About Us
The Listernaut story started in 2021, when two former co-workers, Jeff Kaplan and Bert Leffel, met over lunch to catch up. The friends had gotten acquainted at a previous employer in 2018 and their sons played high school rugby together. Prior to meeting Bert, Jeff and Melissa Shepherd had successfully exited from an e-commerce business in 2019, named Vesalius Health. The company sold medical and physical therapy supplies on Amazon, Walmart, and eBay. The buyer of the company failed and the business was purchased back by Jeff & Melissa in 2021. During their lunch meeting, Jeff asked Bert to join the company as a partner to oversee operations and he accepted. Rocket Enterprises, their first company was born.
The three founders, Melissa, Jeff, and Bert were faced with an elephant of a task. On one hand the business they acquired was full of inventory and the technology solutions were still intact, but functional processes were changed during the transition. On another hand, during Covid Jeff had accumulated three storage units full of inventory purchased from local auctions. On the first opening of their warehouse door, Jeff and Mel asked what are we going to do with all of this? Bert replied that there was only one way to eat an elephant; one bite at a time. They started by auditing the warehouse, added correct quantities and locations and sales went from 7 orders per day on day 1, to 120 orders day 2, to 250 orders day 3, to 305 orders day 4, and continued. They were in the black and profitable in their first 2 weeks.
They continued to sell wholesale medical and physical therapy supplies that they were so successful with prior to the acquisition. They slowly started selling the additional products from their storage units as well. The team was accomplished at selling on Amazon, Walmart, eBay, and Shopify, but knew there was something missing. They started a HiBid online auction account and began selling Jeff’s HotWheels collection in nationwide shipping auctions. They created a sister company called Auctionfuel and sales skyrocketed.
The crew saw so many great products being sold by local auction companies and inquired where they were getting the products. B-Stock was brought to their attention and the company shifted focus to a new purchasing model. B-Stock became the primary source of inventory for the team and they had a new mission, to minimize the footprint of the nation’s largest retailers by selling more, faster.
The business used sales profits to invest in programming a proprietary software that could quickly scan barcodes and push the data to their auction and e-commerce channels. They hired a college student to build the beta version for internal use with an architecture designed by Mark Seidman, on a napkin! Mark came in to talk to the team about his son, an employee of the company who was expressing interest in dropping out of school to become an e-commerce seller. Mark spoke to Jeff and Bert to try and dissuade his son from leaving his Junior year at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business, and just finish the degree. Spoiler alert: he did finish the degree.
The team grew from one 3500 square foot warehouse to three units in the same complex. They kept growing and soon had a 53,000 sq ft warehouse, and another 5000 sq ft across town. They were now anchored to 5 warehouses and eclipsed 30 employees. The challenge was, they were paying out as much as they were making. Overhead was sinking the company, and the software solution could not be completed fast enough. They also faced another major issue, their unit economics. The team was listing 2000 items per day, but unaware of their costs to do so. They ended their first year with over $2,500,000 in top line revenue, but a meager $817 in net profits! Something had to change.
The technology was shared with a group of beta test users in 2022. Through trial and error the team improved the application and hired out a programming company to build the client facing version of the software. When the program was past the minimum viability standards, the team hit a roadblock. Their employees started demanding pay raises, which the company was not
able to offer. Over the course of the following weeks the staff went from 17 catalogers listing 2000 items per day to 3 listers. The team of three was able to list the same volume, saving the company $560,000 in payroll overhead, going straight to the bottom line. This profit was used to bring programming in house.
The team realized that their software could be a transformational solution for companies in similar positions and worked on a SaaS model. In January of 2024, Listernaut was launched for sale to Online Auctioneers and Shopify users. The team invested in AI Computer Vision to list anything that could be photographed. This update was managed by their resident AI expert and fourth partner, Mark Seidman. His experience in Agile Science and AI prompt engineering proved invaluable to the program’s refinement.
The team’s goal was to take a picture and let AI write out the title, description, price, and category to any integrated platforms, like their barcode scan-to-list process. The team set out to create custom AI prompts to write out titles and descriptions in any desired format. This update changed how AI wrote out descriptions for any product type and seller preference. The AI implementation changed their business model almost overnight.
Most recently the team focused on bulk processing multiple items in one upload. The initial goal was to take 500 images, give the system an AI prompt to write out the descriptions and batch process all photos at once. The system was tested with auction clients to work through their needs to arrive at the current version. Today you can take photos in the program and bulk process them all at once, upload bulk photos for processing, and process CSV files for bulk migrations. Millions of items have been processed to date with Listernaut and the team is working toward their mission to recommerce retail returns efficiently and help anyone sell products faster.
If you are looking for a real solution with the backing and experience of a team with over 100,000,000 online transactions, please let the Listernaut team help you achieve your goals. We will share our hurdles to help you avoid the same. We will fill in the gaps with third party software and marketplaces. Our goal is to help every client have a unique advantage over their competition and weather the AI storm. Thank you for reading this and we wish you the very best!
- The Listernaut Team