On Being Uncategorizable

For my last update of '25, I wanted to take a step back and look forward (it will make sense).

“Throughout his career, he evaded easy categorization” - About David Bowie

"What do you do?" It's the first question any gets asked when they meet someone for the first time. For the longest time, I never knew what to say, so I usually mumble some form "computers" or "I write software". It didn't help that I tended to get bored with jobs easily and I moved from role to role after 2-4 years max. That would cause people to look at me with a form of skepticism. "Job Hopper", "Flighty", etc....

I didn't love that, so I spent a good chunk of my 30's trying to land on a label. Something that people could associate with me so I stunk in my head. CTO. Tech Guy. College Football Fan. Event Organizer. Networker. But I had too many interests. I was different things to different people, and it got exhausting to try and meet the "requirements" each person had for what they were expecting. Bleh.

This goes even further back to my childhood: I was a tall, lifted weights and played all sports, but also loved computers, electronic music & hip hop. Not-quite-a-jock-not-quite-a-nerd. Comfortable anywhere, but belonging nowhere.

So I spent a lot of time trying to fit a box in my 20's & 30's. It didn't matter what box, it just mattered that I fit it. But something wasn't right. My 40's hit and I had enough. I didn't want to fit into other peoples ideas of what I could / should / would be. It took me a while to embrace the desire I had to not be One-Thing.

So in 2021, hello No Fixed Plans. An amorphous blob of an entity that I started with the idea of fluidity baked in. More on that in a bit but first, let's come back to The Wire.

This is Idris Elba. He's an English actor whose big break to US audiences was playing Stringer Bell in The Wire starting in 2002. Since then, he's been incredibly busy acting in every kind of property you can think of: Big Budget movies, small arthouse movies, British TV, American TV, prestige TV, Video Games...you name it. Hell of an actor right? But then there's this:

Yeah, turns out he's also an actively touring DJ, DJ Big Driis, spinning everything from latin to afro beats to R&B to hip hop. He's performed all over the world, alongside some household DJ names. There's also his label, 7Wallace, where he publishes music from a variety of artists of all genres. This includes one of my top albums of the year, Victory by Slick Rick, and performing with him on Badman Generation. Also, we can't forget about the tv and movie production company he owns with his wife, his professional kickboxing matches and the fact that he owns part of an Motorsport team. Not bad for "an actor" eh?

So... how does Idris Elba answer the question "What do you do?" I like to think it's some form of "whatever the hell I want to".

And that's the energy I started bringing into to my life as I cross 40 and plan for the next 20 years. How can I evade categorization while having no fixed plans? I had no idea when I started, but it's been working out splendidly since I started.

I'm an entrepreneur, an acquirer, a consulting CTO, a coach, a competitive Netrunner player on top of being a husband, father (but definitely not a communist). What's next? No idea. My wife and I have talked about a little hotel B&B for decades. I have an idea for a kissa that I'd love to do some day. It's all on the table for I am large and contain multitudes.

Onto the updates

FeedGeni: Nothing of note. Flirted with a potential acquirer before letting it die. Going into '26 with a strong balance sheet, profitable P&L and a focus on quality of life improvements across the board. Oh, also, AI. So much AI.

Standard Parts Toolkit: Pretty great start to the whole "being live on Shopify" thing. Gotten some new customers, expanded into new areas and shipped new features.

SPT - Merchant of Record: Something I haven't spoken about is for the last year we've been running a Shopify based Merchant of Record service. It's been going well but this fall I launched a huge update. We're POC'ing a cart checkout that can be integrated into any e-commerce shopping cart. The first customer went live via Salesforce and we processed our first transaction in early December 🚀

Personal: I've been playing more video games lately, especially Silksong. It's an insanely hard "dark souls" type game where the entire point is to die multiple times, over and over again, so that you learn more and improve with each attempt. It's masochistic, there's no other explanation. But I have my own cheerleaders in my two boys and it's a blast to do it with them. 🫶🏻

Have a great holiday season, spend some time with family, but also take some time for yourself. Give yourself the gift of love and make sure you know you're worth it.

As always, 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.

✌️

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.

👐🏻

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).

Closing Time

One constant, in every walk of life, is this: everything ends. A job. A friendship. A relationship. Even, heartbreakingly, a life.

It’s inevitable — this will end. Yet we resist. We cling. We hold on longer than we should:

• Staying in a job that no longer fits who you are — or who you’re becoming.
• Holding onto friendships that are one-sided, quietly toxic or from another time of your life.
• Remaining in relationships where connection has faded or compatibility has slipped away.
• Keeping someone on life support — not for their sake, but to postpone your own grief.

We treat endings as failures, as losses to be avoided. But that’s a misunderstanding.

Holding on is often a refusal to accept a deeper truth: we’re not in full control.

Endings come whether we’re ready or not.

“Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man.” - Hendry Adams

So we get angry, hurt, disappointed — shocked even — when the inevitable arrives. We tell ourselves: this wasn’t fair, this wasn’t supposed to happen. But deserve ain't got nothing to do with it.

So what then?

Epictetus said: Every situation has two handles. You can grab the one that hurts, or the one that helps.

Yes — mourn the loss. Feel it fully. But also look for the new shape of life that emerges. A new rhythm. A new relationship. A new outlook. A new chapter.

That shift in perspective — from resistance to acceptance, from grief to growth — is what the Stoics called Amor Fati: the love of fate. It's not just about enduring hardship, but actively loving and finding value in all aspects of life, including challenges and suffering.

Onto the update

The Good: Growth all around, in great ways. It's been a great month overall, despite the usual summer slowdown. We continue to funnel profits into debt servicing for the business, with the goal of an extremely early pay off of some SBA financing we took on in '24. Long road to go, but still feels good.

Personally, being 100% in control my schedule has really paid off this summer. Kids going to / from camp, in-laws moving to the country and a wife in grad school means my non-work time is as stressed as my work time. So the flexibly is exactly what I was aiming for in '21 when I started this. A lot of people have jumped into ETA and holding companies wanting the flexibility but it feels good to walk the walk.

The Bad: As much as we want to bring out our AI-related product, the entire space is fast moving, immature and full of dead ends. So sadly we're still heads down on the new product and cautiously optimistic for August. Not as fast as we wanted, but as fast as possible.

Personally, I got washed in the Netrunner NYC Megacity tournament in July. Despite having only started playing in April, I decided to jump head first into competitive play, knowing I'm gonna get waxed. And I did. Amor Fati?!? But still I persist. I didn't go 1-6 ☹️ (handle 1), I won one game 😄 (handle 2)! Just a reminder to pick something up you know you'll suck at knowing that progress & improvement will come.

"Every new beginning comes from some other beginnings end - Obligatory Semisonic Closing Time quote

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. 

Your 5 year plan sucks

If you're just here for the Q2 Update for No Fixed Plans, skip below the Grim Reaper. I'm not kidding.

It’s June 2025.

Five years ago, ChatGPT didn’t exist. Peloton was supposedly cycling to the moon. COVID was in full swing. Quibi was still pretending to matter. And we believed the streaming era would bring lower costs and more choice. I had a dad I could call up and get some advice from.

That was then. This is now.

To say the next 1, 3, or 5 years will look different is an understatement. But then again—don’t they always?

There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen. - Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (someone familiar with sudden changes)

If change is the only constant, then it’s worth investing in the things that don’t change.

You can never be too kind (though never naïve).

You can never be too open to new experiences.

You can never love too much.

You can never have too much personal agency.

You can never be too mentally grounded.

You can never be too resilient.

Entropy is an under appreciated characteristic of life. Things are constantly breaking down. And that's a good thing (NSFW). From death comes birth (or rebirth if you're lucky). That means new opportunities, new challenges. I spent decades working perfecting skills that are now completely encapsulated in a $20 subscription and I couldn't be happier.

So: what will you choose to focus on—and what will you choose to let go of?

What will you choose to do, to attempt, to pursue?

Not in five years.

Not in three.

Not once life slows down a bit. When your kids are older. When life's not as crazy.

Today.

Q2 Update

The Good: FeedGeni tops 95% margins, Standard Parts Toolkit grows slightly and expands into some new platforms (BigCommerce). We have a new product in alpha testing. If all things go as planned (they won't) we should be live by Q3 '25.

The Bad: Our new product idea from last month got hit with a setback. Not a major one, but enough to push it back a few months.

That's it. Pretty much a chop wood, carry water kind of quarter.

“Before enlightenment chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment chop wood, carry water.” ~ Zen Proverb

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.

Engineering Ageism in the AI age

Check out my Q1' 25 Recap if you missed it. Today we're talking everyone's favorite topic, AI, with a bit of a twist.

Time to Jack In

You know the archetype: hoodie-clad, lit by the pale glow of a monitor, deep into a 3am bug hunt. Fueled by Red Bull and raw ambition.

We’ve seen it in movies, startup lore, and job descriptions. And the key word in that image? Young.

The operative word? Young.

That's mostly because the most sought after engineers by companies tend to resemble the above archetype: the mythical 10x engineer. Young, single, without kids or obligations that could possible pull them away from work.

What Happens as We Age

But what happens when the hoodie gets swapped for a kid’s school drop-off fleece and New Balances? When all-nighters aren’t heroic, just exhausting?

It's no surprise that as you age, the desire to do those late marathon coding sessions begins to decrease. Life, health, kids, shifting interests, drive, and a myriad more things are all reasons for the shift, even for engineers. Are younger engineers more capable—or are they simply throwing more darts at the board? Hard to say, but what is hard to disagree with is the fact that as this current wave of internet native software engineers hit middle age, we're also getting hit with something other industries have: ageism.

As engineers age, many of us run into a hard truth: companies may love experience, but they hire youth.

Even as in-demand, well-paid professionals, we face the same markers that trigger ageism: rising salaries, family obligations, resistance to the latest shiny tool, aging parents, our own health. Those office perks become less and less appealing the more our schedule adjusts to a better work life balance and a 9-5 work day. Who has time for ping pong when there's kids swim practice, homework help and laundry piling up at home?

What if you still love building—but can’t (or won’t) grind like you’re 25? What if your value isn’t in how fast you type, but in what you choose to build? For most engineers, you get shuffled into the dreaded management career path. Coding's for younger, cheaper folks after all.

An Army of Minions

All of the above has been swirling around my head for the last few years as I have been wrestling with where to go regarding my career. I'm an engineer after all but damn.. do I need to write ANOTHER CSV text file parser? I do not.

And now, just as we’re bracing for the next wave of ageism in tech… an unexpected ally arrives: AI.

When I started No Fixed Plans back in '21, I intentionally took an approach I call staff-0, meaning I wanted to see how far I could get without any employees or full time staff. I also wanted to get back to building and solving problems, not being stuck in endless meetings. But how do you do that AND building an actual business? I had no idea what that would look like, but why not try?

Eighteen months later, ChatGPT launched—and suddenly, tech hit a crucible moment. When Fall of '22 came around, I suddenly had a glimmer of how I was going to accomplish staff 0: Enter AI (specifically Claude).

At first, it was a better search tool. As capabilities matured, I began to integrate it more into my workflow: an architecture companion then as beefed up code completion.

Now, with the launch of the latest round of AI models, I'm no longer limited to figuring out how AI can help me with my tasks. I can now give AI its own tasks.

Why bother killing myself to be a 10x programmer when I can have an unlimited number of 10X programmers at my fingertips?

To be clear: these are not the same as senior engineers able to work independently with minimal oversight. AI code does require consistent reviews and checks to course correct. However, is it as good as a previous intern or Jr. Engineer? You bet. We've got an unlimited supply of bourgeoning 10x engineers at our gray beard fingertips and they don't care about ping pong either.

It's Time To Build

What that means is that capacity for building solutions has increased exponentially. It's not a hard and fast requirement that you find, hire and develop a large team internally anymore. However, if the results of a 36 hour coding session can now be had for a few bucks & a couple well written prompts while I get my tea, what happens to our young friend from above?

The next era of engineering won’t belong to those who grind the hardest—it’ll belong to those who guide the smartest. The next wave of engineering won’t be led by those with the most hours in the chair—it’ll be led by those who know how to leverage those hours. In the age of AI, our edge isn’t in typing faster—it’s in thinking sharper, prompting smarter, and building bigger with fewer hands.

Griff

Q1 '25 Report

Kicking off the new year with a recurring report of how No Fixed Plans (NFP) is doing, some highs and lows of '24 and what we've got coming up.

Highs

Still Here! - Seriously, with everything happening in the world and the impact AI is having on...well everything, the world is a very different place than when I started NFP in '21. I consider that a win, especially with our focus on profitability and vertical/niche solutions.

Positive FeedGeni Growth - Our largest acquisition, FeedGeni, grew by a healthy amount in '24 despite our focus being mostly on the new eBay opportunity (more on that below). The existing business was very much in the "weed" stage of the whole "Seed, Feed, Weed" model for most of '24. Churn was very low, customer expansion was high and we launched a few new plans, increasing ARPU. All good things.

Merchant of Record (MoR) Launch - Continuing our land and expand focus, we launched a new, adjacent service to provide Merchant of Record services for our automotive parts merchants. A MoR handles all of the payment processing and sales tax obligations of e-commerce merchants, leaving them to handle the cataloging and order management, while still maintaining 1st part branding on their store. This is common as companies expand internationally, but less common domestically. It comes into play here as a lot of our customers transition from pure B2B / Wholesale models into DTC. The service has been a success and we're steadily expanding it in '25.

Putting on Big Boy CFO Pants (aka Financing) - I restructured some outstanding capital obligations used to acquire FeedGeni into a single vehicle, reducing complexity (and costs!) which was a big win. Starting NFP has forced me to dive head first into capital allocation and financing (debt, underwriting, QoE, et al...), something I had no experience with previously.

Lows

FeedGeni Roadmap - When we acquired FeedGeni in '22, we had big plans to bring it into the portfolio, expand the focus to include eBay Motors integration and provide a credible offering for the automotive parts market for managing large catalogs. We started off strong by landing an anchor customer (think side of a NASCAR car big) at the end of '23 and making a splash by launching in '24. Sadly the market doesn't stand still and we found ourselves backing away from the opportunity by EOY. There's a few reasons for this which I'll dive into later. Suffice it to say: it sucks, but that's business. Sunk costs be damned.

It is a kind of process which I think is important to go through at one time or another. The great effort which produces nothing. The great stymie. - Robert Pirsig

Standard Parts Toolkit Slowed - After a strong '23, growth with our first product, SPT, took a hit in '24. Combine that with higher than expected churn and overall the product didn't produce like we wanted too. We've got some strong growth ideas for '25, (including launching on additional e-commerce platforms) so the future is still bright but still stings.

Writing Off 1st Acquisition - We made a minor bolt on acquisition early in the No Fixed Plans days that didn't pan out for a bunch of reasons. We finally decided to kill it and move on. We learned a lot about acquiring a product, so it's still a valuable (and cheap) education. Call it a good 'first pancake' that we're tossing out and moving on from.

Q2 Outlook

Focused Growth - Mostly centered on two paths: expanding MoR service offering and moving to more e-commerce platforms so we can start taking on some larger / more enterprise customers (think Magento & Salesforce Commerce Cloud) as well as new locales (like PrestaShop in Europe)

New Product - We're working on a new product that's an evolution of our SPT e-commerce integration, but more streamlined and powerful. Staying a bit mum, but suffice it to say it will rhyme with everyone's favorite topic-de-jour. I will say that a topic I've been enamored with for 2+ decades (industrialized Software Factories and Product Lines) is finally within reach. More on that in a further post.

More Acquisition(s) Maybe - Despite a new product coming, I'm always looking for the right type of acquisition for the portfolio. Sadly, since we started, prices and multiples have skyrocketed, loads of people have rushed into the space, leaving a lot of acquisitions with upside down financials and even more outsized expectations. The math ain't math'ing as they say. I'm patient and firmly believe in focusing on winning the buy vs. doing a bad deal.

It’s far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price. - Obligatory Buffet quote.

Yearly Theme Checkin

I don't do yearly goals, preferring yearly themes. My two for this year are:

Ambition - I'm pushing myself to make bigger bets and to level up from where I had been. That means having higher expectations and going after larger opportunities. It's an intentional move on my part that will show up in several areas.

Communication - Despite my history with speaking and organizing people, I'm notoriously tight lipped when it comes to stuff I'm actually, you know, doing. That's gonna change this year. More communication, putting myself out there more and seeing what sticks (this one builds a bit ontop of Ambition)

-Griff