it. And it's a big part of as we looked at uh fully disrupting the ERP uh in Shopify, it was really nice to say, okay The market leaders clear. We need to completely unseat them in in and create a world that's not like a little bit better than their world. Create a world that's ten times better. And that, man, the idea of doing that with every day of my life became like something I couldn't get out of my head.
Kurt Elster
So you've had the experience of Building a a consumer facing brand, you know, like traditional real traditional retail stuff like fashion and apparel with chubby's operating On the app side and somewhat on a services side with loop returns. And so we've got like that app ecosystem and tech side. And now uh you've got good day software and ERP. Yeah. What's different about being on the the app side of e-commerce tech than you know the the direct to consumer side?
Kyle Hency
Man, we carry so much empathy for these brands into every day. I spent the majority of my career building a brand I love. And every day was a knife fight. Every single day you wake up, you get in there, and there's something new somewhere that is not quite what you thought. And so you have to build this incredibly adaptable flexible environment with your team that can effectively handle anything that's coming at it. And you should expect every day when you get into work that something's coming. And so what you become really good at uh after doing that for a long time is planning over long cycles of time, but being ready to go when uh when things are all of a sudden not what they are. Um You know, I would say on the software side, I always found myself as a brand operator being really frustrated with software providers, to be honest. And that was because I didn't feel like they were reactive enough or in it enough with us. Um I actually think Shopify does this best. And it's amazing to me that they do it at the scale they're at today. Man, they are in it with you. And as I talk about opportunities at Good Day, one of our biggest opportunities is just actually being in it with our brands. Actually being in the conversation, talking to them, listening to them. Trusting that frankly they know you know we have our own set of experiences, N of one, um, from from building Chubby's, but man, we're gonna gather a lot of inputs from all these other experiences. The power of that benefiting everybody in Shopify's ecosystem is really really invigorating. Um so I'm trying to build a culture that's way more responsive to these merchants and in it with the merchants. Now, I will say the fundamental differences of the business models drive some internal behavior. You don't get anywhere near as much ongoing rapid customer feedback when you're building software. It's much slower. So there's just less to react to. Um and so as I think about challenges for me as an entrepreneur, I'm getting used to that. I'm trying to create those moments where I I get more input from merchants. And we're doing some really smart cool things there. But but man, when you're in the apparel business and you're launching a new product every week, you learn a lot every week. And you can evolve every day. With what we're doing, some of these things, especially in ERP, I mean, these are foundational pieces of technology, managing all of your inventory Um if there's anything off in our inventory ledger, it's a problem. So uh that thing takes six plus months for us to build. Uh with no actual outside feedback. And so it is a different like feedback cycle and and all those sorts of things. But I think at the end of the day, a lot of the things that work for us at Chubbies will be will be moved into the culture of good day. Um and it will we'll feel uh very different than a lot of software companies out there.
Kurt Elster
So they so good day, this ERP, this is a work in progress. Yep. What's the thing that inspired it? Because like ERPs by their nature are fundamentally painful. If you're like, hey Kurt, you want to go build a torture device? I'd be like, oh it's an ERP, right? Why do this to yourself, you maniac?
Kyle Hency
Oh totally. Um sometimes I ask myself the same question. Um Our experience at Chubby's really shined a light on these sorts of tools for me. And When I was talking earlier about that plateauing, somewhere between kind of 20 and 40, where we needed to become great operators. A part of that equation was we didn't have the right systems. We didn't have the right processes and we didn't yet have the right people. So we needed to fix that whole stack. Um for us we spent um eighteen months initially and then another eighteen months uh building a lot of software out uh on top of NetSuite. Cost us about a million dollars to build all of this stuff. So um I'll tell you two things that come out of that. One staggering amount of investment that made me very uncomfortable as a small business owner. Secondarily, when COVID hit and we had all these tools in place and we had the right people and processes in place, wow did we feel the power of these systems and tools? I actually think it was a large part of how we were running laps around our our competition um from the second COVID hit until, you know, multiple years later. Um Chevy has scaled tremendously during that that period of time. Um we were built and ready for it. What that told me is that, man, these tools can be powerful. But we need to change the way we're bringing them to market. And specifically, we need to change how complex and hard these tools are and make them more accessible to smaller brands. One of my biggest insights is there's this common idea that until you're a fifty or a hundred million revenue brand, your business isn't complex enough, you don't need an ERP. Wrong. I'm just telling you, uh when you're five million in sales, you start to bring on complexity. That is brutal. Um historically you haven't been able to afford And the tools have been too hard to use for traditional ERPs. And so for us, we're starting there. We're building that. We're making it really easy for these one to fifty million revenue uh brands to get these tools in place, get the leverage. um out of these sorts of tools early in their life cycle with the hope that maybe they don't need to hire so many people down down the line, right? Maybe they don't need to change so many of their processes when they get bigger. They just kind of already have the tools in place. Now, the last point I think is really important is without Shopify in this and having built a lot of infrastructure and an ecosystem, I think this would be incredibly hard. to accomplish standalone. Um you you just can't convince me that the brands growing up on Shopify, one to fifty million in sales um aren't complex enough to need these sorts of tools. Um I think over the next two years, you know, we'll have to we'll have to prove that out. Um and in in and I would say um you know sixteen months into building uh the early signals are really, really positive.
Kurt Elster
Well looking at yeah, the Good Day Software website is really nice, but it's clear f it just looking at the site, the screenshots, the language, um, and what you've been saying. This is a a Shopify first ERP, meaning it is from day one, it is fully integrated. It's built as an embedded app. You use it inside the Shopify admin, and then it's also got some good practical features in here like uh it out of the box it just syncs with Google Sheets. Whereas like every other stupid ERP, I gotta use Zapier or some other connector to make that work, which seems ridiculous to me, right? Like we're all using Google Sheets. Just give me give me my data, please. I could s uh I recognize a lot of the the stores and brand names on here. So this thing, are we in beta? Is this available now? Where are we at with this?
Kyle Hency
Yeah, it's in beta. I would say we are fortunate enough that we we brought in six million dollars last summer to um to build out an extraordinarily strong technology team. And so we're working with about 25 brands who are really close to the fold. Um and just leaking this back to what we were talking about earlier, like we are really in this with these brands. We're talking to each of them every week or two. about their operational challenges and the things they need from us to help us inform building out the product itself. Um And so yeah, it's still in beta. Um going into next uh spring and summer, I think we'll be at a place where we'll go to general availability. Um and look the the early feedback from folks who are adopted is that man Good day is really owning this moment of I've built this really exciting brand. I'm looking out in the distance and saying, Oh, if I keep going, I'm gonna have to sign up for one of these traditional ERPs. But then Good Day is coming in saying, hey This doesn't need to be this hard. Let's get you out of spreadsheets. We're going to do this in the next four weeks. Our entire merchant success team is ex-brand operators. So we know all the data. Send us your raw data files. We'll put all of your data into the system. We'll hand it back to you inside of four weeks. Um, and we'll begin to train you on how to use these different elements of the platform. Um and so I would say early people were kind of blown away by the simple idea of just having data in a centralized trusted place instead of across all these manual spreadsheets across all these different functions of their business. And so simply centralizing and cleansing and making sure the data is correct is like a huge value prop um for these companies because then they can say, oh Hey, we uh out of the blue, we had a wholesale uh account come in. Nordstrom wants to sell uh chubby's next spring. Uh do we have enough inventory to do it, right? Uh yeah, go to Good Day and take a look You'll see all the inventory we have on A. You'll see all the inventory that's coming. And so you can make these kind of really hard, complex questions pretty simple, right? You can get the inputs to those questions pretty simple. You know, I I also think that when you zoom out and you ask yourself for these brands that are in this environment now where venture capitalists and others are not coming to invest in their companies. they have to build profitable businesses earlier in their life cycle. One of the areas that's the hardest to get right is your product, your inventory investments, the margins of your product, etc. And so we're spending almost all of our time. in making that part of the pie much, much more optimized. And to me, that's the biggest part of the pie. We're biting off the biggest piece we could. Um there's a lot of folks biting off the marketing stack. For us, we're really zeroing in on your On your inventory investments.
Kurt Elster
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Kyle Hency
Yep. Um so uh clearly we're it's a work in progress like like a lot of what we're doing. The target for us is that we want to be between 70 and 80% reduction in total cost of ownership relative to traditional ERPs. So it's not an immaterial reduction. That's a design challenge for me as a CEO to our team. We need to build something that's easy enough to implement and powerful enough for these brands. um that we can take a massive amount of market share in this space. And one of the ways we're going to do this is just by being more friendly to them early. Now we're going to grow with these brands. We're going to be a big part of their growth story. So my instincts are just like Shopify 10 years ago, if we can be huge change agents for these brands and help them gr grow and get there, the brands we're bringing on at five to twenty million in revenue today will be a hundred. five to ten years from now. And we have to prove that we can be a part of that story and help these brands get there. If we can't prove that then then yeah, um I think I think that pricing will look hard for us over time.
Kurt Elster
But we're just not saying we're not giving any indication of the pricing. Because like Shopfi early on, there's Shopify. com slash pricing. I'm sure we can go find it was there. Oh yeah, sorry.
Kyle Hency
I didn't mean yeah, I didn't mean to be evasive at all. So um for folks who are under 10 million in sales today, um we set them up for a thousand bucks a month. Really simple, no implementation fees, none of that sort of stuff. Um as you get up to twenty million it becomes two thousand. And so it's purposefully.
Kurt Elster
Knowing what other ERPs cost, and then you alluded to like hey, there's also a setup fee. I mean they're outrageous and time consuming. This is a fraction of that.
Kyle Hency
And I think you also have to incorporate the sneaky cost that people don't talk about. In a traditional ERP, you have a subscription cost, you have an implementation cost, it's sometimes fifty to one hundred percent of the software cost. You have ongoing maintenance costs just to keep it working. And then you have ongoing data connectivity costs. Every time you want to connect a new data source into your data, it's going to cost you another 10 to 15 grand. And so for me, having built out a huge instance uh on top of NetSuite and and uh rode with it for a long time, um, we're creating a world where we're in housing a lot of those extra dollars. Um the other uh leg of the stool on our internal design challenge, make sure that our brands don't have to access outside engineers to build anything operationally. Connecting new data sources our responsibility. Right? Um implementing our responsibility. Um it's very much a Shopify mindset. Right Um of course people do Shopify migrations and there are service providers and we'll figure out those business models, but on day one we're in housing all of that stuff and just making it dead simple Uh and very and very merchant friendly.
Kurt Elster
In my head, like I'm hoping for clavio clavio for ERPs. And I know investors hate when you go like it's X for Y. I don't care. And I yeah, I'm hoping for clavio for ERP.
Kyle Hency
Uh I think that that's an interesting way to think about it. I would think of it more like uh Shopify ten years ago relative to demandware is good day today relative to NetSuite.
Kurt Elster
Okay, well, I I like it. I hope that this works out because I'm I'm optimistic. Um The you've been doing this so long. I think you've probably been involved in in Shop Find e-commerce longer than I have. That's like what fifteen years you've been at this How's the industry's changed overall since you started?
Kyle Hency
All of these brands growing up on Shopify as digital disruptors, digital challengers to incumbent brands, are learning that at the end of the day they're brands. And the channels where they sell and all that stuff are how they operate. But at the end of the day, they're brands. And if they want to have a really special brand, they have to have market share as a brand. Um, and so I do think that the thinking around that has evolved. And again, you gotta go put yourself in the mindset of five to seven years ago where digital was like the only thing. So it's a world where Chubby's was saying no to any wholesale interest based off a principle alone, right? Um so I would say in general that is obviously evolved to me Um, I think for the good for the long term also, um, the brands are really focused on building sustainable, long-term resilient brands. And that started about two years ago, out of necessity. Right? The consumer got tougher and anybody who might invest extra dollars in this world left. Right I think when you zoom out ten years from now and look back and come back, wow, all of these brands really got smart. The operators got really smart. They started building profitable businesses that now will be around for a much longer time. And so I think that's really, really good. And then the last one I will say with Shopify is just, man, Shopify's promise 10 years ago continues today. They're bringing an insane amount of value direct to merchants and helping these merchants both create their businesses and then scale their businesses. That's why a part of why we're building so close to them. And then secondarily, Shopify is creating this massive ecosystem of which Good Day is a participant, of which Loop was a participant, of which Chubby's benefits from, right? Um and I think To imagine a world where Shopify wasn't such a positive contributor to that partner ecosystem seems like impossible to me. Like they've held so true to that. for the last twelve years, um, th that I am betting a lot of Good Day's future on the fact that that will continue. And they're gonna continue to just center the merchant and say whatever is best for this merchant, getting them from A to B is what we're gonna do. Um and so so to me I think I think that has really remained the same and has been a con continuous kind of powerful force. Uh uh yeah, in the marketplace for sure.
Kurt Elster
I love that. I love it. I certainly we've hitched our carts to the right horse. All right.
Kyle Hency
First thing I do when I wake up, uh I know this is a little bit of a uh a crazy trope, but I do hit the cold plunge. It just sets me up for a great day. It's like uh out with the morning coffee and with the in with the cold plunge. Just get right into your day. Hardest part of the day is done and and move on.
Kurt Elster
The so I don't have a cold plunge, but I do appreciate just jumping into an ice shower. Similar effect. It really really wakes you up heart rate. Jumps. I love it. Uh and so you said no coffee. We don't no coffee or tea? We don't drink caffeine?
Kyle Hency
Uh I do, just later in the day now. Okay.
Kurt Elster
Uh favorite favorite book?
Kyle Hency
Favorite book. Um the one the first one that came to mind is just because I've been thinking about it a lot lately, is um Mark Randolph's book, um, That Will Never Work. And it connects back to this conversation about entrepreneurship. I've been talking to a lot of young entrepreneurs recently. And my like primary thread of advice is just start building. Um really smart, competent people oftentimes don't trust themselves enough. Um and they get caught up in the process of just starting And they write business plans and rethink business plans and do all of this work when really they should just start. Build the product, let your product or service collide with real humans, and then you'll begin the learning process. Um in uh Mark was a a board member for us at at Chubby, so we were really fortunate to have him involved. And he he taught me that and I think I I I take it on myself to try to spread that mission because I think it's so powerful at a base level. Just start. Just start building.
Kurt Elster
It everyone, yeah, a lot of people they're like, they're looking for the sign. They're looking for permission. Kyle just gave it to you. Please, please just try. You'll you may not succeed, but you'll learn a lot. Yeah. Uh and okay, what's your uh other than good day software, what's your your favorite productivity tool?
Kyle Hency
Um, this may be a little controversial. I just like a pen and paper.
Kurt Elster
Oh, I love it. I got legal pad and pen right in front of me right now. Always.
Kyle Hency
I uh you know as as Asana and others were coming into our lives. Um I Uh I don't like um how much of a specific lane um those sort of tools push you down. And I like a lot of day-to-day flexibility. in what I'm doing. And so my like trusty list of three or four things that I'm trying to do in a day um are really are really the things that I tried to live by and accomplish. And I will even say I've recently gone through uh I forget the book that I got this from, but I've gone through a process of just writing down one thing. Uh, which is kind of an interesting mentality. Today, what you need to accomplish is this. And what's cool about that is it creates a lot of flexibility for the day. But if you get to the end of the day and haven't done just that one thing, then you weren't you weren't efficient.
Kurt Elster
The I you know, and live and die by lists, but the moment you've got more than three things on the list for the day, like what are you really gonna be doing? And so if you find yourself in that position, take Kyle's advice. Try doing the like, this is the the list has one item and this isn't the thing. And that that can really be uh powerful in in focusing your productivity. One thing you wish you knew before you got into entrepreneurship?
Kyle Hency
The power of compounding. I wish I had started becoming an entrepreneur when I was like twelve. Instead of 25. All these experiences compound on themselves so magically. Right? Like the way I build good day is wildly different than the way we built Chevys in the early days. Right. Um and I would just have more at bats.
Kurt Elster
I've always fantasized it's like if I had the knowledge I have now twenty years ago. Wow. You know, would things be different. But you can't you know, without a time machine we can't operate like that. Um but it is I think it's an important thing to acknowledge that like if your instinct is telling you to do something, maybe just do it as opposed to wondering about it years later. Uh well it Chubby's was all about the weekend and relaxation. I want to know what do you do to relax these days?
Kyle Hency
Oh man, um we are fortunate in that uh we're uh we're in Austin, Texas. I have a seven, five, and two year old. And we are fortunate that we're able to get out on Lake Austin and do tubing and all that sort of stuff for most of the year. So when I'm just like relaxing and taking along Saturday, that's what we're doing. Otherwise I'm in the like classic hubbub of a father of three where it's like a revolving door of soccer practices, lacrosse practices, and dance classes and and all that stuff. Um but when we're like unplugged, we're we're either getting out on the water or getting up in the mountains.
Kurt Elster
The that sounds like a lot of fun. Uh and lucky for your kids. Okay. So If I want to check out this ERP and make my life easier, gooddaysoftware. com, if I want to go to learn more about Kyle Hensley, any place I can go?
Kyle Hency
Uh yeah, you can you can follow me on LinkedIn. Um this is Kyle Hensi. You'll see you'll uh you'll see all my stuff. You can also follow me on Twitter, KHensi6. um is my handle. Um but yeah if you if you sign up for a demo of good day uh you're signing up for a demo with me. Um you know, I'm gonna dive in there and get to learn your business with you and and get a sense quickly on whether or not we can actually help you. So I would say if you're interested in good day, if you're interested in good day, just sign up online. I'll reach out to you pretty much immediately.
Kurt Elster
That's that's cool. Yeah, uh Kyle Hensi, gooddaysoftware. com and uh former CEO of Chubbies and co-founder of Loop Returns, just An incredible career. Thank you for sharing the journey with me. I appreciate it.
Kyle Hency
Alright, awesome. Thanks, Kurt.
Kurt Elster
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