The So Shiny Story

It started with a donkey

Our living room. A massive hand-me-down couch, my wife and me on either end, the two boys wedged in the middle. On the screen, a green ogre is yelling at a talking donkey. We were watching Shrek for something like the fiftieth time.

If you have seen it, you know Donkey. Anything bright pulls him right off task. Sparkles. Glitter. A dragon's teeth, which he stops to compliment in the middle of a rescue, with the dragon still attached.

Every time Donkey saw something bright, he announced it.

Then little five-year-old baby Kevin, who is 6'3" now, said it back in the cutest voice a small boy has ever produced.

"So shiny."

Then again. "So shiny, so shiny, so shiny." Pointing at the TV.

Alex, our over-energetic eight-year-old, picked it up. Yelling "So shiny!" at his mom, then at me, then at the TV. Both of them launched off the couch and started dancing on the coffee table, the same coffee table we had reinforced earlier that year after one of them broke a leg off it.

The four of us started laughing. Actually lost it. The contagious kind, where somebody gasps for breath, everyone looks over, and it sets the whole room off again. Everything becomes funny.

That was the moment. I just did not know it yet.

Then Sunday breakfast

We went out to eat after church that Sunday, and the boys were still at it. Pointing at everything in the restaurant. Saying "So shiny."

The chrome on the napkin holder. So shiny. A spoon. The waitress's horn-rimmed glasses. "So shiny." My brand new iPhone, a thing that had existed for about six months at that point and looked like it came from the future. "So shiny."

That is when it dawned on me. That would be a great domain name.

soshiny.com

No master plan. No strategy. Two kids on a coffee table and a whim. And a data plan that had just been refreshed with 2GB of internet usage. Let's go.

It was January 7, 2008. Snow on the ground, single digits outside, a Western New York winter doing what it does. I bought a domain about warmth and sunshine on one of the coldest days of the year. That part still makes me laugh.

Finding a high value domain lying around unclaimed was a lot easier back then, and boy, I did not realize how valuable it would become.

As it turns out, So Shiny is my superpower

I have a problem with being distracted easily. There, I admitted it.

Growing up in Ireland they called it high energy. In America they call it ADHD. Got to love those labels.

My new high school teachers in Lancaster, New York thought my high energy, so shiny distraction mode was a real problem. A shiny thing crossed my path and I was gone, three tangents deep, wondering what happened to the afternoon. Somewhere along the way I stopped apologizing for it.

Not one of my companies started with a long, drawn-out plan. Every one of them started with a shiny thing I could not get out of my head. Paper menu selling in a finance office led me to build the first digital F&I menu selling tool, called eBusiness Manager. Paying for window stickers on used cars led me to build a used car inventory management tool that helped the West Herr Auto Group dominate in Western New York. A day at an auction led me to create an auction software system called Auction Simplified. And now, a seat on the board of a homeowners association led me to build what I believe is the best HOA software out there.

So yes, sometimes I think I am the donkey in this story. I made my peace with that a long time ago.

Which brings us back to the domain. As I mentioned, I bought soshiny.com in 2008 and then, as is typical with people like me, did absolutely nothing with it. For 18 freak'n years.

It renewed every year like a gym membership I kept meaning to use. I passed it in my domain list a hundred times. Every so often I would stop, look at it, and think, someday that is going to be perfect for something. Then I would close the tab and go back to work.

Let's face it, eighteen years is a long time to hold a punchline. When I finally used it, it was for one of the most important projects of my life. Here is how that happened.

The tangent that got out of hand, like always

Mary and I bought a condo in the Daytona and Ormond Beach area of Florida. Then, like most people chasing something shiny, I thought it would be a good idea to join the HOA board.

Everybody seemed mad at something. Thirty emails back and forth each day, reiterating things that happened ten years ago. Meanwhile the employees were working their tails off, and nobody seemed to see the effort. Half the room wanted everyone fired, like an episode of The Apprentice. The communication was not there, the organization I was used to was missing, and no one knew who was actually running things.

The dues tracking bothered me, still on pen and paper. The lost repair requests bothered me. Vendors working on the property without insurance bothered me. The file nobody could find bothered me most of all, piles of paper and attachments buried in email.

Every meeting handed me another shiny thing I could not walk past. It was, in a word, overwhelming. So no wonder so many new board members quit in the first six months, or worse, live with the status quo, saying things like "it has always been that way."

So my wife and I brainstormed the idea of homeowners association software as a service. And in a month, I handed the board a rudimentary piece of software, for free.

The next thing anybody knew, I had a team building what may be the best homeowners association software ever made. Biased? Obviously. Right by design? Also yes. The homeowners association mismanagement happened to me first. The software came after, built to fix exactly that.

The Badass name we almost used

The software came first. I built a platform for self-managed community associations and gave it a not-so-great working name: Badasshoa.com.

As you know, I have written books with Badass in the title, Badass and Sober to help people quit alcohol and Badass and Sold to help people flip cars, so the name made some sense to me. It made me laugh every time I typed it. But the HOAs I showed it to sort of cringed at the name.

Then the software became something real, and I knew the name might offend the exact customer it was built to serve. Conservative board members do not want to type that domain into a laptop at a monthly meeting.

Then the Daytona sunshine happened

We started the company right there in Daytona Beach, historically one of the sunniest spots in the South. Sun on the water by the Daytona pier. Sun on the Bandshell where concerts play all summer. Sun on the motorcycles during Bike Week. Sun on the race cars at the Daytona 500. Sun eleven months a year.

The pieces snapped together on my walk on Ormond beach one morning. Bright. Sunny. Software. Impossible to ignore. So freak'n Shiny. I started laughing, just thinking about that day watching Shrek. A domain I bought in a snowstorm, for a company that would be born in the sun, named by a five-year-old giggling on a coffee table.

SoShiny.com finally had a reason to exist. And the software finally had a name a board member could say out loud at a meeting and the owners would remember, maybe with a smirk on their face.

Now the part about your homeowners association

Here is what I have learned talking to hundreds of volunteer boards.

The money is serious. The bylaws are serious. The vote on the roof assessment is very serious. None of that is up for debate. But the work does not have to feel like a punishment or a reality show.

Nobody quits a board over a hard decision. People quit over the eighteenth email chain about a broken gate, or the upset tenant who has asked for the same thing too many times. They quit over the spreadsheet two people edited at once and messed up. They quit over spending a Saturday hunting for the 2019 minutes in somebody's old inbox.

That is the problem a little shininess solves. When the tool is quick and clear, people stay. Boards that stay build reserves, keep records straight, and pass a functioning community to the next group. That is not a soft benefit. That is the whole game. That is So Shiny.

What "So Shiny" looks like on a Tuesday night

Fun in software is not confetti animations. It is the small relief of a thing being done already.

• The ledger updates itself. An owner pays, and the number moves. You did not touch it.
• One queue for repairs. Not three inboxes and a text thread. Every request has a status, a name, and a date.
• Search that finds the file. Rules, minutes, budgets and vendor contracts, all in one place, all findable in seconds.
• Votes with a paper trail. Who decided what, and when, without anyone reconstructing it from memory.
• A community website that maintains itself. Update a board member inside So Shiny and the public site updates too. No web designer. No invoice.
• A community events TV. In every lobby and rec center.
• Setup in one evening. Bring your spreadsheet or your QuickBooks file. We will import it with you on a call.

Each one gives you back a small piece of your time. Stack them, and a 200-unit board wins back around 13 hours a week.

That is what feeling so shiny is all about. Clean it up, report it back, and keep it simple.

Fun is a feature, not a distraction

We named the company after two little boys dancing on a coffee table, delighted by absolutely everything.

That is the bar we hold ourselves to. Log in, get the thing done, close the laptop, go have dinner with your family. If a screen makes you sigh, we built it wrong.

You volunteered to serve your community. You did not volunteer to be a data entry clerk.

Let us take that part off your plate.

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So Shiny is independent software for self-managed community associations. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to DreamWorks Animation or the Shrek films. We just really liked Donkey saying shiny, and we love, love, love the movie to this day.