Rivo

The Domaine team had a great time at Pre/Ditions ahead of Editions.dev this year. Our CRO Mac King, CTO Max Rolon, and Director of Partnerships Karolina Kondrat spoke on panels for Shopify Agencies and App devs looking to learn & grow. Thanks to Gadget and Mantle for hosting us 🍏

Going to Grow NY or The Lead in New York this week? Join Domaine, Postscript and Rivo for a sunset sail Tuesday evening. Link in comments ⛵⛵⛵ (brands only!)

The Domaine team will be at the Lead Summit next week 🌠 To celebrate, we are hosting a sailing event alongside Postscript and Rivo. Join us on a private charter as we sail into the New York sunset on an iconic Schooner sailing ship on Tuesday July 9 ⛵ Whether you are a brand based in New York, attending the Lead Summit or Grow NY conference, or in town for any other reason, we would love to have you. There will also be a private shuttle picking up guests from Center 415 following the Grow NY conference. Appetizers and drinks will be available for your enjoyment as you connect with other leading brands in the space. 📧 Email us at hello@meetdomaine.com for your exclusive invite. Brands and merchants only.

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...

There’s no community quite like the Shopify community! We had a blast hosting #preditions and even more fun connecting with everyone at Editions.dev. Thank you to everyone who showed up, travelling from every corner of the world to be there. The last few days have been packed with amazing conversations and connections. A very special thank you to our speakers and moderators for the calibre of content you all shared with everyone. We all walked away from Pre/ditions with enough learnings to keep us busy until the next Shopify Editions. And none of this would have happened without our sponsors AfterSell by Rokt, Rivo, Tidio, Swap, Seguno Software, and Zapiet. Trust us when we say, from both the Mantle and Gadget team, we can't wait for the next one.

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.

Newest edition of our Substack newsletter, Contributions, just dropped. Awesome interview with Stuart Chaney from Rivo. Some really interesting thoughts on B2B SaaS pricing and what it's like going up against an 800lb gorilla... Link here: https://lnkd.in/guQYrXkB

Join the Rivo team at Preditions in #toronto on Monday, June 24th. A one day event before #shopify editions, with tracks for Shopify Agencies and App devs that want to learn and grow. Hosted by our friends at Mantle and Gadget. Sponsored by yours truly along with Zapiet, Seguno Software, Tidio, Swap, AfterSell by Rokt. Links in comments!

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.