VNDLY

I Retitled 29 Blog Posts This Week and It Felt Like Cheating

I retitled 29 blog posts this week and it felt like cheating. We did publish two new pieces, including a step-by-step guide on receiving purchase orders in VNDLY. But the real energy went into sharper headlines, tighter meta descriptions, and a lot of time staring at Google Search Console. If the click-through rate moves even half a point, this will be the highest-ROI work we have done all quarter.

## What shipped this week

The CTR sprint. Our SEO audit flagged a sobering pattern: the blog was earning close to thirty thousand impressions a month, but the click-through rate was sitting around two-tenths of a percent. A big chunk of those impressions came from posts ranking on page one, sometimes position five to ten, with titles so bland they might as well have been labeled Do Not Click. We pulled the real ranking queries for each URL, rewrote the titles to front-load the actual keyword phrase, kept every URL slug untouched so we did not reset rankings, and resubmitted everything to Google. Twenty-nine posts across two batches. We also caught three titles where we had invented numbers that the body did not support. "7 Best" when there were five companies. "6 Tools" when we had no verifiable count. "5 Causes" when the post listed none. Fixing those before they went live was embarrassing and necessary.

Title lint as a weekly habit. We built a script that audits every blog title against a simple ruleset. Does it have a power word or a leading number? Is it under fifty-five characters? Does the meta description land in the right range? It sorts by impressions so we fix the high-traffic weak titles first. Hard issues dropped from thirty-two to ten, and the remaining ten are deliberate keeps. Founder stories and clean how-to posts where forcing a gimmick would read spammy.

Content decay tracking. We started taking weekly snapshots of every post's impressions, clicks, and average position. Right now it just says need more history because we only have one baseline. In about four weeks it should flag posts that are quietly sliding backward so we can refresh them before they fall off a cliff.

Landing page polish and a real conversion fix. We shipped a design pass on the marketing site. Glass header, card hover glow, reduced-motion guards, and a small detail I am almost ashamed to admit. The homepage hero had no call-to-action buttons. None. Just a headline and a video. We added default CTAs in both English and Swedish. It is wild what you stop noticing when you stare at your own site every day. We also fixed a cannibalization pair where two pages were fighting over the same b2b wholesale inventory management query.

Trustpilot welcome emails. New VNDLY tenants now get a welcome email that BCCs our Trustpilot address, which triggers an automatic review invite about a week later. Small, but reviews are the unlock for directory listings and we have been collecting them manually until now.

## SEO and growth notes

The big shift this week was from make more to make existing stuff earn more. We have over a hundred blog posts indexed and a growing stack of landing pages. The content machine works. The constraint moved to click-through rate, cannibalization, and decay. We submitted the reworked pages to Google's indexing API and IndexNow. Now we wait for recrawl, which usually takes days to a couple of weeks.

## What's next

We are in a waiting period now. The twenty-nine retitled posts need two to three weeks to show whether the new titles actually moved the needle. Our content decay tracker will start speaking up in about a month. And we still have two landing pages that Googlebot visits but refuses to index. We do not know why yet. I will report back on all three.

Question for the community: For anyone running a content-heavy site, how do you balance the publish new stuff pressure against the fix what you already have work? Do you schedule optimization sprints, or does maintenance only happen when something breaks?

I started the week wondering why VNDLY's landing pages weren't getting more traction in Google.

My assumption: they weren't being indexed.

Then I checked.

Most of them were indexed.

Which left the more uncomfortable answer: the pages simply weren't good enough to rank.

For anyone new here: I'm building VNDLY, an inventory management platform, alongside two other SaaS products as a solo bootstrapped founder. This is my weekly build log.

What shipped this week

The biggest change was rebuilding all 19 money pages.

Before, they all looked roughly the same: a comparison table followed by mostly reused homepage copy.

Now every page includes:

• Honest competitor comparisons

• Pricing comparisons

• "Good fit if / Better fit elsewhere if" sections

• A switching guide

• FAQs

• 900–1,400 words of page-specific content

I also removed large chunks of duplicated homepage content that had accidentally been repeated across every landing page.

Hopefully Google now has 19 genuinely different pages instead of 19 variations of the same one.

I also built an indexing dashboard that checks every page in the sitemap against Google and Bing.

Current status:

• Google: 49/57 pages indexed

• Bing: 16/57 pages indexed

The biggest surprise wasn't the numbers.

It was realizing that being indexed doesn't mean Google thinks your page deserves to rank.

What I learned

The biggest takeaway this week was that I had been treating indexing and ranking as the same problem.

They're not.

Google was already finding my pages.

It just wasn't finding them useful enough.

Sometimes the bottleneck isn't technical SEO.

It's simply better content.

What's next

Now comes the waiting.

I'll be watching Search Console over the next few weeks to see whether these rebuilt pages start earning impressions.

If they don't, I'll know the content still isn't good enough.

For those who've grown SEO for a B2B SaaS:

Have you seen thin-but-indexed pages respond well to a major content upgrade, or did you end up rebuilding them from scratch like I did?

We just shipped a free barcode generator at vndly.io/tools/barcode-generator - no signup, no watermark, no nonsense.

It supports 8 formats: Code 128, QR, EAN-13, UPC-A, Code 39, EAN-8, Data Matrix, ITF-14.
Download as PNG or SVG. Everything runs in your browser - your data never leaves your device.

We built it because we kept hearing the same thing from small product sellers and makers: "I just need to slap a barcode on this thing." Paying $30/month for a tool you use twice a week felt wrong.

It's free. Forever. No catches.

If you outgrow it and need to actually manage the inventory behind those barcodes - that's what VNDLY is for.

👉 vndly.io/tools/barcode-generator

#inventory #ecommerce #smallbusiness #barcode #freetools

I ran a product company for 13 years and made almost every inventory decision on instinct. For a long time that felt like an asset. Then it became the single most expensive habit I had.

The moment I couldn't ignore it anymore: a pallet of ceramic vases arrived at our warehouse in October -- from a supplier in Portugal, from a purchase order I had completely forgotten placing six months earlier.

Meanwhile, the SKUs that were actually selling were out of stock. Three wholesale customers had called that week. I was standing on the warehouse floor doing inventory math in my head, trying to figure out how this had happened.

It had happened because I trusted my gut.

---

## The first phase: intuition as a feature

For the first few years, gut feel genuinely worked. I knew my products and my customers. I could walk the floor and sense when something was off -- too much of one thing, suspiciously little of another. When we were shipping a couple of containers a year, that instinct felt like a superpower.

Then the business grew. By year ten we were moving 75+ containers annually across three warehouses. My brain -- the same brain that had built the business from scratch -- couldn't hold it all anymore.

I'd think I remembered how many units of a specific SKU we had in a specific location. I'd swear I did. I was wrong a lot. The vase situation was just the moment I stopped being able to look away.

---

## The spreadsheet phase

My first fix was Excel. Color-coded tabs, pivot tables, three people supposed to update "the master file."

Within a month we had three master files, none of which matched. By Wednesday afternoon the Monday numbers were stale. A formula error meant we thought we had 400 units of something we actually had 40 of. And there was no history -- when a number looked wrong, you had no way to know who'd changed it or why.

I was spending more time managing the spreadsheet than managing the inventory. And I was still getting surprised by stockouts.

---

## The software phase (and why it wasn't enough)

Next came inventory apps. The problem wasn't software quality -- it was that none of them gave me the full picture. Sales data in one place. Purchase orders in another. Warehouse stock in a third. Connecting the dots was still my job. The tools had digitized my chaos but hadn't solved it.

The deeper issue: most inventory software shows you a number. "You have 500 units of SKU-2847." That number is close to useless on its own.

What I actually needed to know: at my current sales velocity, with my supplier's real lead time (not the one they quoted me), will I run out before the next shipment lands?

That's a completely different question. And no count in a dashboard answered it.

---

## What "tracking everything" actually meant

When I started building VNDLY, I spent a lot of time thinking about what information I'd wished I had during those years. A few things kept coming up.

Stock trajectory, not stock levels. 500 units today means nothing if you're selling 50 a day and your supplier takes three weeks. The question is always "when will this run out?" -- not "how many do I have?"

Actual lead times, not promised ones. Every supplier tells you two weeks. Very few consistently deliver in two weeks. If you plan purchases based on promises, you will run out of stock. Repeatedly.

Sales velocity, not just volume. 100 units sold in December is a very different signal from 100 units spread across the year. You need to know which products are accelerating and which are fading -- not just the totals.

Landed cost, not factory cost. A product might cost $12 from the factory but arrive at $18.50 after freight, duties, and handling. That's not a rounding error. That's the difference between a profitable SKU and one that quietly bleeds you.

The stock trajectory piece -- knowing when you'll run out rather than just how many you have -- turned out to be one of the first things early users kept asking for. People had clearly lived this pain. We built it before almost anything else.

---

## Three things to do before you touch any software

If any of this sounds familiar, here's what I'd suggest first:

Pick your top 20 SKUs. Not everything. Just the products driving most of your revenue. Track their weekly sales, current stock, and your supplier's average lead time -- not the promised one, the actual one from the last few orders.

Calculate a simple reorder point. (Weekly sales x lead time in weeks) + a safety buffer. When stock hits that point, order. No gut required.

Review monthly. Compare what you projected to what actually happened. Were lead times accurate? Did sales match expectations? The goal isn't a perfect forecast -- it's a slightly less wrong one each month.

That discipline alone will break the worst patterns. Software accelerates it, but you have to build the habit first.

---

## What's still hard

The honest part: even with better systems, I still get surprised. A supplier changes their lead time without telling you. A product picks up in a region you weren't watching. A slow mover suddenly starts moving.

Systems don't eliminate surprises. They make it so that when a surprise happens, you have the data to understand it and react faster. You're still making guesses -- you're just making better-informed ones.

The gut isn't worthless either. I still use mine. But now it's a starting point for investigation, not a final answer. The difference between "I think we're low on that SKU" as a reason to look at the data versus "I think we're low on that SKU" as a reason to place an order -- that gap is where a lot of unnecessary mistakes live.

---

I went into more depth on this -- including the specific patterns that cost me the most and how stock projection ended up being one of the foundational pieces of VNDLY -- in the original post: [Why I Stopped Trusting My Gut and Started Tracking Everything](https://www.vndly.io/blog/why-i-stopped-trusting-my-gut-and-started-tracking-everything-2026)

---

Curious where other founders are in this: are you still running primarily on gut feel, or have you built systems that actually changed how you make decisions? And if you made the shift -- what was the first thing you started measuring that genuinely surprised you?

A couple months ago I launched VNDLY - an inventory and sales management platform I built after TradeGecko got shut down. The response was incredible, and I wanted to share what's happened since.

What's new since launch:

VNDLY AI got a massive upgrade
The AI assistant now has 48 custom tools and is available on every single page of the app. It's context-aware - open the Tag Manager, and it knows you're organizing products. Open Purchase Orders, and it suggests reorders based on your actual sales velocity. It doesn't give generic answers. It analyzes YOUR data.

We also shipped a visual drag-and-drop Report Builder — connect measure and dimension nodes to create custom reports without writing a single query.

Product Development Pipeline (PLM)
Track products from idea to launch across 8 phases - with supplier quote comparison, sample tracking, and one-click conversion to products and purchase orders when ready.

B2B Customer Portal
Your wholesale buyers get their own branded portal with a line sheet catalog, live cart, volume pricing, bulk CSV import, self-serve invoicing, order tracking, and direct messaging. No more email chains for reorders.

Page Metrics everywhere
Every major page now has a toggleable metrics panel - 8 mini charts per module (donuts, sparklines, bars) so you see the health of your customers, inventory, orders, and invoices at a glance.

Email campaigns
Built-in audience builder with AND/OR filters, AI email composer, 4 templates, and 10 one-click quick campaigns (reorder reminders, back-in-stock alerts, win-back, new product announcements).

Drag & Drop everything
Tag Manager, Category Manager, Price List assignment, and adding products to orders - all drag-and-drop now.

The 14-day free trial is still available with no credit card required. I'd love your feedback - what should I build next?

https://www.vndly.io

This was the most requested feature since launch. Point your camera at a barcode or tap an NFC tag, and the product comes up instantly. It works offline, scan in a basement warehouse with no signal, sync when you're back online.

I held off shipping this until the sync layer was solid. A scanner that drops scans or creates duplicates is worse than no scanner. So I fixed the foundation first.

We made an awesome video which makes you understand what VNDLY can do for you, and it will only take 1 minute of your time!
https://youtu.be/rxEmeHniwQI

From 2008 - 2021 , I was running a product company in Sweden. We used TradeGecko for everything, inventory, purchase orders, sales orders, invoices. It was perfect for a small team.

Then Intuit acquired it in 2020, rebranded it to "QuickBooks Commerce," and killed it completely in 2022. Over 10,000 businesses were left scrambling.

I tried everything after that. Cin7, powerful but built for enterprise. Zoho Inventory, decent but buried inside an ecosystem of 50 apps. Spreadsheets, we all know how that ends.

Nothing felt like TradeGecko. Simple, clean, built for small product businesses. So in March 2025, I started building VNDLY.

What it does:

• Inventory, sales orders, purchase orders, invoices — all in one place

• Product Development Pipeline, Packing Visualization, Sales & Leads Strategy Planning, a built in Year Wheel and team Chat.

• AI assistant that generates reports, forecasts demand, and spots anomalies

• Multi-location stock tracking with real-time levels

• Multi-currency Price lists, packing lists, PDF exports

• Integrations: Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Squarespace, XERO, Quickbooks, Visma, Fortnox, Shippo, EasyPost, Sendcloud, etc.

• Starts at $49/mo with a 14-day free trial

The twist: I'm not a seasoned developer. I built the entire thing using my limited knowledge and AI tools like Claude and openAI. I'm a designer and business guy who learned to ship software with AI as my co-pilot and I have learnt a lot the past year for sure.

I sold my previous company in 2021 and after some Real Estate business ventures I am now I'm going solo on this. No funding, no team, just me and a laptop in Stockholm.

Where I'm at:

• Live at vndly.io

• Just launched on Product Hunt

• Podcast running (VNDLY Insights on Spotify)

• Blog, posting articles every weekday.

• Currently working on marketing strategies, google ads, reddit ads, etc.

I'd love feedback from anyone who's dealt with inventory management pain. And if you're a TradeGecko refugee, I built this for you.