SWFA retained my company, Enter360, as their ad agency, but a legacy back office system was blocking growth. They used Mail Order Manager® for their back office and were forced to use SiteLINK®, Dydacomp’s proprietary ASP storefront. It was near impossible to customize, expensive to host, had terrible SEO, and crashed during migrations or during even moderate traffic. I recognized a broader market opportunity: many retailers needed a migration path out of SiteLink into an enterprise-level solution they could host on their own servers.
While my teams kept SWFA’s marketing and e-commerce operation moving, I financed a dedicated 18-month product initiative and defined the vision, business requirements, migration strategy, user experience, roadmap, budgets, and commercial model. I led the engineering and creative teams through delivery as they reverse-engineered the legacy data structure and built an ASP.NET and SQL Server platform that let retailers replace the storefront first, preserve critical back-office workflows, and migrate fully when ready.
SWFA became Umbilical’s anchor. Once launched, sales accelerated immediately, rising from roughly $67,000 per month to an early milestone of $3 million per month in a matter of months. Over the next six years, I led continued product development, turning recurring SWFA challenges into paid modules for other retailers, expanding Umbilical into a standalone product, and ultimately selling the software.
Product Model
Founder-funded commercial software developed through Enter360, launched with an anchor client, then licensed through deployments with paid modules and implementation support.
Role
Founder, Owner & Executive Product Lead
Scope
Product vision; migration and business-process strategy; UX; roadmap; financial planning; cross-functional team leadership; commercialization; and sale.
SWFA retained my company, Enter360, as their ad agency, but a legacy back office system was blocking growth. They used Mail Order Manager for their back office and were forced to use SiteLINK, Dydacomp’s proprietary APS storefront. It was near impossible to customize, expensive to host, had terrible SEO, and crashed during migrations or during even moderate traffic. I recognized a broader market opportunity: many retailers needed a migration path out of SiteLink into an enterprise-level solution they could host on their own servers.
While my teams kept SWFA’s marketing and e-commerce operation moving, I financed a dedicated 18-month product initiative and defined the vision, business requirements, migration strategy, user experience, roadmap, budgets, and commercial model. I led the engineering and creative teams through delivery as they reverse-engineered the legacy data structure and built an ASP.NET and SQL Server platform that let retailers replace the storefront first, preserve critical back-office workflows, and migrate fully when ready.
SWFA became Umbilical’s anchor. Once launched, sales accelerated immediately, rising from roughly $67,000 per month to an early milestone of $3 million per month in a matter of months. Over the next six years, I led continued product development, turning recurring SWFA challenges into paid modules for other retailers, expanding Umbilical into a standalone product, and ultimately selling the software.
Product Model
Founder-funded commercial software developed through Enter360, launched with an anchor client, then licensed through deployments with paid modules and implementation support.
Role
Founder, Owner & Executive Product Lead
Scope
Product vision; migration and business-process strategy; UX; roadmap; financial planning; cross-functional team leadership; commercialization; and sale.
For companies already on Mail Order Manager, Umbilical replaced the fragile SiteLINK storefront without forcing a back-office migration. They kept the workflows they depended on and gained a faster, customizable, search-friendly storefront, web-side order access, and a clear path off the legacy system whenever they were ready.
Once the integration model was proven, I expanded Umbilical into a standalone storefront and back-office platform for companies ready to leave legacy systems behind, or starting fresh. That turned Umbilical from one client’s fix into a flexible enterprise e-commerce platform with room for paid modules and future growth.
I designed Umbilical to grow with each customer. Every recurring retail problem became an optional paid module, so each client could add only what their business needed.
Umbilical grew out of a years-long partnership with SWFA, where I helped scale their online business to $3 million a month. We built it for that anchor client, commercialized it under the Umbilical name, expanded it over about seven years, and I later sold it.
