What They Are, When You Need One, Why They Don't Have to Suck
For most direct-to-consumer brands, the term "ERP" evokes dread. Six-month implementations. Six-figure costs. Software built for factories, not Shopify stores. Kyle Hency experienced that pain firsthand. He scaled Chubbies Shorts past $100 million in revenue, and along the way, his "sophisticated" spreadsheet system (built by a former banker) completely fell apart. The breaking point? When Nordstrom called wanting to stock Chubbies, and his team realized they had no infrastructure to even accept the order. That painful lesson led Hency to raise $13.5 million for GoodDay Software, an ERP designed from day one for Shopify merchants. In this episode, we demystify what an ERP actually is, identify the warning signs that a brand has outgrown spreadsheets, and explore why the traditional barriers to operational infrastructure are finally falling for smaller businesses. Hency makes the case that it doesn't have to be this hard anymore.
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The Unofficial Shopify Podcast is hosted by Kurt Elster and explores the stories behind successful Shopify stores. Get actionable insights, practical strategies, and proven tactics from entrepreneurs who've built thriving ecommerce businesses.
Kurt Elster • 00:00.001
This episode is brought to you in part by Swim. Here's the thing about wishlist apps. Most of them just sit there. A customer saves a product, and then nothing happens. Swim actually activates that data. When someone wish lists a product, you could trigger price drop or back-in-stock alerts and feed that intent directly into Clavio or your CRM. You're not guessing what people want because they've told you. Plus, customers can share wish lists for gifts and your team can view them to offer personalized service online or in store. And unlike card abandonment, wishlist data is permission-based. These are people raising their hands saying, hey, I want this. Just not right now. Swim's been around for over a decade. It powers 45,000 stores and installs in about five minutes. You can try it for free today at getswim. com slash Kurt. That's G-E-T-S-W-Y-M. com slash Kurt. Today on the unofficial Shopify Podcast, we are going to discuss three letters that I absolutely fear. They're not IRS. No, it's ERP. Enterprise resource planning. Oh man, you talk to a technologist, an integrator, a CTO, any of those folks, they're gonna tell you an ERP implementation for any business will take at least twice as long as you thought and be ten times as painful. All right, I exaggerated the last part, but ERPs are difficult and essentially a often viewed as a necessary evil in, you know, business growth. But they don't have to be. And that's, you know, that that's Kyle Hensy's thesis. Kyle Hensy from uh Chubby's, who co-founded Chubby's. and now has raised $13. 5 million building Good Day, an ERP specific from day one to Shopify. for the last three years. Kyle, uh, you're gonna be our ERP expert today. How are you doing?
Kyle Hency • 02:06.680
Hey, thanks for having me, Kurt. Thanks for having me, Kurt. Great to great to see you again.
Kurt Elster • 02:11.879
I am I'm thrilled to have you here. Uh so okay. Everybody loves loves chubby stories. You know, I've got I'm not wearing my chubbies right now, but I enjoy I still got my chubby stuff. I enjoy it. Um it you obviously chubbies would have used it ERP, right?
Kyle Hency • 02:27.319
Absolutely. I mean, you know, we like yeah, and you can kinda have to rewind back in to the old days of twenty fifteen Oh man, I don't like I don't like saying it out loud because it makes me feel old, but but like back then, you know, I remember when we had these needs. There was really like only one recommendation. It was like you're gonna have to go sign up for NetSuite. We know it's really tough, but it's kind of the the best of the worst possible options, was how it was sold to me as a CEO.
Kurt Elster • 02:58.360
That's y that's how it gets phrased. They're like, hey, we know this is gonna be painful, but you need this. You know, it's like I guess you go to the doctor. You're like, nobody actually wants to do it.
Kyle Hency • 03:08.360
Absolutely. And and I I think like going to the doctor is like a really good analogy for this whole thing. Right? Because it's like investing in in ERP is like investing in your long-term hygiene. It's it's it's not a short-term investment. It's a long-term investment by nature. And of course, as an innovator and a disruptor in the Shopify ecosystem, we're like totally trying to buck trends in and around that. But that's the exact right mentality you have to be in when you're thinking it. You're like, hey, I need to get healthy. I need to be, I need to be strong for the long haul. Like these are the like fundamental things I need to put in place to be able to be successful.
Kurt Elster • 03:45.540
Let's still leverage some of your past experience. Because you you know, yeah, it was 11 years ago, but at the same time, today it we would still be using those same products, those same ERPs as we did 10 years ago. Um, potentially, you know, pre-good day. And so looking back on it, you know, did did adding an ERP ultimately help chubbies?
Kyle Hency • 04:07.920
Absolutely. And that's I mean, that's the power of of these sorts of tools. It's it's impossible to imagine Chubby scaling to over $100 million in sales, having a successful um you know, sale ultimately to a private equity backed um firm, having a full audits top to bottom and ha you know passing all of that, you know, you really do have to have You know, you have to have a really clean shop ultimately to go through that whole journey of scaling, selling, exiting, etc. And so it's really hard to imagine a getting there. Yeah, it's really hard to imagine getting there.
Kurt Elster • 04:47.500
I get uh for sure. I understand and accept you know the the value and importance of an ERP at a particular stage in a business. I want to know is like how do you know you you need that ERP? Regardless like platform agnostic, just how do I know I should start shopping for an ERP? And then you know, realistically, what am I getting out of it? From my perspective, it's like, all right, I'm getting a third-party warehouse of my business data with a goal toward compliance, clean reporting.
Kyle Hency • 05:15.620
Um I think I think that's um my gut would be that that's a little bit of a traditional view of ERP and that that's evolving quite a bit. I always tell brands that I'm talking to. And again, I spent a lot of time with brands who are sub 10 million, even sub five million in sales, right? And and what I talk to them about is like Investing in a long-term solution like an ERP is not a thing you do on a whim because it would be a nice to have. You need to have a capital N need. So for us, typically that need is We've been managing our inventory, but now our inventory model has gotten more complex and we're not managing our inventory well. Right. So that could be we have a growing number of SKUs, we have multiple distribution centers, we're selling through multiple demand channels. The most common one for us is we've gone from Shopify only to Shopify plus Amazon and wholesale and marketplaces and the next and the next and the next. And so these brands are all of a sudden between the inventory they're keeping on house, you know, and digesting all of the demand channels, there's a lot more complexity kind of sloshing around inside the business. And typically that is the first moment where people are like, ooh, these out-of-the-box tools aren't quite working for me Now, there's other ones where it's like if you want to do things like D2C e-com pre-saling and automate a lot of that flow, that just doesn't work out of the box anywhere else. If you want to, if you want to have accurate, timely cogs. Um, that doesn't work out of the box anywhere. And so I I think a part of what is being broken down in this next era of ERP that we're a part of is In addition to the compliance element of ERP, the brands are moving into these systems because they have more comprehensive data. Right? Remember, the ad platforms have gotten so expensive that just being a D2C Shopify only brand. is becoming less and less common at an earlier point in the lifecycle of these brands. They're having to go find more demand. So now that you have that, what do you do with the sales that are happening off of Shopify? You need to have a way to consolidate that all into one view and give you a clean idea of what's my revenue, what's my inventory, what are my cogs. And we take that really seriously. How do we make that as easy as easy as possible? Um that's like we think about that as our ultimate end goal.
Kurt Elster • 07:27.040
It's a it the well, let me ask the devil's advocate question. If I were really feeling overconfident Could I build something similar, you know, with a spreadsheet, a really aggressive spreadsheet?
Kyle Hency • 07:42.759
Uh I mean I'll just give you my actual experience from Chubbies as a former banker. I had that very aggressive spreadsheet.
Kurt Elster • 07:49.200
Oh, you attempted this?
Kyle Hency • 07:50.000
I had that very aggressive spreadsheet. And where my spreadsheets totally imploded was when we started to add multiple channels. And then we layered in the concept of time-based selling. So in the wholesale channel, we were beginning to take orders today for orders we were going to deliver in six months. Right. Just that's a pre-book in B2B, right? And that just our inventory model was not in our data flow was not set up to handle that Wasn't set up to say, hey, that inventory we bought today is actually meant for that future date and that future order. And so those sort of flows just don't work. Um, especially when you think about drif fall driving them all the way through the accounting stack. So I think I I really do think that um brands are increasingly investing these tools to get more visibility down the PL. in a more rapid environment. At at this point inside of a good day, like you're you have live down to gross profit reporting with accurate cogs in the system. All the time. Like that's that's important for your hour to hour marketing spent.
Kurt Elster • 08:56.980
And knowing Yeah, it really Increasingly, you know, I think I'm starting to realize is it once the business is successful and you're going, all right, I want to scale in faster, better than this, To be able you have to take risks. And to be able to take risks really seems to be quite dependent on I understand my numbers to a extreme detail. And and ERP is that it seems like that's the tooling, you know, that gives me that analytics and reporting. So as an example, let's say I'm a manufacturer. And I've got, you know, I I have my items, I have my inventory, they're listed in Shopify. I could put in my cost of good goods sold. But like all the raw material inputs that went into that You know, that in no way is Shopify should, you know, does it or should it be tracking that info. But that like that extra granularity, that's what I start getting into with an ERP, isn't it?
Kyle Hency • 09:49.660
Absolutely. I think the easiest way to think about how you would operate in the Shopify environment with a simple ERP versus just in Shopify. When you're operating just in Shopify and you're not flowing your entire supply chain through the same system The second that you put a COGS number in there, it's out of date the next day. Because your world changed in the supply chain. And so in in our world, we're doing all the work to get all of your POs, all of your receipts, all of your shipments. all of your data organized inside of Good Day where we're the system of record. And then one of the new things we're we're releasing here in the next month, you'll be excited to hear, right, is Taking those now accurate dynamic cogs based off of the system of record and piping them back into Shopify. So we'll be one of the first ERPs to push dynamic cogs into Shopify. So on a daily basis, as your supply chain is evolving, your cogs will change in Shopify if you're a good day customer. And that's like to us, that allows you to have accurate contribution margin reporting in all of your analytics tools.
Kurt Elster • 10:55.640
Absolutely. Cause yeah, the I mean I talked to a brand that last year or at the the beginning of this year that last year they thought they were doing really well. They'd started the brand, it was scaling, things were going well, we're acquiring customers, you know, everything looks good on paper. Our reporting is great, right? And our marketing positive Roas. And then you start doing that end-of-year analysis and discovered, uh-oh, we may have been paying some of the customers to take these items. Because unless you have the really accurate numbers, it could be tough to figure that out. Like it's easy for some of those things to slip through the cracks when you're looking at it from say like, you know, even just overall media efficiency ratio as opposed to, you know, having this granular reporting.
Kyle Hency • 11:39.500
Absolutely. And in in as I think about our journey at Good Day and what we're trying to enable, part of the way you enable smaller and smaller and leaner and leaner teams To be able to get the value out of managing their supply chain and a s uh a centralized system is you have to make all these touch points easy. You need to make putting data in simple and fast. You need to make changing the variables dynamic, right? And if you just think about all the new AI tools that just arrived, the ability to ingest a PO um from uh a manufacturer that has It might be a PDF, it might be an Excel spreadsheet, it could be a variety of different things, and get all of your existing internal data accurate is just easier and easier. So we're investing in all of the kind of data input tools to make the ERP surface areas easier. But then also we're building all of this assuming you're a Shopify brand.
Kurt Elster • 12:34.560
You're already operating inside of Shopify.
Kyle Hency • 12:37.200
So it's exactly where you're already working, and you're just keeping the data inputs accurate. Right. Uh we're doing all the under-the-table stuff that's hard. We've built an entire inventory ledger that automates FIFO COGS. Right. So you're not having to do any of that work in season. You're just keeping the the data inputs from the supply chain accurate.
Kurt Elster • 12:57.780
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Kyle Hency • 14:16.759
Yeah.
Kurt Elster • 14:17.639
I like that level of automation.
Kyle Hency • 14:19.399
Yeah, I think I think that's gonna be, but, but like at this point, I wouldn't even truly consider that all that innovative. That's gonna be how that works in all software. Right. Like you're gonna take these unstructured data sets, push them into your system. Your system will chew them up and just put them into the format. The two service areas where this is applicable for good day is purchase orders in the supply chain and sales orders in the B2B. sales world that happens outside of Shopify. So those two formats of of records come in all sorts of formats, PDFs, Excel spreadsheets. pictures like uh like I've I've had people in the supply chain say that uh they manage their supply chain in WhatsApp in Spanish And so they then translate it, and then they have to turn that into an PO in the system. And so so there's like some wild edge cases to that, but but we're starting with the obvious ones, PDFs. in Excel. But that level of automation I think everybody should like if it's not already in the software, it will be arriving in the front half of this year.
Kurt Elster • 15:19.140
Well we started to touch on workflow there. Give me like with an ERP I'm Because I've never personally directly used one, you know, I'm always just next to it and aware of it. It's looming, you know, connected to Shopify. Uh, what Walk me through like a typical workflow. Like using it, what am I doing with it on a day-to-day basis?
Kyle Hency • 15:41.339
Yeah, I'll just talk through the like basic inventory flow, right? So Uh your brand, uh I'll I'll talk to Apparel because that's the world I know from Chubby's, right?
Kurt Elster • 15:51.100
Um Well, and that's also you know one of the biggest, if not the biggest, vertical on Shopify.
Kyle Hency • 15:55.360
Absolutely. Absolutely. So so um your design team comes up with a design you want to adopt 50 styles. You take those styles, you create items. um inside of good day, those items uh house the design numbers, the SKU numbers, the default MSRP, the duty rates, tariffs, the cogs, all those sort of like estimated elements. at that item level, good day will become your item master. Off of that, we'll create a PO. So let's let's buy of those 50 styles, let's buy uh 10,000 units. That PO will be your your record that you send to your manufacturers to create those items for you. Ben Good Day will track once those are manufactured and they're on a boat coming back to your warehouse in the U. S. Um we'll we have full chain of custody of all of that. Um it hits the port truck to your warehouse, it's received in your warehouse. Those units you're gonna get account at that point. We expected to have a hundred of these. We actually got 90. So we got short shipped by 10 units. Good day will capture that in our system. Then that receipt will add inventory into Good Day's centralized inventory. management system, which enables multi-channel inventory management. Uh you take those units and you're going to allocate 90 of them to e-commerce and 10 of them. To uh wholesale. Um in the wholesale example, um, we've integrated with systems like New Order and SPS Commerce. So we'll take those 10 units that have been made available. to wholesale and we'll push it up to new order and say, hey, wholesale, if you're if you're gonna go sell, you have 10 units of these to go sell against, um, get to work. And then they'll take sales orders that will flow directly into Good Day. Good Day is integrated with the warehouse and will push those fulfillments into the warehouse. So like that is a really like end-to-end flow workflow that happens around your inventory. What's really cool is you've put your default cost elements in up front. And as the data changes and evolves, your cogs evolve. Um through the clever. So the out the output is you you're getting more and more accurate cogs as as it goes through that workflow. Now, now our vision over time is that there's all sorts of really cool things we can do with with agents, with this whole agentic layer that's that's um like all of a sudden on our doorstep, right? Like One of the things I'm most excited about with Good Day is we've built our entire team filled with former brand operators. And so when we're building an allocation agent to help you allocate inventory between your e-commerce store, your Shopify POS locations. and your wholesale channel, um, it's really thoughtful. And it starts with 12 years of history of learning how to build these sorts of brands. Um and so we we think we're gonna have a leg up as we get into this kind of next leg of agentic a commerce and in these small brands are going to be the ones that benefit the most, which is part of what gets me so excited. Like they're going to be able to use an agent when they can't afford an inventory planner or inventory analyst to move this stuff around. Um, and so and so like I'm like if you're like Kyle, what are you most excited about that you're seeing the team work on? It's that sort of stuff that levels the playing field for the small brands and and even helps the big brands scale as well.
Kurt Elster • 19:10.800
I want to I see the val for sure I see the value in it. I want to know the currently where where the limitations are on these AI agentic workflows. Like it You're re-setting some some realistic expectations, I think, is my goal here.
Kyle Hency • 19:25.980
Yeah, I think um I think I have actually not seen anything really in production. Um that is managing core workflows of assets like inventory that are your core assets. So I think like People are doing small little workflows here and there, but most of those products live in betas at all of these different software platforms. Um so I think there's very little in production. So when people are thinking about, oh, I'm like way behind, all these companies are doing all this, like you get under the hood, and everybody's doing it pretty much the same way they were doing it three and six and twelve months ago. Now, everybody's testing new tooling. So just to set people's like realistic expectations, I do think this will evolve very quickly in the next
Kurt Elster • 20:08.460
six months. Yeah.
Kyle Hency • 20:09.340
Um it's clearly coming. Uh one of the coolest things we're seeing is some of our some of our operators are already building cool things with Cloud Code. And we consider our job to expose our APIs and MCP to those that tooling. And so, you know, when you have a lean team, but you have a great operator who's like partly technical, um, they're already getting away with that and starting to build those things custom for themselves. themselves. And so I do think that that will arrive fast. That's here. That's but I'm seeing it.
Kurt Elster • 20:39.080
You have an You have an MCP. This one is a fairly new phrase. Model Context Protocol MCP. Um Shopify has uh more than one MCP now. Uh tell me, you know, for folks who still are like, what the heck is an MCP? Tell me.
Kyle Hency • 20:54.520
Yeah. So um the easiest way to think about it is to think about it as um A way for Good Day to expose both the data, the resources, is what we call that inside of Good Day, as well as the actions you would make inside of Good Day as tools to external systems. So if you were in Cloud Code or if you were in ChatGPT and you said, I want to transfer inventory between A and B for this reason, is that a good idea? Um, it could look into Good Day, access all of the data, assess if that's a good or a bad idea, and then you could say something like, oh, it's a good idea, cool, go ahead and transfer 10 units from wholesale to e-com. And it would grab the tool, which is a virtual transfer in Good Day, and enact it inside of Good Day. So that's an example of somebody who wants to work in Cloud Code or wants to work in uh Chat GPT, we'll have our own interface. We'll expose that same MCP to Shopify itself so people can work in Sidekick and do the same thing. So I think like our surface areas are expose our tool sets. What I get excited about is there's 30 awesome tool sets, which are actions inside of Good Day that will expose the sidekick, Chad GPT, and collect.
Kurt Elster • 22:12.240
You'll have you have an AI chatbot inside good day, but then you know obviously other software like Shopify has sidekick. Um and it I it sounds like the two of us use Claude a lot in our our daily workflows. An MCP is a a plugin for those chatbots. So I can give You know, my favorite chatbot, Claude, you know, or sidekick, the ability to ask questions of good day in a structured way.
Kyle Hency • 22:39.000
Yeah, and it's very powerful.
Kurt Elster • 22:41.800
Yeah. Well yeah, it's like, you know, you've like you got all this stuff living now. It becomes like this um productivity organizational tool, like a workspace, you know, the in these chatbots. Um And being able to go like, all right, I got you I've got this issue, I have this question, just go ask Good Day. And then it could just do it. It's yeah. That's when like things start to get really powerful, like at least from automation and and AI and playing with these tools.
Kyle Hency • 23:12.960
It's these people trying to build really special brands, both lean teams. So now instead of having a financial analyst or an inventory analyst, they're just asking the AI these questions and it's really good and it's unbiased and um it has a lot of uh it there's a lot of leverage in that for all of these for all of these brands. I think And again, I think a lot of this is really new. So just to set a practical like baseline for people, especially if people are feeling, oh, I'm behind. I see all the stuff happening on uh D to C X or you know whatever channel, it's coming, you should definitely be experimenting. I have not seen like in full production, like really, really uh really, really end-to-end workflows built out. Um but we're we're working really hard to deliver that.
Kurt Elster • 24:03.440
No, I think it'll For sure it's the it's the direction we're heading in. And I I like your approach. Like reminding people, like, hey, you're if you have not missed the boat yet, just just play with the tools and see what happens and see what makes sense for you. But okay. The thing with an ERP, what's the cutoff? Like what's the threshold? When do I know that this is right for me? I should be doing this.
Kyle Hency • 24:26.179
Yeah, I think again, just going back to the core principle, make sure it's a capital N need and that there is real pain you're solving. If you have a specific pain point you're going at, In our specific case, this is typically inventory related. Um, imagine a world where, and this is exactly what was happening at Chubby's, and this is why we invested in ERP. We were like, uh, we had Nordstrom knocking on our door saying, hey. We wanna we want to test Chubby's in ten doors. And we were looking around being like, how would we even do that? Like like if we got a sales order, where would we put it? How would we tell the warehouse to send those things? We didn't have any infrastructure to do it. And so the purpose of the ERP is to give you infrastructure to handle all of your sales, all of your inventory, and all of your COGS components. To us. That's how we think about our our purpose. So typically it's something's missing. You want to do B2B, but you can't. You want to be better at allocating inventory to retail stores, but you're bad at it, right? Um it's those sort of things um that are helpful and and where I think we really shine. About 75% of what we do is taking brands out of spreadsheets for the first time and putting them into their first system. So where good day shines is we have all these brand operators who are diving in there with you and teaching you how to work in a in a centralized system for the first time.
Kurt Elster • 25:45.840
That I love that uh that hands-on onboarding. You know, they say when you're building a startup, do things that don't scale. That's often one of them. Um but often like you know getting in on the ground floor with a piece of software, especially in something as complicated as an ERP, there could be a lot of benefit where you know someone getting in early could genuinely help shape the direction this thing goes. And also I I think you know the early adopters get preferential treatment. I do.
Kyle Hency • 26:13.660
Do you want to get to the I do you want to get to the punchline what of what has evolved because The reason why you would do all this work up front today um is more obvious. Now you have all this centralized digitized information in one system, and that becomes your engine of automation going forward. It's much clearer that a small group of people can use that central data, expose it via MCP into sidekick, and now you're getting the power of this broader network as a small business. So I do think it's the foundation off of which you're going to drive huge automations over time. And so we're just at a place where that entire system of record is working. And now we're switching all of our focus into where are we helping a lean team automate wildly? And that's that's our big message for 2026 at Good Day is The core is there, and now we're your automation partner. We're gonna help you just get more done with less resources. Um and that, I mean, if you want to talk about the promise of the new tooling that's arriving, like that's really the promise.
Kurt Elster • 27:16.340
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Kyle Hency • 28:45.059
Um I'll give you two thoughts. One, if you're building technology and you're expecting to get the attention of venture capitalists and you're not AI, you will not get their attention. So there is a just a assume the practical reality of the situation you're in. Um separate of that. Like that is just true. Um Separate of that, um, I do think as you think about building your business on a go forward basis given what we just learned in the last six months. If this isn't at the forefront of what you're doing, um, I think you're missing the boat pretty big. Like this is a very big transformational moment in the way that businesses work generally inside of Shopify and Apple. Right. It's really important that these brands, to me, the idea of exposing your technology through MCP. and giving your brands the power to go build the way they want to build, where they want to build, will become table sticks. That I think everybody suddenly it'll it'll be table sticks in the course of this year. What I think it makes it a platform. Yeah, it makes a platform. What I'm building towards is I believe if I'm going to build an agent that replaces actual employees for your team. It's really important that I know how your business works. And we have that more deeply than anyone else in our competitive set. So If I'm building an agent that manages your inventory, helps you in the supply chain, or is a cost accounting agent, these are all actual ideas we're working against. Um, you you want to have the best one. You want to have the one that's accurate. You want to have the one that's right. Um, and to me, that's where the differentiation will lie. It's not gonna lie in Uh can you expose things via MCP? All of our peer sets will do that in the course of 2026. And that's great for brands, by the way. That's amazing. That's so powerful. But but where the real differentiation will lay is in the actual utility that you're delivering to the brands and how many of these brands does this utility apply to. So that's where we're focused at least.
Kurt Elster • 30:48.120
And you've got uh yeah, now that this good day is is out there in production, you've got um you've what at least fifty stores using this now, right? Yeah.
Kyle Hency • 30:58.040
Yeah. So we just crossed fifty. Um Man, it's been a total honor building what we're building. And the types of brands that are working with us just like blow my mind. We have a couple brands, Lola Blankets and Pancho, that have we've scaled. over multiple years with um at this point. Um we have small brands like Scenic in Yard Sale that we started with when they were two people in a garage and now they're growing successful multi-channel brands two years later. We have new brands that we've recently signed on, 10,000 and Burlibo, that are really scaled out, complex businesses. And the same technology that works for those businesses works for a team of five. you know, working out of a their first office ever. And in like as an entrepreneur and builder in Shopify's ecosystem, I'm more proud of that than anything we've done.
Kurt Elster • 31:46.580
Yeah, being on both sides because we've got agency services and do we have we have apps. I mean nothing like you know an ERP, you know, very smaller utilitarian stuff like free gift with purchase. But man, the I think the two things that's so fun, you know, going from agency work to building, you know, d an app, uh a SAS, you know, any of those things. One, pride of ownership, you know, and then the leverage you get out of how many people it helps. So you build a feature once, potentially that then helps thousands of people over years. And so there's leverage, you know, to to working in this way. Um it's just I don't know, it feels good. Like it's a it's an easy thing to get behind and and get up in the morning and go, okay, yeah, you know, we're gonna write some code and it's gonna help people.
Kyle Hency • 32:30.760
I mean the core idea of what you just described is at the core of Good Day. When I after we sold Chubby's and I was like, what am I gonna do next? I was talking with my wife and I was just like, I spent all this time because it's just I like it working with these young brands and helping them learn from what we learned at Chubby's. And, you know, good day to me is just the scaled out way to do that. I was doing that for a brand here and there, maybe two or three a month. Now I talk to hundreds of brands every month. And I'm a part of the solution as well. And so just in terms of like what gets you up out of bed and what's gotten you motivated, like we have a whole team of people that feel that way. Um and it's it's it's pretty powerful. You know, we're we're actually creeping up in March will be three years from our uh original founding. two and a half years of developing. And so uh there's a lot of power built into the product we've already developed. And man, I look out another one, two, or three years, And think about where we'll be. And it's a really cool thing to think about for brands that are growing up that are subscale and we're just leveling the playing field. We're giving them the tools to compete a lot earlier in their life.
Kurt Elster • 33:37.400
It is cool. It does feel good. Um, so you know, one of the things Chubby's was known for, of course, was that irreverent marketing. You know, and we see more of that now. Uh, but I think, you know, a brand like Chubby's had paved the way for a lot of that that tone of voice. What uh did any of that make it into good days? You know, marketing or culture?
Kyle Hency • 33:57.900
Absolutely. I don't know if you got your eyes on our recent fundraising video we put out, but we put out a pretty fiery uh and fun uh AI supported uh fundraising video that's very much kind of irreverent, fun. And look, in our world, we're just transparent and honest about what we're doing. We're going right at these legacy ERPs and creating a completely alternative world for these brands such that that seems crazy to go in that direction. And we're doing it in the most optimistic and positive way you can. Good day is called good day because we want our operators to have just a good day. When otherwise all of these things are breaking and they're having a bad day. And so we do think about all the branding elements of what we're doing. We want to be your partner. We want to bring positive optimism to your day-to-day and your operations. It's at the core of what we're doing. Uh, I was joking in telling one of my buddies you can you can take the guy out of apparel, but you can't take him out of branding. And so I'm still spending a lot of time on building the good day brand.
Kurt Elster • 34:58.740
Okay, you gotta you're you're talking to a merchant, they're drowning in spreadsheets, but they're terrified of ERPs because you know there's guys like me who are like, oh man, those things are painful. What uh what's one thing you want them to know?
Kyle Hency • 35:12.299
It's just not as hard as it seems like it has to be. It can be simple and it can be powerful. And if you're imagining Six plus months of building to get any value, um, we've completely compressed that down into a six to eight week process of getting you live and getting value to your business quickly. Um, so there is a new world here and it is easier. Um, and and like look, we can get away with that because we're true operational partners. We have live Slack channels with every one of these brands. We're fully in with them. Going through Black Friday, Cyber Monday, I was more stressful than any of my chubby Black Friday Cyber Mondays because I have 50 of these brands I'm working with, not one. Um and we're real operational partners for them. So yeah, I I just we're we're we're really convicted that um there's a big opportunity for these sub 10 million revenue businesses.
Kurt Elster • 36:04.680
And where do we go to learn more?
Kyle Hency • 36:08.360
Go to gooddaysoftware. com. Um uh you can sign up through there. It'll be me or one of my colleagues, uh likely also from Chubby's, that'll help you. And yeah, you can also find me on LinkedIn.
Kurt Elster • 36:20.020
Man, it is. Yeah, it I know on the other side, you know, like the resource of power that comes from knowing the numbers of your business. And so having a tool that's that's good at it, that doesn't have to be painful, that is, you know, most importantly, Shopify first. Mm, that's exciting, right? I like that. So, yeah, I'm that is to say, I'm glad you're out there building good day, Kyle.
Kyle Hency • 36:43.540
No, I appreciate it. And then I always enjoy getting on here with you. I think I think um 2011 at Chubby's, we bet on the Shopify ecosystem growing up and being a really big deal for these brands. That has been a great bet for 15 years now. That makes me feel so old. And I consider like good day building in that same ecosystem and being a positive participant in it is like really, really important to me. So appreciate all the hard work you're doing to make that possible as well.
Kurt Elster • 37:11.299
Well, I think we we both hitched our our carts to the right horse. You know, thank you. Thank you, Toby and Harley out there for making it possible. Uh Kyle Hensy, good day software. an ERP that doesn't suck. Thank you so much.
Kyle Hency • 37:25.680
All right. Thanks, man.
Kurt Elster • 37:28.080
Hey, before you go, I was hoping you would check out our new app, Promo Party Pro. It is what I want to be the single best, easiest way to run a free gift with purchase promo on Shopify. We just put it live in the App Store. We've got less than 50 users. We want your feedback. So if you need to run a free gift with purchase promo in the near future, install it, try it. There's a live chat. I check that all the time. And so if you have any issues at all, you know, or any suggestions on how we can make it even easier to use. Let us know. We're happy to help. If you want to try it, search Promo Party in the App Store. Promo PartyPro is the app. Give it a shot. It's got a free trial. Thanks.