The Million Dollar Cane Toad Story

About three years ago, I walked into a burger place in Springwood to meet this guy who owned two massive warehouses in Brisbane, packed with ute accessories he was trying to sell online. A mutual customer had put us in touch after getting frustrated trying to buy a bull bar from his website. 'You need to talk to this guy,' he'd told him, probably after spending twenty minutes hunting for a part that should've taken two clicks to find. So we exchanged numbers and decided our journey would start over burgers and hot chips.

"My website's a disaster," he told me over burgers that grew cold as we talked. "They [the shop system company] sold me this supposedly bespoke automotive template in 2017. Four years later, half the pages still have 'lorem ipsum' placeholder text."

He was making around thousand dollars a month with his own online shop while his ebay shop buzzed like a bee's nest but also eating him alive with evergrowing fees. He saw a dead-end.

I saw something else, though. I saw this massive, beautiful puzzle that nobody had bothered to solve properly.

The Problem Everyone Ignored

Think about it: You've got a passionate community of ute owners who love their vehicles. They spend their weekends on them – tinkering, modifying, personalising. But when they wanted to buy parts? They had to wade through generic catalogs, squinting at terrible photos and guessing whether something will actually fit their 2019 Ford Ranger Wildtrak.

It was insane. We wouldn't accept that experience buying new power tools, let alone something that costs thousands and needs to be perfect.

So we started obsessing. Not just about the website, but about the entire experience. The first breakthrough was realising that NETO's admin system was the bottleneck. It took several seconds to render a single page, and we all know that nobody has enough patience to browse a website that's as slow as a snail in winter. Trying to create proper product pages was like performing heart surgery with oven mitts – you simply couldn't set up the content for the experience that customers deserved.

Building the Foundation

So we bit the bullet and built our own. One with a custom admin panel where his team could create new products in minutes instead of hours, upload and optimise dozens of product photos instantly, and – most importantly – assign vehicle make, model, and trim data with a few clicks, instead of wrestling with clunky dropdown menus for twenty minutes per product.

That admin system became the foundation for everything else: vehicle filters that actually work, content-rich product pages with real specifications. The ability to clone similar products and have them live in minutes. Without solving that backend puzzle piece first, none of the customer-facing magic would have been possible.

Nobody knew this company outside of eBay, so we really started from scratch here. And that customer chat? That's not some "first line of defense". Nope, that's the first good impression we were fighting for.

But here's what quickly gets forgotten about, just because it's not measured in numbers: the human interaction that's such an essential part of our journey. We spent weeks together with the warehouse team figuring out the right language, learning from mistakes on how to handle difficult situations with customers, trying to turn around the ship that seemed to go off course.

The Late Night WhatsApp Sessions

The owner of Cane Toad Equipment and I developed this rhythm where we'd WhatsApp each other at the end of the day, just after dinner, before settling in for a movie. New ideas, small challenges, customer feedback that needed solving. I can't count how many times I'd tell my partner "give me twenty minutes" and end up coding until midnight, because I could see the quality and potential in what he was asking for. Movies got postponed. A lot. (I'm still making it up to her…)

We'd drive out to their warehouse, camera in hand, photographing new products, understanding how they actually fit different vehicles. Because you can't fake authenticity. Customers know when you've actually held the product, when you understand what works on their truck.

Building More Than Just an eCommerce Site

From day one, we knew we weren't just building an ecommerce site. We were creating something with heart. A community hub. A place that could help turn their vision of their beloved vehicle into reality, and where they felt like they belonged. The Showroom feature where customers share their builds. The color-matching tool that helps them visualise their dream setup. The vehicle-specific pages that speak their language. These weren't afterthoughts, they were always part of the bigger picture, because we knew that including the customers in the story from the very beginning was the only way to build something that fundamentally mattered.

The Million Dollar Milestone

Crossing that $1M milestone is pretty neat, but the real fun is in all the technical puzzles we're still solving. Every customer conversation shows us new ways we can make the user interface more elegant or optimise the interaction with the system. We genuinely get excited thinking about the algorithms we could write for better vehicle matching, or how we could automate the image matching by implementing machine learning algorithms. This community has been stuck with these clunky, poorly architected systems for way too long. They deserve solutions that are engineered with the same care they put into building their rigs.

$1M is a milestone, but not the destination. The real journey is reshaping how a whole community shops, connects, and builds together.

That's what drives me and my vision for Vendos. One million dollars doesn't mean we've 'made it.' It means we've got one million reasons to keep listening, keep building, and keep putting community first. The first million proved we were solving the right puzzle. The next million will prove we can solve it better than anyone else.