The studio
A studio for the markets the software industry skips.
Auto Shift Media builds and operates its own products for customers who have been overcharged and underserved for years. We started with independent auto repair. We did it again for Shopify. We pick a neglected market, ship the tool it actually needs, and run it ourselves, every week.
Story
Why we exist.
Whole categories of business run on software that was never designed for them. The tools are expensive, dated, and built for someone larger. The people actually doing the work, the shop owner, the solo store operator, get whatever is left over. That gap is the whole reason Auto Shift Media exists.
We started with the independent auto repair shop. About 230,000 of them, most with two to ten bays, most owned by the people who turn the wrenches. The category leader is late-1990s shop software that still costs $300–$500 a month, charges per-bay surcharges, requires an annual contract, and looks like it was last touched the year the iPhone came out. So we built Pitlane, and put it in production in April 2026.
Then we found the same shape of problem somewhere else entirely. Most Shopify stores watch the majority of first-time buyers leave and never come back, with no simple, honest way to win them back. So we built Relode, a win-back app that reactivates lapsed customers and books the revenue it recovers. Different market, same thesis.
We build to operate, not to flip. We’re not raising venture capital and we’re not trying to be everything. The structural advantages we have over the incumbents, shipping speed, fair pricing, modern technology, are things they can’t copy without rebuilding their businesses. We intend to use them, in one market after another.
How we operate
Things we won’t change.
A short list of operating principles. They’re here because they’ve come up in real product, pricing, and customer decisions, and we’ve said no to perfectly reasonable things because they violated one of them.
01
One transparent price.
No setup fees, no per-seat surcharges, no integration costs, no annual contract. The price you see is the price you pay. The incumbents can’t match this without dismantling their pricing model.
02
Self-serve from day one.
No onboarding calls, no sales calls, no white-glove migration. An owner should be able to sign up at 9 PM, import their data, get their first result before bedtime, and never speak to anyone if they don’t want to.
03
Shipping every week.
Visible product motion. Every Tuesday, something ships, a feature, a fix, a polish pass, with a public changelog. Customers notice when their software gets better. They notice when it doesn’t.
04
Real ownership of customer data.
Every customer owns their data. Export it any time, in standard formats, with one button. Leaving Auto Shift Media should be just as easy as joining, because that’s the only kind of software relationship that earns trust.
05
AI is a tool, not a story.
We use AI where it does specific work: drafting review replies, summarizing inspections, writing customer follow-ups in the business’s own voice. We don’t market it as a transformation, and we don’t apologize for it either.
06
No private equity exit on the customer’s tab.
We’ve seen what happens when small-business software gets bought, milked, and rebranded. Pricing doubles, support evaporates, the product stagnates. Auto Shift Media isn’t built for that exit. We’re built to be a long-running studio that compounds.
Founder
Abdul Mohamud.
Abdul founded Auto Shift Media in early 2026 in Columbus, Ohio after spending several years building software in adjacent markets. He runs the studio solo, product, engineering, design, sales, support, with help from a small group of advisors and friends across the industries the studio builds for.
He answers his own email at abdul@autoshiftmedia.com. For business and partnership conversations, that is the right starting point.
The basics
Quick facts.
The questions vendors, partners, and journalists tend to ask. If you need something not listed here, email abdul@autoshiftmedia.com.
- Studio
- Auto Shift Media
- Founded
- 2026
- Founder
- Abdul Mohamud
- Based in
- Columbus, Ohio
- Model
- Build and operate our own products. Bootstrapped, not raising venture capital.
- Products
- Pitlane (usepitlane.com), auto repair shop software. Relode (relode.app), Shopify win-back.
- Press
- press@autoshiftmedia.com