Lucas Barnes on Building Stock Pigeon to End the Silent Killer of E-Commerce Profits

How did you come up with the idea for your startup?

The idea for Stock Pigeon came from seeing, over and over again, how stockouts were silently killing businesses. Merchants would run out of their bestsellers and not even realize how bad the damage was.

One breaking point for me was working with a Shopify store that had been out of stock on its top product for a week. The owner thought they lost maybe a thousand dollars in sales. But when we analyzed it properly, the real number was closer to five thousand. It wasn’t just the immediate sales that were lost — it was customers who never came back, ad spend wasted on traffic to “out of stock” pages, and the momentum they lost in the market.

That was when I realized this wasn’t just an inventory problem. It was a business killer hiding in plain sight. And I knew merchants needed something that could warn them before disaster struck. Stock Pigeon was born from that simple but powerful insight: if you can prevent stockouts on your bestsellers, you’re not just protecting a product — you’re protecting the entire business.

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What major challenge are you currently solving?

The biggest challenge is tackling the hidden profit killers that traditional inventory systems ignore. Stockouts on bestsellers don’t just cost a sale; they cost trust, they tank your rankings, and they take away opportunities to sell other products. That’s where Stock Pigeon steps in — making sure the money-makers never run dry.

Another challenge is finding the balance between too many alerts and too few. Most systems either overwhelm merchants with useless notifications or stay silent until it’s too late. We’ve worked hard to get that balance right.

And then there’s forecasting. Platforms like Shopify can show you current stock, but they don’t tell you when you’ll run out. That’s where our forecasting engine comes in — turning complex patterns into simple, actionable decisions. The core idea is that inventory management shouldn’t feel like earning a degree in supply chain. It should be simple enough for a solo founder to use, but powerful enough for a scaling business.

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What major trends do you see in your industry and market?

There’s a big shift happening in inventory management right now. The biggest change is that merchants are finally waking up to the true cost of stockouts. They’re realizing it’s not just about losing one sale — it’s about losing customers and market momentum.

The push toward real-time accuracy is also massive. With same-day delivery expectations, you can’t afford to be “close enough” anymore. Systems need to be perfectly in sync across all channels. At the same time, AI forecasting is going from “nice to have” to “must have.” Merchants need predictions that actually reflect seasonality, trends, and even outside factors like social media virality.

I’m also seeing a shift in the way people talk about metrics. Instead of just looking at “units in stock,” they’re asking better questions — like how many days of cover they have, or what the real revenue impact of a stockout will be. And finally, everything is becoming mobile-first. Store owners are running million-dollar businesses from their phones, and they expect critical alerts to meet them there, wherever they are.

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How did you build your audience on social media?

We built our audience on a foundation of transparency and genuine value. When we launched Stock Pigeon, we did it as a public beta and shared the journey openly. Every feature, every bug fix, every merchant win — we documented it, and that honesty resonated with people.

Instead of just promoting features, we focused on education. I created content that showed the real hidden costs of stockouts, often with actual numbers from merchant cases. Posts like “How one stockout cost a store $50,000” really caught attention in Shopify communities.

I also made a point of direct engagement. Whenever I saw someone complaining about inventory issues on Facebook or Twitter, I’d reply and even offer free audits. That one-on-one approach built trust and word of mouth. We also celebrated our users’ wins — if a merchant prevented a major stockout thanks to Stock Pigeon, we’d turn it into a story with their permission. And we kept an open inbox policy, promising to respond to any inventory question within 24 hours, whether or not they were customers.

The key was always the same: stop promoting, start solving. Every piece of content had to answer the real question — how do we help merchants stop losing money to stockouts?

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What is the future vision for your startup?

Right now, our focus is on perfecting the alert system, making sure merchants never miss a critical low-stock moment. But the long-term vision is much bigger. I want Stock Pigeon to become the intelligent inventory brain for e-commerce businesses — the thing that makes stockouts essentially extinct.

In the future, I see our system not just predicting when you’ll run out, but also recommending when and how much to reorder, even adjusting for seasonal patterns or lead times. Eventually, I’d like us to go further — automatically creating purchase orders, tweaking ad spend when inventory is low, or even negotiating with suppliers. And of course, this isn’t only about Shopify. Merchants are expanding across multiple sales channels, and our goal is to keep everything in sync in real time.

At the end of the day, it comes back to the mission: eliminating the global cost of stockouts and overstock, which is in the trillions. Every time a customer sees “out of stock,” that’s a failed experience. My goal is that no merchant ever has to show those words again.