Stuart Chaney’s Post

I've bootstrapped two SaaS startups from $0 - $1,000,000 ARR in the Shopify ecosystem, making every mistake you can imagine. Here’s how I’d do it again if I started today: 1. PICK A LANE: - There are two lanes. Brands doing > $1M and brands doing < $1M. - The GTM motions for each are RADICALLY DIFFERENT. - Don't try to do both until you have mastered at least one. Let’s focus on building for brands > $1M, as this is where I’ve screwed up the most. 2. PRODUCT: - Don’t write a_single_line_of_code. - Spend 60-90 days talking with brands. - Refine the pitch/solution/value each time. - Look at their face for signs of interest, instead of their words. - Focus on where you are adding revenue for the lowest lift possible. - Brands will not switch providers or onboard a new tool otherwise. - See how many will commit to a 3-4 month free trial based on hardcoded screenshots of what the solution will look like. Super hard, but it's gonna be a tough first 18 months without this. 3. DISTRIBUTION: - Build in public on LinkedIn and X as a founder. 100x more effective than any paid ads you could run at this stage. - Build a TAM list in Hubspot (around 25,000 brands) to work from. Companies and Contacts. Enrich the data and work backwards. Track how much of the market you are penetrating as you grow. Study how Romain Lapeyre did this at Gorgias (his SaaStr videos are essential viewing) - GOOD cold email. Good, being the key. I’ve been fortunate to have some people in the ecosystem share their strategies in detail with me recently. Still works if done right vs spray and pray. - Invest in SEO early. I’m surprised at how much traffic we get from our blog and the people who show up through RB2B every day. - Buy a $299 Webflow template and hire a good designer to work on branding. Update the template. - Build best-in-class integrations for Klaviyo / Postscript / Gorgias / Skio/ etc. Use their latest tech/API's they want to promote. There’s a chance they could refer/promote to their customer base based on the strength of the integration. At the very least you'll make connections. Tech partnerships will be critical. - Do the same for agency partnerships. No one will take you seriously yet and that’s fine. We’re playing the long game. For every brand you onboard, identify if they’re currently looking for X,Y,Z solution if possible. Refer business to agencies whenever it makes actual sense. Start small, work up. This will come back to you eventually. Leads are the currency. - Show up to every event in your area and every event you can financially make it to. Meet people IRL, it goes a long way and most people in the ecosystem are happy to help. - As soon as you deliver over-the-top service for a brand, ask to put their logo on your site, and plaster over your social. Social proof is HEAVILY Weighted here. Ask for case studies once real results come through. Looks like we're going to the comments to continue 👇

Rivo grew 18% in Q2 to hit $1,678,957 ARR. After 12 months of banging my head against a wall, we're finally starting to see real momentum. Here’s the numbers as we bootstrap towards $10M+ CONTEXT: I’m currently in the $1M-$10M phase of bootstrapping my ecom SaaS startup Rivo. We're a loyalty and referrals platform for DTC brands on Shopify Plus. NUMBERS: ↳ MRR: $139,913 (+18%) ↳ Active Subscribers: 1,195 (+11%) ↳ Net Revenue Churn: 3.3% (-18%) Q2 HIGHLIGHTS: Shopify Plus brands that made the switch from legacy alternatives: Unique Vintage, Bartesian, Andar, Minor Figures, Heights, Stratia Skincare, Fuel Meals, Smash + Tess, Kerotin, and many more. Things that are working: -IRL events remain undefeated. People still buy from people, especially at ACVs over $6K. James Dohm, Jeffrey Haga, Kyle Dicker did an amazing job on the Q2 events circuit. - Not swimming against the tide by leaning into the latest Shopify updates. (Checkout extensions, New Customer Accounts, Store Credit) - App store installs are back and producing revenue. - It is possible to be better and cheaper in 2024 SaaS. You no longer need to pick one. What we’re working on fixing: - We are yet to send a single outbound email to book demos. (Would love a rec if anyone has one) - Major rebrand/website almost complete. We've been stuck on the same webflow template for 2 years. - Our self-serve experience sucks and the activation metrics show it. We're completely overhauling this right now. TAKEAWAYS: After being flat as a pancake for the first couple of months to start the year, March - June has been strong. We’re not on a rocket ship and that’s fine. We're a bootstrapped startup currently running at breakeven and growing steadily in the right direction. Our goal for this year was $3M. We won’t hit that. We’ll hit $2M this quarter though, and will probably land closer to $2.4M to close out the year. Still plenty of time...

In the last 10 weeks, we've added $204,000 ARR at Rivo by fixing one of the biggest mistakes I made when moving my SaaS startup upmarket last year. We forgot about the SMB cohort that had gotten us there. CONTEXT: We’re a $1.6M ARR bootstrapped SaaS - helping Shopify Plus stores drive retention through loyalty and referral programs. This month, the number of activated trials for our SMB cohort is up 422% compared to the start of the year. This number has been steadily on the rise this quarter. 3 realizations from obsessing over building for our ICP: 1) Having a self-serve-first mindset forces you to create a much better product for everyone. I’m a massive advocate for honing in on your ICP and nailing where your product is positioned in the market. It helps with everything - Sales, marketing, positioning. Our team does a STELLAR job of onboarding Shopify Plus brands. Brands who are personally onboarded have a net negative churn rate. But, I dropped the ball by spending too much time focusing specifically on our exact ICP. ↳ We stopped working on the self-serve onboarding flow. ↳ Quit looking at self-serve activation rates. ↳ Threw out the app store playbook that got us our first $800K ARR At the start of Q2, we began working on turning this around by building these back out, building a better product for anyone to self-serve without needing to be manually onboarded. All metrics are back on an upswing. 2) It's hard to be picky in 2024 SaaS Right now, Ecom SaaS is in the toughest spot I’ve seen in the last decade. Mid-market deals are still closing at a good pace - but they’re longer and much more price-sensitive in this climate. We’ve shifted 42% of our revenue to brands on Shopify Plus (our ICP) since last March and are still fully focused on getting this to over 80%. But we’ve also got over 47,000 lifetime installs from using my tried and trusted app store playbook. Over the last 12 months, I essentially quit this channel. In hindsight, I shouldn’t have turned this source off. By building for self-serve first, and gaining our Built for Shopify badge, we’re back in the app store rankings game. Having this additional revenue will keep our growth rate humming along through tougher times. This is a U-turn on what I’ve been saying for the past year - but this isn’t the year to be picky. 3. Our metrics will suffer - but revenue will go up. This is the most interesting one. Moving some of our focus back to the SMB segment will make our metrics look terrible. We managed to whittle Net Revenue Churn down to 2.5% over the last couple of years. This is going to shoot back up. Activation and success metrics will also get hit. This would look TERRIBLE if I had investors. When you’re bootstrapped - this doesn’t matter. MRR Growth > everything, for this year. TAKEAWAY: ICP is the north star for SaaS. But it might be time to loosen the restrictions and see where you can add incremental revenue at a low lift in 2024.

In April 2023, growth rates across Ecom SaaS took a MAJOR hit. After a brutal 10 months, I'm finally seeing a steady rebound across my userbase of over 2,000,000 Shopify app installs. Here’s what I’m seeing: CONTEXT: In the chart, we're looking at the month-by-month uninstall rate (Uninstalls + Store Closures / Installs). In April 2023, this number skyrocketed after a steady decline over the previous two years. (This graph is skewed towards SMB, so it doesn't tell the full story - but close enough) For 10 months, growth was being dragged down by this shift, making it extremely difficult to gain any real momentum. In the past few months at Rivo, we’ve seen this return to (somewhat) normal growth: ↳ March: 7% MRR ↳ April: 4% MRR ↳ May: 4% MRR We’re back in a sense of positive growth - but the landscape is very different to pre-April 2023. THE REALITIES I'M SEEING IN 2024: 1. Mid-market deals are slower and much more price-sensitive. In the last 15 months, we’ve moved from being primarily SMB-focused to now having 42% of our revenue at Rivo come from brands on Shopify Plus (Our ICP) Deals are still closing, but are taking much longer to get over the line. I'm not interested in fighting competitors solely on price, but it's MUCH more of a consideration today for brands than in previous times. 2. If you're not innovating on product and price - you’re in big trouble this year. Lots of Ecom SaaS companies absolutely crushed their numbers for years with truly amazing sales & marketing motions. I honestly wish I could replicate how they executed these playbooks. The problem is that there was barely any innovation on their product or price during this time. If your product has fallen behind and your pricing hasn’t readjusted to the new levels - your lunch will get eaten by a hungrier competitor willing to get in the trenches in Slack channels with brands. Every month I talk to these founders coming up and it's amazing to see the traction they are getting. This is happening right now. 3. Still tough to make the numbers work for heavily funded ecom SaaS I feel for the majority of ecom SaaS companies who heavily raised VC during 2021-2023. I don't think investors or founders were expecting the slowdown to appear at such an alarming rate. The numbers in the pitch decks are thrown out the window today. I'm a big fan of moving upmarket but only a small amount of verticals can justify charging over $15K ACV deals today. (Email, SMS, ERP, etc) Although signs of bouncing back are there - today's math works out as follows: ~18,000 Shopify Plus stores and most likely an ACV ceiling of $12,000. Small TAM / Smaller ACV / High CAC = tough business. TAKEAWAY: Growth is still tough. But not as mind-numbingly tough as April - Feb. My hats off to you if you crushed it through that time period - the majority I know did not (including myself) If you're still running the old playbook - it might be time for a change.

Last month, I replaced an $80,000 full-time engineering role at Rivo with a $40 automated AI tool. Here’s why revenue per employee across SaaS startups will drastically increase in the next 24 months. BACKGROUND: Ellipsis (YC W24) now automatically provides QA, code reviews, and fixes for all of our engineers' work - at 0.6% of the cost and 50x the speed of a human. I was convinced this would take another couple of years to become a reality, but things are moving much, much faster than I expected. This is just one example from a number of tools we’ve implemented in the last 90 days that have reduced the need for capital, headcount, and time in our startup. Here's what I’m seeing in the Shopify SaaS ecosystem I live in: 1. Ecom SaaS companies are crashing back to reality We all lost our minds and took our eye off efficiency in SaaS from 2020-2023 (myself included) ↳ VC money piled in ↳ Teams became massively bloated ↳ CAC in our small ecosystem became crazy ↳ Prices spiked for end users to pay for all of this, and show investors growth. Sad to see lots of these companies being left in a tough spot at the moment now that the oxygen has been (hopefully only temporarily) sucked out of the room. 2. You can go a lot faster - with a lot less, even compared to 12 months ago The output of a team of 30 in 2021 can probably be accomplished today with a team of 5 or less using tools that weren't available a year ago. - Intercom for 80% coverage on fully automated support - Grain for transcribing sales calls and moving Hubspot deals forward - Clay for automating tedious outbound campaigns This list will only keep getting longer, needing fewer people each time. 3. Boostrapped entrants are gaining ground with leaner teams. In the last 9 months, I’ve met with a handful of founders who are quickly eating up their larger competitors' lunch by having: 1. A much better product 2. Vastly superior support 3. At a fraction of the price (80% discount in some cases) It’s hard for brand loyalty to remain when you nail those 3 things. Most of these new startups are bootstrapped, with less than 10 team members, and are not running the usual mid-market ecom SaaS playbook. They simply have a compelling product and an even better offer. This is what brands are looking for in 2024. TAKEAWAY: We’re right smack in the middle of a crossroads in the Shopify SaaS ecosystem. The current climate heavily favors bootstrapped teams if you have the patience to slog it out through this patch.

It took 11 PAINFUL months to grow my bootstrapped SaaS startup Rivo from $1,000,000 to $1,500,000 ARR. Here are the 4 biggest mistakes I made that slowed down growth while moving from SMB to Mid-Market in the Shopify app ecosystem. CONTEXT: There is a jarring difference between the SMB and mid-market in the Shopify ecosystem. At times, it’s felt like starting a whole new company. Lots of these mistakes come from being enthusiastically naive and not doing enough research before diving in. 1) Not seeing hidden moats "Hey, look at this big Shopify app - they suck, they’re super expensive, and the product is barely updated anymore. We should just build a competitor and charge 50% as much" This might be all true... but what you CANT see in this scenario, is that the big competitor has 10+ years of deep-rooted relationships with agencies and brands across the ecosystem that make the buying decisions. You can absolutely break these, but if your product is not 2x as good as the incumbent - you're going to be pushing a boulder up a hill, wondering why things aren’t working. It took me at least a year to understand how tight-knit and relationship-driven the mid-market really is. 2) Switching costs are 10X more than SMB From my experience, SMB brands are much more likely to replace an app if they can get a similar product that costs 50% less. Brand loyalty doesn’t really exist in the Shopify app store funnel. Brands on Shopify Plus aren’t looking to save $10K by switching to your app. It’s not worth the time and hassle of onboarding your product. If you can instead show them how your superior product/service will generate another $250K+ or greatly improve the customer experience, then you are in the convo. 3) TAM is much smaller than expected There are over 4M Shopify stores, but in my experience, the TAM of stores that will pay an ACV of $10K+ is around 0.005% of that number (~20,000 stores) This is especially true in 2024 as the price of SaaS in the Shopify ecosystem folds over the next 12 - 24 months. I can account for around at least $100M+ ARR in the ecom loyalty & referrals space across many competitors so this isn't an issue, however, the landscape is ultra competitive with a high number of vendors fighting for a very small pool of customers. 4) Importance of brand building This is where I really dropped the ball in the first year. I wasn't quick enough to shift from the transactional mentality of SMB to a mindset where most of our customers aren't actively in the market for our product. The brand we build in the meantime is how they'll remember us if/when they eventually need our solution in 6-12 months. TAKEAWAY: Most of the last year has been frustratingly slow as we were still figuring out the GTM upmarket. We've finally hit traction where the numbers are starting to add up now. My only regret was not spending enough time to truly understand the mentality/rules of the new game before making the switch.

I’ve bootstrapped two SaaS startups as a solo founder that have generated over $22,000,000 in revenue. Here's how I’ve kept 100% of the cap table without needing VC funding. 1. Booster Apps (100% funded from profit) In 2015, I started as the only team member doing everything from engineering, to support, to admin. This was a pure PLG motion that required nothing more than a free Shopify partner account and minimal server costs to get started. I ran the company extremely lean and scaled the team and ops as revenue grew. We scrapped our way to $1M ARR within 18 months of our first dollar - with just myself and my brother running engineering and support. A lot of this was due to the luck of entering the Shopify App Store when you could significantly scale revenue with $0 in sales and marketing. In hindsight, I should have doubled down on scaling by re-investing much more back into growth in those earlier days. 2. Rivo ($600K in loans) We spun Rivo out of Booster Apps in late 2021. I made a ton of mistakes in how I initially set this up. We essentially split the team at Booster Apps in half and began working on our new startup. The issue is that we had a very high burn rate from day one (around 20 team members). Looking back, we should have started with a handful, validated the product, and hired into pain. It was peak 2021 fever - but I’ll never begin a startup again like this. Restructuring the team to where it is today was brutal. To work through this burn I could have withdrawn funds from my previous company and just put the money in personally - but loans made much more sense financially. Myself and Katherine Cornick started looking for non-dilutive sources of funding and landed on the following: ↳ Loan from my previous business: $250K @ 3.84% p/y ↳ Loan from a close friend of mine: $250K @ 2% p/y ↳ Loan from Arc : $100K @ 10% p/y This got us through to $1M ARR and we flipped profitable soon after. MOVING FORWARD As we're scaling up and in a heavier sales-led motion at Rivo, we’re going to be adding more non-dilutive options to accelerate growth. Eg: We’re closing a flexible Business line of Credit from Chase right now. In the next 24 months, we'll be reinvesting every cent back into scaling towards $10M ARR. TAKEAWAY: This is absolutely not advice on how you should bootstrap or fund your startup. I was extremely fortunate in how I was able to sustain a low burn to get going initially. There are definitely instances when I think raising VC makes sense, but I have no desire to get on the hamster wheel and play the game when there are other less conventional ways to make it work. By bootstrapping we can focus 100% of our time on scaling the company and not have to answer to anyone on decisions I make. From my perspective - it's hard to beat a competitor when the founder's family's money is personally on the line and they need to make it work (my situation).. though I would never recommend anybody follow that as advice.

60 days ago, I made some MAJOR pricing changes at my ecom SaaS startup Rivo by introducing self-serve plans that drastically undercut our usual 12K ACV deals. Here are the results so far and 4 reasons why we're doubling down on this. CONTEXT: We are a $1.4M ARR bootstrapped SaaS - helping Shopify Plus stores drive retention through loyalty and referral programs. Our product works much better for brands doing > $3M p/y and when we work directly with the brands to implement and optimize the product. 2 months ago we made pricing changes that: ↳ Killed 95% of feature gating ↳ Launched a self-serve scale plan for SMB. ↳ Launched a plan for our ICP based on levels of concierge support Note: Self-serve plans still have 24/7 live chat support - but not the direct implementation, migration, strategic and technical support required for bigger brands (our ICP) RESULTS: ↳ MRR Growth +7.02% ↳ Active Users: +8.72% ↳ Self-serve free trials started: 235 ($13,515 MRR) There are a lot of factors as to why these numbers are moving, but all indicators are positive since this update. WHY DO THIS?: 1 ) Adding another self-serve brand costs next to nothing. The incremental cost of adding another self-serve customer to our product is minuscule. This is accelerating with AI. I've been so focused on serving our ICP that I forgot there are a bunch of smaller brands that just want excellent software w/self-serve resources and are happy to pay fair prices. 2) I only focus on churn from our ICP I care DEEPLY if a brand from our ICP churns. It does occasionally happen and it truly stings when it does. If a brand outside our ICP churns out - I am 99% less concerned. Cutting off access for smaller brands will make metrics such as churn look better - but not your bottom-line revenue. 3) Sweep up more market share Our company will succeed based on how many Shopify Plus stores we can onboard. There’s not much of a sustainable business model focusing on SMB brands in a DTC category like retention. But, if we can offer many more features at a fraction of the cost of our competitors in this segment, then why not? 4 ) Having a self-serve motion makes every aspect of the product better This has been one of the biggest insights so far. When you focus on creating a better self-serve product, everything else improves across the business. Manual processes carried out by our team now become automated. Eg: We just released a theme extension page/account builder that reduced manual time to build from 12-24 hrs to 1-2 hrs. TAKEAWAYS: I have no doubt that these changes will have a negative impact on Churn, ARPU, and LTV over the next 12 months, but I honestly couldn’t care less if they do. We have no board or investors to make these numbers look good for. These numbers are only relevant if we were looking to sell the business (which we’re not). The only 2 metrics worth paying attention to for our stage are MRR Growth and ICP churn - everything else is mostly noise.

Since 2016, I've generated over 34,000 reviews on the Shopify App Store. This was the single biggest factor in scaling multiple 7-figure ARR Shopify apps. Here’s my 3 step playbook: 1 ) Fill the funnel with proactive support interactions (alongside reactive) - You’ll need a killer support team - That deeply understands chat-based CS - 24/7 live chat coverage is a requirement - Under 20-second first response times - Identify sticking points in onboarding or returning users - Eg: User is stuck on a start wizard page for 2 mins or more - Automate a chat message offering help (Intercom is the best at this) - More chats = more opps to deliver a great experience, and request a review 2) MASSIVELY overdeliver value on the conversation - Convos are proactive (help with onboarding) or reactive (help with an issue) - These chats should be highly personalized - visit their Shopify store at least - Overdeliver on support related to our product - then continue - Notice a store is brand new? Offer help in setting up their store - Eg: Create a favicon for their store using a quick generator and send - Our only goal is to provide insane support to these merchants - Convos can range from 10 seconds up to 60 minutes. 3) The Ask - I can't stress this enough. - DO NOT MESS AROUND HERE - Shopify are extremely diligent in auditing partners for review compliance - There is no point in risking your entire business for a review - We have preset review request templates that team members must use - Our team manager regularly audits review requests for compliance - If it feels right - make the ask using a template - The majority of the time - we don’t ask for a review - We just do our job of delivering exceptional support - Don’t use a logo for your chat image - Person-to-person conversations win here That's basically the gist of it. SIDE NOTE: The Shopify App Store review system is not perfect. Skim through the majority of apps with over 1,000 reviews and you’ll notice the same trend - they all reference support over product. On the one hand - this promotes creating amazing CS experiences for merchants, including onboarding. On the other hand, reviews based on the ROI of the product get lost in the mix. The reality is - this is what moves the needle in a market of 10,000+ competing apps. (Let's assume a great product is table stakes in 2024). I would love to see this shift to a more holistic method - but this is an extremely hard undertaking for Shopify. TAKEAWAY Implementing this playbook will take 6-9 months, and likely 12-18 months to start paying off. Without this, and the team behind it - we would have had a fraction of the revenue growth in the last decade. Still worthwhile to get the machine up and running if you're starting today..

After an EXTREMELY humbling start to 2024 at Rivo, we rebounded with one of our best-ever months in March to end Q1 at $1.4M ARR. Here’s our Q1 results: - MRR: $117.7K - Revenue Growth: 7.36% Recap: Despite having an unrecognizably better business/product/customer base/GTM/team from 12 months ago the following is unfortunately true: - In the first 8 weeks of 2023 we added $156K ARR - In the first 8 weeks of 2024 we were essentially flat… Thankfully we recovered to finish March strongly - adding almost $90K ARR in the last few weeks of the quarter. If we can keep our March growth rate persistent throughout the year - we will hit our goal of 125% growth by Dec 31st. ($3M ARR) What went well: - We’re shipping product at an unbelievably fast rate. - We’ve finally honed in on our GTM strategy and have put that into action - Rolled out improved pricing and self-serve motion. - Q1 ended with pipeline and active trials at an all-time high. - Some amazing brands onboarded this quarter: ALOHA, Stratia Skincare, Waterboy, R+Co, and many more. What we’re still trying to figure out: 1) $1 of MRR is now 3X harder to generate than previous years I will never blame the market/economy/state of DTC as to why we don’t meet our goals. We just have to work harder and smarter to generate the same growth as 2016 - 2023. Despite making some major progress across the business in the last year - the first couple of months this year were a humbling reminder of this new reality. 2) SMB still represents a big chunk of our revenue: - When times are good - this is great. When times are bad - this is brutal. - Closed Stores in Jan and Feb were 350% higher than usual (We lost $7K MRR from SMB stores shutting down in these months) - We’ve been working on moving upmarket for the last 12 months and are finally starting to make a dent on making mid-market/enterprise stores the majority of our revenue. Overall, sentiment is the best it’s been since we’ve started - but those first couple of months were a good reminder that we’re in a new time where it's going to take a lot more to scale in 2024 than expected.