The Day I Realized My Gut Was Lying to Me About My Own Business
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.
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## 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.
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## 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.
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## 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.
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## 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.
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## 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.
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## 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.
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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)
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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?
