Kind-of-Lost

RouteXL Alternatives: Free Multi-Stop Route Planners

I spent twenty-plus years building vehicle routing models for companies that paid serious money for them, so when I went looking at RouteXL alternatives recently, I wasn’t shopping — I was checking out the neighborhood. RouteXL is probably the best-known free multi-stop route planner on the internet, and for good reason: paste in your addresses, get them back in a sensible order, free up to 20 stops. But 20 stops is exactly where a lot of real delivery days start, and that’s where the free tier ends. This post is an honest tour of what’s out there — including the free VRP tool I built and run myself — and which one fits which kind of routing problem.

Internal Link Building: How I Fixed 180 Orphan Pages

This is part of the ongoing WordPress optimization series on this site. If you’ve been following along, we’ve been going through kindoflost.com piece by piece — speed, indexing, content rewrites — and documenting what actually happens when you try to fix a real site without a dedicated SEO budget. Internal link building was supposed to be a quick win. It wasn’t, and the reason it wasn’t is entirely my fault for framing the problem backwards from the start.

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Selling Tradelines Update: Five Years, $30K Later

When I wrote the first version of this post I had sold 59 tradelines and was somewhere between encouraged and beaten up. eBay had just banned me. Bank of America had just closed my $40,000 card. The direct sales experiment was going nowhere fast. I called it “year three” even though I kept going.

This is the update. It’s been about five years now, 241 tradelines, $30,603 in commissions. The eBay ban still stings when I look at the data. The BoA closure still stings more. But the numbers are growing and I have enough of them now to actually say something interesting — so here we go.

Tradeline sales by credit card — 241 total sales and $30,603 in commissions across 18 cards

The Full Circle: How I Set Up My Tradeline Business to Run Itself

People who sell tradelines don’t talk about the setup much. Most of the content out there is aimed at buyers — how tradelines work, how much they cost, whether they’re worth it. But the seller side has its own logic, and once I had it figured out I realized the whole thing clicks together in a way I didn’t plan for. The most common questions I get are from buyers, but sellers are starting to find me too, and this post is for them.

Twenty Years of Models, One at a Time

I’ve been doing operations research for over 20 years. Most of what I’ve built is locked inside Excel files on a hard drive. Not because Excel is where OR models belong — it isn’t, really — but because that’s where the data was, that’s where the clients were, and that’s what worked at the time.

The backlog is real. Staff scheduling, vehicle routing, warehouse slotting, least-cost formulation, a few others. Each one took months to build and calibrate. Each one is doing nothing right now except existing as a .xlsm file.

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