The RocketShift Origin Story

I've owned The UPS Store locations for over 20 years. In that time, I've seen it all and done it all. Top to bottom. Cleaned the toilets, vacuumed the floor, helped tens of thousands of customers at the counter, reconciled QuickBooks, made many schedules using paper, spreadsheets, and apps. I've also taken so many inventories of our stock to know what to bring to the store. Hired many employees and yes, even fired a few. All of this and far too much more to mention has given me a lot of insight into small business operations.

One thing I have often wanted over the years was an easier way to take inventory and restock our stores (yes, my brother and I now own two stores our first we purchased in 2004 and our second in 2013). I consider myself very technically savvy. I've held titles like Network Systems Engineer, Network Security Analyst, and even Web Designer in previous employment lives. I'm very capable with spreadsheets and that's what we switched to after a few years of just having the employees write what was needed down on a sheet of paper and text the image to us. Spreadsheets and specifically Google Sheets were a nice upgrade. We used an Apple iPad in the stores and the employees would take inventory using the Google Sheet, my brother and I could then open the same, shared sheet on our iPhones. That worked for a few years, but I still longed for an easier, more elegant technical solution.

Then a few years ago, I started learning to program on the side (who does that, right?). I took a number of tutorials in the JavaScript, Python, and Swift languages. I started to feel very comfortable with programming. I'd always wanted to learn how. I then thought I would take on the task of building an inventory app using a JavaScript framework so I'd have the web app built and then I'd try to build an iOS app for the iPad and iPhone in Swift. Man, did I ever bite off more than I could chew! I worked through a video tutorial to build a standard inventory app and it took me over a week. It was very challenging building a program that large. Multiple pages of code. By the time I was finished, I had come to the realization that, yes, I had a working prototype, but that I didn't really have the skill to customize it to our unique requirements or use case. I set it aside and moved on.

Then, this past February 2026, I heard of a new open source software that was causing quite a stir in the AI or Artificial Intelligence world. I stay up on tech pretty well and heard it was pretty amazing, but still early days, very "wild west". Which I loved the idea of as I'd been a fan of Linux since the late 90's. I had already messed around with ChatGPT some when it had made a stir a few years ago. It was very impressive, but it was "captive" in a web browser and was great for asking questions and chatting, but it couldn't really do anything. Then came OpenClaw, touted as "The AI that really does things." Oh yeah, I had to check that out!

After doing some research, watching some YouTube videos, I downloaded and installed it. It was very rough in the beginning. It definitely gave me the same vibes Linux gave me back in the day. Very rough around the edges. Very much a do-it-yourself project and it was getting a lot of mixed opinions. Normal for anything that causes such a ruckus. After a few days of using it though, I asked my OpenClaw agent, Eve, if she could build me an inventory app for our The UPS Store locations. She said that she could and as I had been learning, I tried to give her plenty of direction and context in my prompts. We got to work.

Over a weekend, our usable inventory web app was completed and it was pretty well customized for our stores and what I thought we needed. I was blown away! It/Eve, made me laugh out loud numerous times in amazement at what would appear on my screen as I'd hit the browser refresh button. It was astonishing the speed at which she could work. Doing in a few days what had taken me so long to do before.

As we had taken a mobile first approach, or building the web app with mobile use in mind, making the app responsive and looking good regardless of what size screen was being used to view it made it very capable for us to use in our stores quickly. We used the app for a few weeks and Eve fixed many bugs. We constantly worked on it, grinding rough edges and polishing. It was starting to really turn into something nice.

It then occurred to me, why stop there? At the time, we were paying a company $160 per month, $80 per store, to use an app that I was now thinking Eve could easily build the functionality to match what we were paying for, so we got started. Eve and I were just referring to the new app loosely as SuperApp because that's what I had in mind. Building an app that could do anything our stores could want. Scheduling, Time Clock, Timesheets, Task Management, and so much more!

Well, we've been through so much in the months since we really got started back in March of 2026. I originally had in mind that this SuperApp would just be for our two stores. I then started thinking that other The UPS Store franchisees might want something that is effectively custom designed to help our stores. I then spoke with a couple of trusted friends who asked, "Why are you limiting yourself and this app to just The UPS Stores?" I didn't have a good answer. I was on a long road trip at the time and had a lot of highway miles to drive, or have my Tesla Cybertruck drive using Full Self Driving, so I had many miles on the interstate to think a lot about what I was doing and why.

I came to the conclusion that they had a great point, so I then broadened my scope and that's how RocketShift was born. Eve and I continue to build whatever I dream up or whatever becomes very apparent that we need. I have two amazing store managers that are constantly give me feedback when something isn't working quite right, or that they'd like it to work differently, and then they test it. Daily. And we're still building, informed by day-to-day operations in real stores.