About the company
A studio for one stubborn corner of the software market.
Auto Shift Media is a software company that builds for independent auto repair shops. We don’t spread across verticals. We don’t scale through enterprise contracts. We pick a customer who’s been underserved for thirty years and ship for them, every week.
Story
Why we exist.
The independent auto repair shop is the working backbone of American driving. About 230,000 of them. Most have between two and ten bays. Most are owned by the people who turn the wrenches. Almost none of them run on software designed for how they actually work.
The category leader is a piece of late-1990s shop management 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. Younger competitors have done better but mostly chased fleet contracts and big-shop customers, leaving the small independent shop, the majority of the market, to fend for itself.
Auto Shift Media exists to do that work. To build modern, fairly priced, honestly designed software for shops that have been told for a decade that they don’t deserve it.
We started in April 2026 with one product, Pitlane, and one customer profile: the two-to-ten-bay independent shop. 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 business. We intend to use them.
How we operate
Five 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-bay 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. A shop owner should be able to sign up at 9 PM, import their data, send their first review request 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. Shop owners notice when their software gets better. They notice when it doesn’t.
04
Real ownership of customer data.
Every shop 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 for shop owners: drafting review replies, summarizing inspection photos, writing customer follow-ups in the shop’s 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 shop 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 company solo, product, engineering, design, sales, support, with help from a small group of advisors and friends in the auto industry.
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
- April 2026
- Founder
- Abdul Mohamud
- Based in
- Columbus, Ohio
- Operating products
- Pitlane (usepitlane.com), auto repair shop software
- Press
- press@autoshiftmedia.com