1. What’s the quick origin story of your brand, and what makes your product or positioning genuinely different from other options in your niche?

Anthony Connelly: Neato started in 2018, when I began selling on Amazon out of my garage and saw firsthand how many strong consumer brands were getting crowded out online by low-quality competition and messy marketplace execution. That experience pushed us to build a different model: we buy inventory directly from brands, become the seller of record, and run the marketplace business end to end.

What makes Neato different is that we are not selling advice or a stack of disconnected services. We own execution across pricing, content, advertising, logistics, reporting, customer service, and brand protection, while the brand keeps strategic control over how it shows up. That creates much tighter alignment than the typical agency, software, or reseller model, since we only win when the underlying retail operation actually performs.

2. Since launch, what have been the 1-2 real turning points for your brand-specific decisions, pivots, or experiments that noticeably changed your growth or profitability-and what did you learn from them?

Anthony Connelly: The first real turning point was moving from wholesale distribution into what became Neato’s 2P model. Founded in 2018 as a wholesale distributor, the business evolved after we saw how difficult it was for brands to manage Amazon while keeping control over pricing, content, and distribution. That shift into second-party commerce, buying inventory directly from brands, becoming the seller of record, taking inventory risk, and running marketplace execution end to end, became the foundation of Neato’s growth. The lesson was that brands did not need another vendor or agency stack. They needed one accountable 2P operator whose economics were tied to performance.

The second turning point was expanding that same model beyond Amazon. As commerce became more fragmented, it became clear that brands could not keep managing marketplaces, social commerce, and DTC as separate silos if they wanted clean economics and real control. That is why we leaned harder into a one-inventory-bank, one-P&L model across channels, supported by new operations centers and Neato’s AI stack. The takeaway was that profitable growth comes from reducing channel complexity and extending the 2P model across channels, not adding more partners to manage it.

3. Which 2-3 channels drive most of your revenue right now (for example SEO, paid social, email, marketplaces, influencers), and what have you learned about making those channels work in your category?

Anthony Connelly: Amazon is still the center of gravity, but the bigger lesson is that no channel works in isolation. Success on Amazon depends on treating it as an operating system, with Buy Box stability, reseller control, catalog quality, pricing, inventory, and ad execution all working together. From there, adjacent marketplaces and social commerce, especially TikTok Shop, become meaningful growth channels only when they run through the same unified model. We have learned that broader distribution works when inventory, reporting, brand standards, and fulfillment stay connected across platforms, so expansion supports margin instead of creating more complexity.

4. How are you thinking about search in 2026 – Google, AI assistants like ChatGPT, and other discovery platforms? What, if anything, have you changed in your content or site to stay visible as AI search grows?

Anthony Connelly: Search is becoming less about a shopper manually scrolling results and more about systems that summarize, compare, rank, and recommend products on the shopper’s behalf. That applies inside Amazon, across Google, and increasingly in AI-led shopping and discovery environments.

What that changes is the bar for visibility. Brands now need cleaner catalog structure, stronger product data, deeper content, better reviews, and tighter operational consistency, since AI-driven discovery rewards complete and trustworthy inputs much more than surface-level optimization. Our response has been to focus less on isolated tactics and more on keeping the entire engine sharp: listings, creative, structured product information, pricing, inventory, and retail media all need to reinforce each other.

5. What do you do to turn first‑time buyers into repeat customers and advocates? Are there specific experiences, content, or community touches that work especially well for you?

Anthony Connelly: For us, repeat growth starts with trust and consistency. The brand experience has to feel controlled across pricing, listings, fulfillment, customer service, and post-purchase interactions, since a broken experience in any one of those areas hurts lifetime value.

We also think a lot about how content and conversion work together. Better creative, stronger product detail pages, cleaner SEO and conversion-focused listings, and ongoing optimization all help first-time buyers understand what they are buying and feel confident buying again. On newer channels, especially social commerce, advocacy grows when content feels native and community-led rather than overproduced. That is why we are investing in creator programs, affiliate models, and live formats that let discovery and trust build together.

6. If you had to write a short playbook for an ecommerce founder one stage behind you, what would you double down on over the next 12 months – and what would you stop doing entirely?

Anthony Connelly: I would double down on operational clarity. Get very honest about contribution margin, channel economics, inventory flow, and who actually owns the outcome. I would also focus on building one connected commerce engine instead of treating Amazon, DTC, social commerce, and other marketplaces like unrelated projects.

I would stop adding vendors every time a new problem appears. Too many brands try to solve complexity with more dashboards, more agencies, and more point solutions, and that usually creates more handoffs instead of better performance. The businesses that win are the ones that simplify the system, tighten accountability, and make faster decisions with fewer blind spots.