Founding Story Series

1. I Started Detailing Cars at 13. Here's How That Led to Building An AI Company.

2. From Frankenstein to Rankenstein: How we grew Gateway Auto from $3M to $11M

3. We built the wrong thing for eight months before pivoting into Service Stories

4. The Domain In Neon Lights

For the past month I'd been at Gateway Auto full time, banging my head against the same problem I'd been circling for years: how do you create long-tail SEO content at scale for a service business without it sounding like a robot ran a find-and-replace on a template? I'd tried mapping every year, make, and model we'd ever serviced. I'd drafted programmatic frameworks. I'd pushed the idea to interns, to Alex, to anyone who would listen. None of it felt right.

Then I stopped trying to build a system and just watched what was already happening. Our guys came in every morning. They diagnosed cars. They fixed things. They wrote it all up in Tekmetric when they were done. They'd been doing that for years. Every repair order was already a story — a specific vehicle, a specific problem, a specific solution that nobody had written about in exactly that way before. All I had to do was figure out how to get it out.

When I tested the first batch of repair orders through an AI model and saw what came back, it felt like finding something that had been sitting right in front of us the whole time. The pattern worked. The content was genuinely unique. And we had thousands of them waiting.

By June of 2024, we had something. We just weren't sure yet what to call it.

The Guest Who Changed Everything

We had been running the LeadFoot Automotive Podcast for a while by then interviewing executives, operators, investors, people who'd already built something in the industry. Honestly, we loved it. There's something about sitting down with someone for a great conversation. We were learning, connecting, and staying close to the people who would eventually matter most to what we were building.

In June, we had Antonio Davila booked on the show. He was an early investor in Shopmonkey (along with a golden list of others), had helped run his own family shop in LA, and was exactly the kind of person we'd built the show around — someone who got the industry, had skin in the game, and had the kind of energy that makes a conversation go somewhere real.

We did the pre-show chat the way we always did. Caught up, traded notes, started talking about what we'd been working on.

We never recorded the episode.

What was supposed to be a podcast turned into a live demo for something we hadn't finished building yet, and he immediately got it in a way that stopped us cold. He wanted to know how we were doing it. He wanted to know how he could be involved. By the time we would have normally been hitting record, we were talking about him becoming a customer.

A week later, Antonio became our first paying customer, and the proof point that changed what kind of company we thought we were building.

Big Market, Better Performance

Up until that moment, we had Gateway Auto in Omaha, Nebraska as our test case. That's a real shop with real data and real results, but it's also my family's business. Of course it worked there. The question every founder has to answer eventually is whether the thing works somewhere they don't control.

Antonio gave us Los Angeles.

Think about what that comparison actually meant: a shop in the middle of Omaha, Nebraska where competitors barely have any idea what AI search is, and a shop in one of the most competitive auto markets in the country, thousands of miles apart, completely different customer bases, different competitive landscapes, different everything. One product. Two proof points that couldn't be more different.

The Question Nobody Warned Us About

Here's the problem we ran into that I didn't see coming: we knew the best way to sign up more auto shops was to go local, knock on doors, sit across the desk from an owner and show them the product. It's personal, it's tactile, it's a handshake business.

But traveling city to city is expensive and slow. And there was another wrinkle — one that felt almost too obvious to say out loud, but we had to say it anyway: we were developing this thing inside my family's auto shop. Were we really going to turn around and sell the same competitive advantage to shops across the street?

We sat with that tension for a while. We decided the answer was no, we wouldn't sell to anyone else locally for at least 12 months. Instead, we started asking a different question entirely. What if our work doesn't have to be limited to the  automotive industry?

Service Stories Was Born

Alex had been doing SEO for other companies for years so he started working his network of service businesses. Within a few months we had commtiments from a creative agency, a heavy duty trucking mechanic center, a plumber, and a chiropractor.

None of these were cold calls. They were warm. That mattered because what we were really testing wasn't whether we could close a deal, it was whether the pattern held outside the automotive industry.

Every single one of them had the same thing that Gateway Auto had: daily work, documented in a system somewhere, sitting completely unused from a content and visibility standpoint. The creative agency had project notes and client outcomes documented in their statements fo work. The trucking company had repair orders just like Gateway and Euro-Tech did. The chiropractor had patient care notes. The dentist had procedure records and treatment schedules. None of them were thinking about any of it as content. All of it was.

Within about a month, we were doubling pre-sales month over month.

We'd be using the name Repair Stories and it was really starting to feel wrong. Not because anything was broken, but because we were outgrowing it in real time. After enough calls, the pattern became impossible to ignore: the framework we had built didn't belong to one industry. It belonged to an entire class of business that had been generating its own content every single day and never knowing it.

We were no longer Repair Stories. We were Service Stories.

The Domain In Neon Lights

Our first thought: check for domains. Nobody owned servicestories dot com. That surprised us. A domain like that — short, descriptive, exactly what it does — should have been sitting on an aftermarket site for $10,000 or $20,000 or more. But it wasn't. It was available. And we bought it for $3,000 without a second thought.

That's one of the most expensive domains I've ever purchased. It's also one of the easiest decisions I've ever made. When you've spent years in SEO and digital marketing, you develop a feel for what a domain is worth — not its price, but its value. A name that tells you exactly what a product does, in plain language, is not a branding exercise. It's a business asset. It became worth more than $3,000 the moment we typed in the credit card number.

The name made it real in a way that everything else hadn't quite yet. We had a concept. We had proof it worked. We had paying customers across industries. We had month-over-month growth before we'd even launched a real product.

And now we had the name.

Service Stories was born somewhere between a canceled podcast, a family auto shop in Omaha, a shop in Los Angeles, and the moment we realized we'd been thinking too small the whole time.

Next: The hot streak. From September through October, everything started to accelerate — and it felt like we couldn't lose. We'll tell you about that next, and why that feeling matters more in retrospect than it did at the time.

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