This is what Collected North runs on as of October 2026, and what each piece is for. It will change, and when it does this page changes with it. The second half is what we tried and dropped, which I suspect is the more useful half.

Selling

Shopify is the store you are standing in, on the Broadcast theme. It handles checkout, Ohio sales tax, and shipping priced from the real weight and box size of each piece, which is why every item gets weighed the day it is listed. Orders over $250 ship free.

Klaviyo does the email: both newsletters (The Journey and The Build), every signup form on this site, the welcome emails and the shipping email. Shopify still sends the order confirmation, since our plan doesn't let us turn it off, and it would send its own shipping notice too, so we switch that off one order at a time when we buy the label. Klaviyo's marketing mail goes out from hello.collectednorth.com and its order mail from orders.collectednorth.com, so a bad day for one does not bruise the reputation of the other.

Metricool schedules Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest for Collected North, and Instagram for Anneteex, from one place. We are on the Advanced plan, because it lets Anne have her own login and approve her own Anneteex posts before they go out, and because it holds more brands than the two we need today. What actually decided it is that Metricool has an official connector, so the automation can draft a different post for each account and read the daily follower and engagement numbers without a browser involved anywhere. Product tags on Instagram still get added by hand, one search per post, which is the one step I have not found a way around.

Money

Mercury is the only bank. We keep six accounts there rather than one: operating, sourcing (with its own card that travels to Denmark), a receipts account that Shopify pays into, a capital reserve, and two tax accounts, one holding Ohio sales tax in trust and one setting aside member income tax. Money gets sorted by which account it lands in before anyone has to think about a category.

QuickBooks Online, on the Plus tier, keeps the books and the inventory. Every piece we buy is its own inventory item at its own cost, FIFO, carrying the same SKU it has in Shopify. Plus is the floor because our CPA wants inventory tracked properly, and the cheaper tiers do not do it.

receipts@collectednorth.com is an email address rather than software, and it does more work than anything else on this page. Every receipt gets sent there: emailed invoices forwarded as they arrive, paper receipts photographed on the spot (a Danish dealer's handwritten slip included). An automation logs each one, matches it against the bank feed, and hands it to QuickBooks for review. The bank rules in QuickBooks are written only against charge descriptors we have actually seen, and nothing posts automatically.

Mike Wagner, CPA is a one-person practice in Cincinnati that also does the books for my advisory business. He is the reason inventory accounting is in the stack at all.

Legal and paperwork

Vorys formed the LLC (Delaware, registered as a foreign LLC in Ohio) and reviewed the store policies. Trademark Engine handled the USPTO filing for the Collected North mark, an intent-to-use application that converts once we have sales to show. The Ohio vendor's licence is a Hamilton County one, effective October 1, which is the date nothing on this site could take money before.

Running the business

Claude, from Anthropic, is the part of the stack that lets two people run the rest of it. I built a set of skills that run on a schedule. Every night, one files whatever landed in the document inbox, another logs the day's email and conversations, and the rest capture receipts, check spending against the controller rules, turn the day's signals into to-dos and write the diary. Once a week, one reconciles Mercury against the receipt log against QuickBooks and another scores the business against the targets for its current stage; once a month, one re-baselines operating expenses. They reach Shopify, Klaviyo, QuickBooks, Mercury, Gmail, Todoist, Evernote and the social tools through connectors, and a separate nightly audit reports on whether the others did their jobs. The signup forms on this site were configured through it as well.

Google Workspace carries the email and the group aliases (hello@, orders@, receipts@ and a few more), and Google Voice carries the business line, (513) 202-3642.

Cloudflare is the registrar and the DNS for collectednorth.com.

Todoist holds the to-do list, most of which the automation writes. Evernote holds the diary. Superhuman is the mail client. Plaud is the voice recorder that goes to dealer meetings, so the conversation is on record without anyone taking notes.

Notion joined the stack this month: a shared home for documents Anne and I both need to get into (SOPs, brand standards, legal, strategy) that used to live in Drive folders only I could open. There is room in the plan for a couple of small databases too, mirroring receipts and live inventory status out of QuickBooks and Shopify rather than replacing either, mostly so both of us can look something up fast. The workspace exists; moving everything into it does not, yet.

Dropbox takes over the product photography in November, after the Denmark trip; until then it sits in Drive along with everything else. The move is really about Notion: a wiki page can link out to a folder of photos without Notion ever hosting the files itself, so the pictures need a home outside it before the document migration can work the way we want.

Wispr Flow is dictation: talk instead of type, wherever I am writing. It also keeps meeting notes and a running scratchpad, which is where a stray thought goes when I do not want to stop and open something else.

Slack is where customer support gets worked. Whatever arrives at orders@ or hello@, or on the business line, gets sorted out there between the two of us, and the store will post its order and stock alerts into it once that wiring is done. Customers never see Slack; they write to orders@ and hear back from orders@. We ran it on the free trial for a month before paying for it (Pro, month to month), which is the order I would rather do that in.

Walter AI checks whether a draft reads like a person wrote it. It was used to tune the voice the automation writes in, and it still gets a vote.

Measuring

Google Analytics runs on Google's own tag, which went into the theme on September 23. The custom pixel we started with in early September still handles the checkout steps, because Shopify sandboxes checkout and the normal tag does not reach it there. This is the newest part of the stack and the least settled, and I have spent more time since it went in checking whether the numbers are true than looking at them.

Search Console is the other half of that, and the more useful one right now. Before anyone is buying, what people searched to end up here tells you more than how long they stayed once they arrived.

OpenRush ($30 a month) is how the automation reads both of those. It is an API layer over Search Console and Analytics built to be queried by software rather than opened by a person, which is the shape of the problem here: the nightly review needs numbers it can score, not a dashboard somebody has to remember to look at. It does the keyword and competitor work the weekly business review uses as well.

Looker Studio is the human half of the same data, and it is not built yet. The intention is one page putting the launch funnel (sessions, signups, orders) next to the social numbers, so there is something to look at that is not a Slack message. OpenRush and Looker are not alternatives to each other, which took me longer to see than it should have: one is for the automation to read and one is for us.

Making things

Adobe Creative Cloud handles photo editing and Final Cut Pro handles video. The brand photography was shot by a crew of four in August; the pieces in the shop get photographed by us, under the same rules.

A Brother QL-1110NWB label printer prints the shipping labels and the inventory tags, each with a QR code, so one printer covers both ends of the basement pack-and-ship station. The boxes come from customboxes.io in three sizes, printed on four sides with the wordmark and a QR code, and 95% of what we sell fits in the smallest two.

What we tried and dropped

Hootsuite. It ran our social for the first month, on the Professional plan, and as a scheduler it did the job. The trouble was getting software to work with it. Hootsuite's own connector can make drafts, but it cannot add a product tag or a collaborator, and the analytics it exposes need the Enterprise plan, which a business our size has no reason to be on. So the nightly numbers were being read off report pages in a signed-in browser on the Mac mini, and every time Hootsuite signed itself out (two nights running at the end of September) a night of numbers went missing. Metricool does the same scheduling, hands the automation the numbers directly, and costs a fraction of what Hootsuite does. The Hootsuite year is paid through next September and is not refundable, so its inbox keeps logging comments and messages until something of our own replaces it; the plan is not to renew.

Wise. The plan was to hold Danish kroner for buying trips. Wise could not offer a DKK-denominated account to a US LLC and had no US business cards, so there was nothing left for it to do that Mercury did not already do.

Dext. This was for receipt capture. It was signed up, looked at, and dropped the same day, because the receipts@ pipeline above already covered everything Dext would have done. It got reopened once that week on a mistaken belief and set aside again by evening.

Buffer. This was the other social scheduler on the shortlist. Hootsuite's Professional plan gave unlimited accounts on a single seat, and that was the deciding line. That held up as a reason for about a month.

OpenPhone. It had the better feature list on paper (shared inbox, auto-attendant, business-hours routing). Google Voice sits inside the Workspace we already pay for, and one line is all a two-person business needs for now.

Originality.ai. I signed up to test whether the writing coming out of the automation reads as human. Once the voice was tuned, running two checkers was one too many, and Walter AI was the one that stayed. I cancelled it in August and declined the retention offer.

Fieldy. This was a wearable recorder. It was retired at the end of August; the Plaud does the same job and its transcripts are what the conversation log now reads.

Three larger accounting firms. We had conversations lined up with three Cincinnati firms and a question list ready to ask each of them. We closed the evaluation before asking, on a referral to a one-person CPA practice that could take both businesses.

Freight forwarders and customs brokers. Five Danish forwarders and four US brokers were shortlisted before the first trip. None of them is needed at the scale we will operate for the first year, which is smalls rather than furniture, so the list is filed and not acted on.

GoDaddy, as registrar. The DNS was already at Cloudflare, so collectednorth.com moved there too; the defensive domains stayed where they were.