Hi, I'm Florian — I built sqrly for stores like yours.

I'm Florian Mandel, the founder of sqrly. My background is in e-commerce, and most recently I was a product manager at a B2B generative-AI startup here in the Bay — sqrly sits exactly where those two worlds collide. It's built from San Francisco, and it's refreshingly hands-on: when you run a report, I probably see it come through; when you email, I'm the one who answers.

Why small stores? Because they're my favorite thing about commerce. An independent store is a person who cared enough about something — teas, trail gear, violin strings, sea-moss supplements — to stake their livelihood on knowing it better than anyone. The internet was supposed to give those people a level playing field. Every platform shift since has quietly tilted it back toward whoever has the biggest team: SEO had consultants, marketplaces had agencies, ads had budgets.

Now the biggest shift yet is happening. Shoppers are asking ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity what to buy, and the assistants answer with a handful of names. Working with real stores, I kept seeing the same thing: the good independent shop simply isn't in the answer — not because its products are worse, but because nobody told it what these systems need to see. Big brands will have agencies for this. Small stores get skipped by default.

sqrly exists to un-skip them. Today that's a free snapshot showing exactly how the four big assistants see your store, and sqrly Pulse, which keeps watch every week for less than the cost of a lunch. Next is the sqrly agent: a salesperson for your site that knows your products the way you do. And one promise holds across all of it — we tell you the truth. If an assistant can't find you, the report says so plainly. If everything's fine, we say "steady" instead of inventing drama. The best fixes are usually free, and we lead with those.

If you run a store and any of this rings true, I'd genuinely like to hear from you — what you sell, what you've noticed, what worries you. Write to me; I read everything.