What Smart Inventory Management Looks Like (And Why You Need It) — Sebastiaan Debrouwer | Why Inventory Fuels Shopify Growth, How Spreadsheets Fail Scaling Brands, Why Multichannel Selling Breaks Systems, How Genie Simplifies Inventory Automation (#402)

This episode dives into smart inventory management for fast-growing Shopify brands. 

Our guest, Sebastiaan Debrouwere, founder of Genie, shares how to stay in stock without overstocking, avoid spreadsheet chaos, and grow your business efficiently. 

Topics discussed in this episode: 

• Why is inventory key for fast-growing Shopify stores. 
• How do spreadsheets fail as brands scale. 
• What triggers the move beyond manual tracking. 
• Why does multichannel selling break old systems. 
• How did Sebastian’s experience inspire Genie. 
• What was the impact of a friend’s mistake. 
• How does Genie simplify inventory automation. 
• What features does Genie offer merchants. 
  
  

Links & Resources 

Website: https://www.genie.io/
Shopify App Store: https://apps.shopify.com/genie-io
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/sdebrouwere
X/Twitter: https://x.com/iamsebdeb 

Get access to more free resources by visiting the show notes at
https://tinyurl.com/3mvk6mep

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Transcript

[00:00:00] It's probably a cautionary tale more than anything else. This is a problem that [00:00:05] traditionally no one's particularly excited to tackle unless they are very big on, on, on supply chains. But, [00:00:10] um, whenever as a brand, you kind of think the right time is to tackle [00:00:15] this, which is at some indistinct point in the future, I.

It's probably always better to do it a [00:00:20] couple of months before that.[00:00:25] 

Hello, welcome to another episode of the E-Commerce Coffee Break podcast. If you're growing fast on [00:00:30] Shopify, staying in stock without Overstock stocking is a key. Spreadsheets can't keep [00:00:35] up with this usually, so we want to talk about how you can do smart inventory, what [00:00:40] tools you have. There and we want to dive into the right platform that's helping you as a fast [00:00:45] moving brand to stay in control and grow faster.

Joining me on the show today is Sebastiaan Debrouwere. He is [00:00:50] the founder of Genie, the simplest and most powerful AI inventory management platform for [00:00:55] fast growing Shopify merchants. Prior to founding Genie, Sebastian was a VC investor at Baldin [00:01:00] Capital in London, an early employee at Scoter Startups. So that's why coming onto the show.

[00:01:05] Hi Sebastian, how are you today? Uh, hey Klaus. I'm great. How are you? I'm very well, [00:01:10] let's kick things off. Why does inventory management become such a big challenge for Shopify [00:01:15] stores that are starting to scale? Absolutely. I think what we've seen and what I've [00:01:20] kind of seen throughout my career is that supply chains are generally a bit of a, a dry [00:01:25] technical topic.

People don't like to jump into too much, uh, but it's actually a key building block [00:01:30] of building a successful brand, uh, in part because you can only really sell things to [00:01:35] customers if you find them, if you actually have them. As obvious as that sounds, but also [00:01:40] becomes because it becomes part of this very great sort of virtuous circle that helps you grow as a brand.[00:01:45] 

And so really why it matters and why inventory management matters is as soon [00:01:50] as you start reaching, I don't really wanna call it product market fit, but some kind of, you know, you [00:01:55] know what the product is, what your customers is, how you advertise them. You essentially wanna be able to fulfill their [00:02:00] need as much as possible, um, without tying up all of your cash or without ruining all of your [00:02:05] costs.

And so that's why inventory management really matters and why it matters to kind of do it well and, [00:02:10] and to make it a core skill of your business, not sort of an afterthought. Now [00:02:15] most startups, most side hustlers, starting getting their feet wet in e-commerce, they start [00:02:20] with spreadsheets. And I did this years and years and years ago, same thing.

And they, spreadsheets are growing and [00:02:25] then they break and you have sleepless minds and so on, so forth. What's the, the typical journey that you [00:02:30] see from brands, from startups in e-commerce, uh, on the [00:02:35] tools they use and the mistakes they make? Yeah, there's a, there's a big difference to begin with [00:02:40] between people who build their first brand and people who build their second or their third brand.

We noticed that some of our [00:02:45] customers who are kind of building their third brand start with inventory upfront. Uh, 'cause they [00:02:50] realize it's quite an important thing and they wanna get the system kind of pinned down. But typically, look, [00:02:55] when you, you launch a brand, you'll have an insider passion, an opportunity, anything that [00:03:00] kind of.

Lets you build a brand around that. And so probably the very last thought you're gonna [00:03:05] have is, how do I make sure I have enough inventory? Because really you figure out, you know, you build the [00:03:10] front end, you build the Shopify store, you try to get your advertising funnels in place. Uh, and the first time [00:03:15] you order whatever your supplier tells you, you have to order from them contractually.

Um, [00:03:20] you sort of try to guess a little bit maybe what the sizes or the colors are, and you run with [00:03:25] things that works. Fairly well early on, so [00:03:30] folks fairly well, if you don't have too many orders, you don't have too many suppliers, you're kind [00:03:35] of only selling maybe in one country, uh, or you don't have too many products where it starts [00:03:40] getting very, very, very messy, very quickly.

Uh, and it's typically kinda the spreadsheets [00:03:45] that, that, you know, you and I have built throughout our career. And, and, uh, that break at some point in time [00:03:50] is when there are too many variables factoring into this. So, um, I'll give an [00:03:55] example. We've worked with. Uh, a brand called Lenny Swims. They're an [00:04:00] Australian swimmer brand.

They wanted to kind of go and launch in the us so suddenly they're [00:04:05] involved having a number of warehouses in the us, manufacturing things in Asia, sending into the [00:04:10] us, making sure they could do two day deli, two day deliveries. And so they were trying to work out how to work [00:04:15] with a couple of different suppliers, launching, you know, 10, 20 products a month, each with their own sets [00:04:20] of lead times and their designs and their sampling, and then getting those two customers at the right [00:04:25] time.

The spreadsheet they had broke because it was a spreadsheet that [00:04:30] needed to work, both in terms of planned product launches and tracking things like [00:04:35] samples, and then the actual sales and went to kind of go and reorder things. And so when that broke for [00:04:40] them, the way it broke was really that they suddenly became unable to launch new collections because they [00:04:45] just weren't on top of what the previous ones were doing.

[00:04:50] Therefore, kind of how much cash they would be needing and really also how profitable some of these things are, right? Because if you [00:04:55] launch a new market, you may not have an idea of your actual cost once you kind of factor in [00:05:00] customs and duties and shipments and manufacturing and things like that. And so you [00:05:05] don't really know if you're supposed to be selling the swimsuit at $60 or [00:05:10] 120 for it to make profit.

So typically that's where their spreadsheet broke. [00:05:15] They had it because they had a high volume of launches. You see other people, um, we work with a brand [00:05:20] called Canada Bolts who have, you know, thousands of products and another couple of [00:05:25] thousands of different configurations. Uh, for them, the difficulty becomes that you just can't check [00:05:30] that many individual line items and try to make a set of calculations what you want as a really focused view that tells you, [00:05:35] okay, this is the stuff that is now running low.

You need to restock. This is the stuff that you've ordered. [00:05:40] It's coming in, you're fine. This is where you currently have too much. That typically [00:05:45] is where these spreadsheets break, where they definitely break. And if you're kind of starting [00:05:50] a brand and you're wondering, you know, when should I, what's the latest point?

I can wait to fix [00:05:55] something. I'd say the latest point you have to fix something is when you, once you start selling in multiple channels. [00:06:00] So it doesn't really matter whether you have five SKUs or 5,000, whether you have one [00:06:05] supplier or a couple of hundred when you're selling on Shopify. [00:06:10] In multiple countries or Amazon, maybe you start doing some, some wholesale, [00:06:15] uh, you absolutely need a solution because it goes beyond what a human can compute [00:06:20] and understand, uh, and track and things just change so fast, right?

In, in each of these [00:06:25] channels, you have momentum and complexity coming in. So that's, that would sort of be my take [00:06:30] is, uh, I'm not anti spreadsheet. We're not anti spreadsheet. We respectfully all built our [00:06:35] businesses on spreadsheets. There's a point in time when it stops the growth that you figured out, [00:06:40] um, and that's when you really should go and look at another solution.

Mm-hmm. I think best [00:06:45] part is not taking spreadsheets into your business at all on that level. And you came [00:06:50] up with Genie, so what's the story behind Genie? How did you get started? So, I [00:06:55] worked in consulting for a couple of years around supply chains, but I kind of built my [00:07:00] own. Supply chain from scratch for the first time in 2019.

Uh, [00:07:05] when I joined a, an scoter startup called Circ, um, which we ended up selling to an American company called Bert, one of [00:07:10] our competitors. And, um, we had ordered our first set of Scoters to [00:07:15] deploy in the streets, kind of from supplier we found online and things weren't going so great. [00:07:20] Um, so I kind of went to China for two weeks to try and fix, uh, [00:07:25] an issue with our joint venture partner.

And I stayed for a couple of months and kind of built out. [00:07:30] Quality assurance team, a supply chain team that was kind of coordinating with, uh, [00:07:35] 12 or so countries on, on, on what they needed for scoters, spare parts, things like that. And then [00:07:40] ran the whole manufacturing cycle. And so I'd kind of gone out and built this whole, [00:07:45] um, organization almost like we were 23 at some point, uh, in that team.[00:07:50] 

Off spreadsheets. And so we had, uh, one guy in our team called [00:07:55] Jorge, and he was, uh, extremely critical. He was maintaining, uh, our kind [00:08:00] of master spreadsheet of, of placed purchase orders and trying to sort of do this elegant dance [00:08:05] between different ships and containers and customs and things like that.

And that worked reasonably well. Look, I mean, we, [00:08:10] we were in the process of implementing ERP system for most of the existence. So that country company and [00:08:15] then I, we actually sold it before we'd even implemented a single module because that's how long it takes [00:08:20] to advance ERP system, even if you're a new business.

And I think for [00:08:25] me it gave me a huge appreciation of how quickly your problem can scale. And so [00:08:30] even when I spent a couple of years. Mostly investing in, in online [00:08:35] brands, uh, in software that kind of enables online businesses. So, um, companies like AIO and, [00:08:40] and CRM systems or inventory heavy businesses. I, I invested in a company called Joker, who are kind of [00:08:45] the leading rapid grocery retailer in, uh, in Latin America.

I didn't sort of touch the problem directly, [00:08:50] but I started getting back in a spot, uh, where I had a [00:08:55] number of friends building brands and they sort of asked me to look at their spreadsheet. Or to [00:09:00] like sense check their work or help them kind of, you know, take a good look at this. And, um, [00:09:05] a friend of mine was building a betting brand and he was going through a [00:09:10] huge issue where he was doing a couple million in revenue and.

Essentially he [00:09:15] missed the entirety of summer because they placed the order for summer too late. And so this is really [00:09:20] relevant with Beding, right? Mm-hmm. Because you have different kind of like thicknesses and materials and, and bedding is quite seasonal. It took [00:09:25] me a while to realize that as well as an adult, by the way, that, that bedding is, is seasonal [00:09:30] and, uh, there's colors and, and things like that.

But so they had placed this huge order [00:09:35] for summer and um, they placed it so late that it actually only [00:09:40] arrived once Autumn came around. And that meant they had a [00:09:45] huge amount of debt stock that they had to clear heavily, heavily discounted to try and have cash to not [00:09:50] miss their kind of winter order. And so I kind of jumped into this with them and it took me like [00:09:55] all of two minutes to realize that they had a spreadsheet that had a Google sheet that was referencing a [00:10:00] bunch of other Google sheets and different people were putting inputs.

And anyway, somebody somewhere had broken a [00:10:05] formula by manually overwriting it. And the result was that the entire prediction had kind of [00:10:10] reference errors in it. So now the numbers were right or they told 'em not to order anything or [00:10:15] you know, you kind of see the situation about how you end up with, with having, uh, nothing in place.[00:10:20] 

And it really frustrated me. It really, really, really frustrated me 'cause I obviously knew how to fix it, [00:10:25] but I also knew, you know, the huge impact this had. And so I kind of started [00:10:30] looking around a little bit more and what I realized fairly quickly on was [00:10:35] a lot of brands are growing very quickly. We'll try to avoid the [00:10:40] experience that we have with Circ.

So they will kind of, you know, talk to professionals and the professionals will be like, get an [00:10:45] ERP system. And they'll be like, no, you know, it'll take six months, nine months, tens or hundreds of [00:10:50] thousands of dollars. I don't have the time for that. And so my kind of take on that [00:10:55] was, there had to be a way for us to squeeze something that takes [00:11:00] months into minutes.

Uh, and as you can imagine, my, my, my early team kind of [00:11:05] thought we were, uh, we were crazy for doing this. But there had to be a way to help a certain [00:11:10] subset of brands be able to get on top of this vital skill really, really quickly. And so that was really Divis [00:11:15] division behind Building Genie was not let's build the world's most configurable software, [00:11:20] even though we are extremely configurable.

But it was, let's find a way to make this happen in a couple of minutes. [00:11:25] And you know, a couple of years that we've built that right. Are now able to [00:11:30] essentially connect your Shopify store. We extract all of your data [00:11:35] from, you know, your products, your suppliers, your historical orders, all these things in a very smart way.

This happens [00:11:40] kind of when you don't even see it. It happens at a couple of minutes. You upload whatever extra contact there [00:11:45] is, whether it's, you know, existing purchase orders, which can be PDFs or things like that, supplier lists. [00:11:50] And we try to get people to view where we say, okay, look, here's the health of your business.

That's the first thing you're gonna see. [00:11:55] Here are the actions you have to take from that, and they will help you kind of follow those through and, and take those [00:12:00] actions. And yeah, it's been a couple of years ago now, but today I think we offer [00:12:05] kind of full end-to-end management of your reordering flow.[00:12:10] 

Uh, and on top of that, also management, your suppliers, forecasting, reporting, and a lot [00:12:15] of finance features. So ways for people to see what payments are coming up and, and, [00:12:20] and where their profitability is. And that's been fantastic because mm-hmm. There are a [00:12:25] lot more fast growing brands that kind of desperately need to get on top of this than [00:12:30] than we ever anticipated, which is the bit we often forget to say.

It works really well. [00:12:35] I think it's the most important part. Um, I think a lot of brands, they sort of not [00:12:40] only get overwhelmed sometimes they get. Surprised by their success. Um, you need just one [00:12:45] post going viral and then one of a sudden there's so many orders coming in that [00:12:50] basically you are, you're drawing in it and you lose control.

And I think as, as a business [00:12:55] owner, um, small business owner or somebody who's scaling, um, you're not a da data [00:13:00] scientist, but you get provided with so much data that you obviously wanna have an overview. Now talk [00:13:05] me through sort of the day-to-day, um, job. In your system. So who's the [00:13:10] person working with your system?

What's their daily task, weekly task? How does it look like? Yeah, [00:13:15] it'll depend a little bit on the company, obviously, and their size. But if, if we look at like most of our kind [00:13:20] of typical companies, so people doing maybe couple tens of millions in, um, in [00:13:25] sales, maybe doing, you know, 5 million in sales.

Typically [00:13:30] at that point, they will have brought somebody on board who's responsible for managing supply chain day-to-day. [00:13:35] And so that person will, well, this is what we see from the numbers, uh, which kind of, [00:13:40] not necessarily only from the stories, they'll probably start their day by logging in, looking at the [00:13:45] Genie dashboard and getting a good overview of the general kind of health of their inventory [00:13:50] and the things that are on track.

Some days that won't require any additional action, but that right [00:13:55] to kind of understand, okay, here's where we're at. Um, no further [00:14:00] action needed. Almost, it's not exactly like you have with, um, for example, if you have your chip world [00:14:05] dashboard, right, where you constantly kind of going and adjusting campaigns.

Uh, other days they may need [00:14:10] to be working on an order or a reorder. So they'll kind of take our recommendations in [00:14:15] gi uh, we've got them in a couple different places. We've got them on a dashboard. We've got them in like an in tray called a, [00:14:20] a Buy now list. Uh, we've got them in kinda a spreadsheet on steroids called the [00:14:25] inventory tool that we've built.

But, um, on the days that people are [00:14:30] placing orders or that they're kind of starting to build these up, typically they'll go in, um, they'll [00:14:35] start creating this kind of draft order, and what we will do is we will use the latest data [00:14:40] to pre-fill the numbers for them. So kinda the big step that, that we [00:14:45] skip for this individual in the day-to-day role is usually, you know, once a week, once a month, they [00:14:50] would download the.

Sales numbers, the inventory numbers, uh, manually add [00:14:55] the kind of supplier restrictions, try to forecast forward, come up with a number, plug in that [00:15:00] number, run that by their boss, get approval, check if the number is still correct, kind of, you know, [00:15:05] that back and forth. We'll kind of take all that and put it in one step.

So we'll kind of say, okay, [00:15:10] here's how much you should be ordering to be covered until this [00:15:15] period that you would like to be covered. And we're quite smart about that. So we'll either, um. Work [00:15:20] with like a reorder timeline if that's what you have. Um, but we can also understand seasons, right? So we [00:15:25] can understand if you're building up a really big order and you're an apparel brand that you probably wanna cover the [00:15:30] season or at least the beginning of that season.

So that's one really big day-to-day task is kind of, [00:15:35] uh, creating orders, then managing these orders, filling them up in shipments, [00:15:40] uh, paying parts of them, uh, things like that. First really big role. [00:15:45] The second one we'll see is typically finance people. They'll come in about maybe once a month, [00:15:50] uh, to go and pull all of the actual landed costs.

So the the beautiful thing that [00:15:55] we do in Genie is, you know, we know which order you're placing, when you're placing it, how much you're paying for it. [00:16:00] And so we're able to tell you exactly what a particular product and a particular size actually [00:16:05] cost you in the warehouse today and in a particular warehouse, because we know [00:16:10] the current order, the historical orders, how these are kind of being consumed.

So typically they, I'll look into [00:16:15] that once a month. Um, founders will use Genie, [00:16:20] actually, I'd love to say we expected it about monthly, but we see weekly, daily to [00:16:25] go and log in and check sales and inventory kind of progress, and then maybe [00:16:30] double click and jump into these things. And then we have a set of reports.

Uh, and those really [00:16:35] are one things that we hope people don't have to even go into Genie for really. [00:16:40] So. We've built a bunch of kind of automated reporting that gets delivered to people's [00:16:45] inboxes, and so they might get a daily email telling them what's at risk of running out of stock. They might get [00:16:50] a monthly email telling 'em what their stock asset values are.

They might get emails around underperforming [00:16:55] suppliers, um, that are like consistently late. Those are things that happen off [00:17:00] platform, but obviously drive a lot of this work as well. No. Makes perfect sense. [00:17:05] You mentioned that you integrate with Shopify and you pull all the data from there. Are there other APIs, [00:17:10] integrations where you pull data from?

We're obviously able to plug into people's warehouses. Um, [00:17:15] it's quite critical for us to have that data. Um, and [00:17:20] then we're now also able to work with things like Fair. Some people have got their Amazon set up [00:17:25] running fairly easily if they're doing fulfilled by merchant. If it's fulfilled [00:17:30] by Amazon, uh, it takes a little bit more effort for us, but it's doable as well.

Uh, and then your [00:17:35] kind of typical return platforms like, uh, loop and Editor. So, we'll, we'll try to plug into all of these. I [00:17:40] think the big one that is still on our list and that is really critical is [00:17:45] QuickBooks and Xero, because today we don't sort of automatically write to somebody's ledger. [00:17:50] Um, and that gets more and more important, especially as kind of profitability is more and [00:17:55] more of a challenge.

Actually one, one important one that I always forget to mention, uh, 'cause I never sold [00:18:00] bundled products, but we, um, we plug into the bundling app. So we also allow people to [00:18:05] create a map. Bundles from what Ginni, to actually have things down to correct sku. [00:18:10] Mm-hmm. Bundle's very important to increase your average order value.

I think, I think there's really value into, [00:18:15] into this part of it. Who's your, who's your perfect customer? Who do you work with normally? [00:18:20] Uh, anyone that's going really fast. Um. [00:18:25] I'd say that we started off doing a lot of apparel, which is probably also up to you, link [00:18:30] to kind of by network. We've started significantly moving from that.

So we've [00:18:35] got people doing, um, beauty. We've got more and more people kind of doing [00:18:40] home, uh, furniture, kind of large skis. The people we don't work [00:18:45] with really, or that we, when we work with them, we only solve, you know, 80% of their problem. [00:18:50] Is anyone dealing with deep formulations? Or expiry dates. [00:18:55] So think your typical protein bar brand, we can help them [00:19:00] track things we can't help them do.

I think what is the most important thing in the warehouse, which is make sure that [00:19:05] they sell the stuff that's about to expire really soon that we don't do yet. And the same [00:19:10] with formulations, because formulations I think are something that have a lot of complexity. Let's say that you're like [00:19:15] formulating a particular kind of beauty serum.

You've got all the [00:19:20] compliance stuff to deal with. You're also constantly dealing with the availability of [00:19:25] particular raw materials from suppliers to your contract manufacturer or formulator. [00:19:30] Those are not always available for various reasons. Uh, and so [00:19:35] you're constantly, almost like reformulating for every batch.

And so the [00:19:40] very important thing to do there is Yeah, I know, I know. Um, [00:19:45] you need to track across the batch. You need to be able to track the samples, the batches, the availabilities, [00:19:50] um. Et cetera, et cetera. You need to be able to do recalls. And so those are typically [00:19:55] people that we don't work with, frankly, simply because building out their system is [00:20:00] extremely complicated and personalized.

I think what's very [00:20:05] unfortunate for those kind of businesses is to me, their online brands that [00:20:10] create a lot of value by developing, you know, phenomenal and innovative products. [00:20:15] They still get failed by typically ERP systems because typically RP systems will kind of still go and say, [00:20:20] here is a rigid logic that you must fit.

I suspect from everything I've seen, that the people [00:20:25] that will have the biggest amounts of spreadsheets are, you know, the beauty [00:20:30] pies of this world and, uh, and I feel sorry for their teams.[00:20:35] 

It's really, really a huge undertaking. So those people, we don't [00:20:40] serve yet. Okay. That sounds very, very complicated. Sounds like very complicated. And [00:20:45] I've never looked into this kind of particular industry, so I have no background there, but it sounds very, [00:20:50] very difficult. So it's complicated and, and I think for, for companies like us, [00:20:55] obviously you've gotta choose where you apply AI most wisely.

And that's really been a lot of our [00:21:00] roadmap for last year, right? Is like we can do forecasting. It's not incredibly hard to [00:21:05] do kind of forecasting. We can do automated workflows and insights, but like where do you. Where [00:21:10] can you create outsized impact for people with that? That's not yet the case for, [00:21:15] for these people.

Okay. But for everyone else, genie is a solution. [00:21:20] So walk me through the typical onboarding process for a new user. How long does it take? What steps are involved? [00:21:25] It, it can be as easy as going through the Shopify store and clicking install and going through a [00:21:30] five screen kind of configuration where you import some files and, uh.[00:21:35] 

Tell us a little bit about your business. Like, here's the space I operate in and, uh, and [00:21:40] here's, uh, how often I might be ordering and, uh, we'll get it set up. So I think we've, we've had, [00:21:45] we have more and more customers who kind of set themselves up and then maybe book in some time with our team to kind of [00:21:50] run through things.

But the setup process itself is, is the thing that we've tried to get really good at. So there's [00:21:55] no, you don't need to speak to human. You don't need to [00:22:00] wrangle any of your own data manually. We either read it from Shopify or if you provide it to [00:22:05] us in any format, we'll kind of ingest it and map it to give an example of that, right, because that, [00:22:10] that sounds really abstract.

If you have a supplier, you probably have a price list, you probably have a series of [00:22:15] products for that price list. It is, you know, specific to a certain [00:22:20] time and you might have another supplier who also is able to supply some of these products. [00:22:25] We don't need a lengthy kickoff call where you explain us how these suppliers work and which these products are, et cetera, et [00:22:30] cetera.

You kind of go through the first part of the flow where you say, Hey, I'm an apparel business based [00:22:35] here. We're like, cool. We think you should be reordering this often. Yes. Okay. We've [00:22:40] prefilled your suppliers. Are these your suppliers? Yes. No, I'm missing a couple. Okay. We'd love to map your product to [00:22:45] suppliers.

Have you got a price list? Yes. Here I go. We'll kind of go and say, okay, this product [00:22:50] will be ordered from this supplier. These are the different prices. And then all, we'll [00:22:55] kind of have to ask you once your ingen is, Hey, which of these two suppliers is the primary one you wanna work with? [00:23:00] But yeah, people find this a little bit hard to believe sometimes, but it's, um, you can [00:23:05] get set up by yourself.

That's the big thing that we wanted to win on, was how do we make this something in a [00:23:10] couple of minutes? And it obviously means that mm-hmm. I think we maybe have, I don't know, 10% of the [00:23:15] people that install us and that. Realize they don't need us, and then sort of uninstall [00:23:20] within an hour or two, which we're very happy about.

And we kind of, you know, let them keep a free [00:23:25] dashboard and we're like, Hey, in case you ever gonna come back. But a lot of other people, what we see is [00:23:30] they install typically because there's, um, a whoop [00:23:35] seat that's happened somewhere that's made somebody go, let's go and fix inventory. We, we, [00:23:40] we kind of fit into two categories.

The, the. January 1st, good intentions. [00:23:45] We get a lot of installs the first week of January, um, [00:23:50] and sort of the right before the busy season, like the QBR planning, right? When someone's like, oh, damn, black Friday's [00:23:55] coming up in, you know, four months. We gotta get on top of this. Um, but the rest of the time we get a lot of whoopsies.

[00:24:00] We get people who have a situation like the one I described where all their cash is tied up in one place. They have to [00:24:05] find a way up. And, um, the phenomenal thing for us where they have to place a really big order that they don't know what [00:24:10] the numbers are and they've heard that maybe it's possible to have a machine kind of assist you with doing [00:24:15] that.

The great thing for us is it means that we get, uh, insane customer [00:24:20] activity kind of within minutes of signing up. So I think we get something like 80% of our [00:24:25] customers creating a purchase order and about 65% sending it off within [00:24:30] about a day of installing Genie, which is, you know. It gets a bit scary for the [00:24:35] team and me, but it's, it's, it's millions and millions of dollars of, of, of merchandise value that gets created.[00:24:40] 

And that's also what we then track, right? So if you kind of ask like, how do people get started installing is [00:24:45] the easy bit. The thing that we really track is, is somebody able to get value from this [00:24:50] within a couple of days? And we try to look at that as either placing an order or kind of [00:24:55] having a, a, a personalized analysis built in our inventory table, either using one of our [00:25:00] templates or, or using one of their own.

How does your pricing structure work? How do you [00:25:05] charge? Uh, we've been told we charge too little. Um, but um, [00:25:10] but so we, we try to keep it reasonably easy. [00:25:15] There were kind of two things that I really wanted to avoid. Always. I wanted to avoid charging [00:25:20] people purely on revenue. 'cause I think it's a bit of a tax on success and revenue doesn't always [00:25:25] correlate to complexity, and I've never, ever, ever wanted to charge people own seats.

[00:25:30] I'm very happy that that's kind of slowly dying as a concept because for [00:25:35] most pieces of software, if several people in the team use you, it's a success for the [00:25:40] team and a success for you. So today I have three kind of pricing tiers. We have a tier that goes up [00:25:45] to about $60, um, which is pretty much for any merchant.

So they can have [00:25:50] up to, I think 1500 products, 50 suppliers. The only thing they don't get is like their sort of [00:25:55] in trade to do list. Then we have about a hundred dollars plan [00:26:00] just for people that have up to about a hundred suppliers. And then anyone that has more than [00:26:05] 5,000 products or um, more than a hundred suppliers, we kind of create a plan for 'em.

That's called [00:26:10] scale, and I believe it's around $160 a month. And that's it over time. [00:26:15] Um, we'd like to add in some kind of credits so that if you are, [00:26:20] every time you generate a forecast, that obviously requires. A whole set of [00:26:25] calculations to happen behind them so that we know for each product that's happening, we can update it.

We'd like to [00:26:30] start doing that with credits because some people are okay forecasting, you [00:26:35] know, once a month and then checking in and some people, due to their volumes, [00:26:40] their, um, number of platforms and so on and so forth need to kind of forecast almost weekly [00:26:45] or daily. And so we'd like to kind of help them budget for [00:26:50] that a little bit better.

While accounting for the fact that it's very expensive to compute all that stuff. [00:26:55] I think with this price point that you have right now, it's absolutely no [00:27:00] brainer for the value you provide. And, um, just maintaining on an hourly basis a [00:27:05] huge spreadsheet, um, probably is much more expensive than what you charge per month there.

So I [00:27:10] think our listeners will be very, very, very happy to, to hear that. And I hope a lot of listeners will go [00:27:15] over and try it out because it's uh, it literally, it's a no brainer before our coffee break comes to an [00:27:20] BU today. Is there anything you want to share with our listeners that we haven't covered?

It's probably a [00:27:25] cautionary tale more than anything else. This is a problem that traditionally no one's particularly [00:27:30] excited to tackle unless they are very big on, on, on supply chains. But, um, [00:27:35] whenever as a brand, you kind of think the right time is to tackle this, which is at [00:27:40] some indistinct point in the future, it's probably always better to do it a couple of months before that.[00:27:45] 

Um, right. Because this is one of those problems that, uh, I, I guess I'll, I'll [00:27:50] contrast it with, um, with paid advertising, right? It's nice to get analytics [00:27:55] for paid advertising 'cause it helps you be more efficient and it improves your CPAs and your clickthroughs and, and, and your [00:28:00] conversion rates. But if you make a mistake, the damage tends to be fairly [00:28:05] limited, right?

If you, you launch a piece of creative that's aimed at a new, new segment and [00:28:10] it doesn't work, it's a couple days of advertising spend and that's fine. The decisions you make in supply [00:28:15] chain are things you need to live with for a long time. Uh, they're sort of the obvious bit of like, you know, you might spend a couple of weeks out [00:28:20] of stock or.

You might spend a little bit more money to ship things in express and [00:28:25] not via, um, train or ship, which is what we had at, at at circ. [00:28:30] Um, we used to constantly fly out e scooters on planes and it's expensive, [00:28:35] but there's also a knock on effect that a lot of people don't realize till they get large as businesses, which [00:28:40] is.

It affects your cash flow. And the cash flow is ultimately what allows you [00:28:45] to grow as an e-commerce business, right? Most e-commerce businesses don't go out of business because they go bankrupt, they go out [00:28:50] of business 'cause they run out of cash because they're kind of liabilities that they have to pay are, are great enough.

They're [00:28:55] able to finance. And similarly, if you look at really great success stories, [00:29:00] um, like gym, they, they have, you know, negative cash conversion cycles, right? They were able to generate [00:29:05] cash before they ever spend it. I think that's as, as geeky as it sounds like [00:29:10] the key reason you should get started on this earlier than you think is because the faster you master the [00:29:15] skill, the faster you're able to start creating a set of circumstances where you can grow faster and more [00:29:20] profitably because you negotiate better deals with your suppliers because you plan out when you spend your cash better and [00:29:25] so on and so forth.

And so if you're listening to this and you're like, this [00:29:30] sounds like a great January problem for me, um, it's now end of May. [00:29:35] I. Endeavor to make this a June problem. Um, because if you make it [00:29:40] a June problem, you will be in so much better of a spot in January in in [00:29:45] every single respect. I. That's probably the one thing I really wanna, I, I really wanna get out there [00:29:50] because I, I go to lots of trade conferences, the likes.

People are like, this is great for next quarter. I'm like, ah, [00:29:55] this is great for now. Yeah. But I like that you highlighted, and I, I can't [00:30:00] emphasize this that enough, that a lot of brands out there, specifically growing brands, they're completely ca cash flow [00:30:05] driven. And if the smallest thing goes wrong, your business can go down the drain.

So you wanna make [00:30:10] sure that you have every tool in place to help you, that this is not going to happen. Where can people go and find [00:30:15] out more about you? We've got a great website on Genie do genie.io. That's [00:30:20] GENI e.io. Uh, and then we're in the Shopify app store. And, uh, [00:30:25] from either of these places you can kind of watch demos, you can get in touch with us.

Uh, you can [00:30:30] book time and, uh, I'm on Twitter and LinkedIn, which I'm sure people will be able to find. [00:30:35] Cool. I will pull all the link in show notes. I will put them in the show notes here. Just one click [00:30:40] away. Sebastian, thanks so much for giving us an overview about Jeanie and how important inventory management is.

I hope [00:30:45] a lot of people will reach out to you, and I hope a lot of people will make a decision now and not only in January. [00:30:50] Thanks so much for your time. Fantastic. Thanks. Take care.