Kyle Hency keeps churning out new businesses.
After co-founding Chubbies Shorts in San Francisco in 2011 and then moving it to Austin in 2019, he went on to co-found a software startup focused on retail returns called Loop Returns in 2016. It was an instance of an entrepreneur building a new startup to solve a problem he encountered in his prior startup.
Now, Hency and two other co-founders, Dave Wardell and John Gully, are back with a new company called GoodDay Software, which is focused on enterprise resource planning, or ERP. The startup, which announced a $6 million seed round May 8, pitches itself as an easy-to-use interface to help brands manage inventories.
It's yet another case of a founder seeing a new business opportunity after not finding the right solution off the shelf.
"When evaluating an investment in ERP at Chubbies, we were advised to go with the least bad of all the bad options. We knew there had to be a better way," Hency stated. "Starting GoodDay is directly inspired by our experiences at Chubbies and Loop Returns. As former brand operators, we experienced these pain points directly. Like Loop, GoodDay represents how we can help (thousands) of other brands avoid these challenges and scale through them more efficiently."
To jumpstart the company, GoodDay raised the $6 million seed round, led by FirstMark, Ridge Ventures and Flex Capital.
Like Hency, fellow GoodDay co-founders Dave Wardell and John Gully have experience in the space.
Wardell co-founded Loop Returns with Hency, and he also held senior finance roles at Chubbies, including chief financial officer, for a couple of years before becoming its president from 2021 to 2022. The period included Chubbies' acquisition by Dallas-area company Solo Stove in 2021.
Gully, meanwhile, is GoodDay's chief technology officer. He was previously a senior engineering lead at Shopify, and, before that, held director level engineering roles with Slalom, a tech consulting firm.
The Shopify experience seems pivotal because one of GoodDay's primary pitches is that its operating system embeds directly into Shopify.
In addition to the co-founders, GoodDay has set up an advisory group that includes former Shopify execs, as well as execs from Chubbies and Austin-based boot company Tecovas.
