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Announcing: LVL Up Auto - Vendor Management Platform

So you're saying you DIDN'T take my advice and get some sleep last night. :rofl::lmao:
Ahh no...

I had to do it in the middle of the night in case I broke everything. I have added batches before but never more than double the size. It should all work the same and ended up working perfectly. It was a bit slow this morning but I was able to tune everything up and everything is snappy again.

I was adding 1 or 2 at a time from requests every day. Trying to avoid having to do that.
 
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Thrilled to announce our largest update so far: the My Vendor Expansion. This is the culmination of 2 months of community feedback. Watch my <3 min overview below

Here are the high points ↓
  • Upload vendor contracts, by far the most requested feature.
  • Add vendor specific notes, for keeping all the plates spinning
  • Invoice historical view at the vendor level
  • Deal summary and ability to add key vendor contacts, the second most requested feature
  • Custom vendor tags, create and apply at the vendor product level. Think PII, ok to pay approvals, internal categories...
 
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Big fan of adding contacts and the ability to reach out to them from the platform.
I have a ton of ideas for this part of the application. I held 60 meetings over the past 35 days. Roughly 50/50 vendor to dealer.

It was crystal clear communication is a pain point. There is genuine frustration from both sides. Depending on the persona the challenges are different. You basically have the champion at the dealership the account manager at the vendor then all of their respective managers. You also have tickets or actions that are in flight and the other people those impact.

The monthly meetings came up continuously, lack of structure, recaps or follow through from prior meetings were the dealer concerns. Vendors felt leadership don't join the meetings enough and dealerships don't own their action items.

Notes is just the scaffolding, so much more coming to make this better.
 
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✨ AI Highlights

Jon Berna announces LVL Up Auto, a vendor management platform built specifically for car dealerships, covering features like vendor tracking, Collections for organizing vendor lists, 20 Groups for peer collaboration, and a live automotive vendor news feed. The platform has since been rebuilt from the ground up as a headless system with an MCP server, allowing it to run inside AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude rather than requiring a separate login — and the site is now being cited by AI in vendor-related queries, which the community celebrated as a major validation.

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